Can't Stop Won't Stop (56 page)

Conciliation took place three months later. In early February, McKenzie River organized a joint meeting between Ice Cube and the KAGRO leadership. Ice Cube apologized to the merchants and pledged to discourage violence against store owners and to continue “working to bring our communities closer together.” In a follow-up letter to Kim, he wrote of the meeting:

I explained some of the feelings and attitudes of Black people today, and the problems and frustrations that we confront. And I clarified the intent of my album
Death Certificate
. It was not intended to offend anyone or to incite violence of any kind. It was not directed at all Korean Americans or at all Korean American store owners. I respect Korean Americans. It was directed at a few stores where my friends and I have had actual problems.
Working together we can help solve these problems and build a bridge between our communities.
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Many Blacks debated passionately whether Cube had sold out, and at what point. Was it when he apologized to the Korean-American store owners? Was it when he let McKenzie River punk him after he had generated so much business for them? Was it when he endorsed a malt liquor beer while studying with the Nation of Islam?

But Ice Cube was moving on; he was no utopian hard-liner. Lessons learned, points made, back to business. He resumed his St. Ides sponsorship deal, and donated all of the proceeds to charity, including a large monetary gift to the King-Drew Hospital, the same place he had indicted on “Alive on Arrival.” He pored over the movie scripts being offered to him.

Within KAGRO, as in many other Korean- and Asian-American organizations, there had also been soul-searching. In January, KAGRO had adopted a ten-point code of behavior for its 3,200 store owners, an event that African-American and Asian-American activists hailed as a breakthrough. After their meeting, KAGRO conceded that Ice Cube had legitimate complaints and expressed hope that Blacks and Koreans would “help each other and learn to understand each other's cultures.”
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On November 15, Judge Joyce Karlin sentenced Soon Ja Du to just five years of probation. As she read her judgment, she seemed to go out of her way to lecture the African-American community. “This is not a time for revenge,” she said, “and it is not my job as a sentencing court to seek revenge for those who demand it.”
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The African-American community reacted with horror. Many Asian-American leaders, too, were shocked. Nobody had been asking for revenge.

In South Central—where there were already three times the number of liquor stores as in the entire state of Rhode Island—community activists began to talk about a campaign to close liquor stores. African-American, Latino and Asian-American community leaders met behind closed doors to find common ground. But the trial of the four police officers who had beaten Rodney King was about to get underway in the 80 percent white community of Simi Valley, more than sixty miles to the north and there was now a gnawing sense that some kind of a disaster lay ahead.

A picture of Ice Cube shaking hands with David Kim, the Southern California president of KAGRO, appeared on the cover of the
Korea Times
under the headline, ICE CUBE THE PEACEMAKER. Although the meeting had happened in February, the picture and story were appearing in the May 4, 1992, issue. It seemed, all at once, a tragic irony and a bittersweet celebration of a moment that now seemed so far away.

The arc of history is that every
generation has to fight the liberation
struggle. And the time you're on that
historical stage is short.

—Richie Perez

 

 

Disposable futures. From the “Hip-Hop Poster Series.”
Photo © Beuford Smith/Césaire

The National Guard comes to Crenshaw Square. May 1, 1992.
Photo © Ben Higa

 

 

REPORTER: Does Mr. King feel guilty about all the rioting that has taken place . . . Does Mr. King feel the guilt all upon his shoulders?

STEVE LERMAN, ATTORNEY FOR RODNEY KING: Mr. King is proud to be an African-American man living in Los Angeles in 1992 and was proud to be so in 1991. The sense of violation and shame that these officers visited upon him is what he has distress in. He is not guilty for anything. The officers that beat Rodney King are the ones to concern themselves with guilt. Mr. King is innocent of wrongdoing.

REPORTER: He doesn't feel apologetic for anything?

—Exchange at May 1 press conference

By the time the Simi Valley jury delivered its verdict on April 29, 1992, in the trial of the four white officers who had beaten Rodney King, a gang truce had already been secured fifty miles away in the housing projects of Watts.

Since the 1970s, gang peace workers had struggled to establish peace agreements between gangs in various neighborhoods and had been hobbled by the enormity of the problem. Gangs were growing and beefs were escalating much faster than the ability of any shoestring agency to keep up. Even if gang peace workers could get two gangs to agree to a peace, it did not automatically mean others would follow. Indeed, other gangs might figure that the peacemaking sets had given up their neighborhoods and that they were ripe for conquest.

Los Angeles's demographics also made peace work complicated. Inner-city gangs once largely fought along racial lines. Mexicans against Mexicans, Blacks against Blacks, Asians against Asians. But by the 1980s, the ethnic math had become trickier. Samoan gangs formed from Carson to Compton, often affiliating with Black Blood or Crip sets. Cambodians and Latinos turned bloody
rivals in Long Beach. Salvadorans clashed with Mexicans from MacArthur Park to the Valley. Blacks and Latinos warred on the beach in Venice.

In 1980, a gang peace conference at California State University at North-ridge drew 1,500 Latino gang members, and ended with a treaty that lasted a year and a half. In 1984, a treaty in Hawthorne brought together a number of
Sureño
sets. But both these peaces were doomed by the quickly changing conditions on the streets. The crack trade was spreading. Giving up one's ‘hood was no longer an option.

After the Long Beach Arena riots in 1986, KDAY sponsored an anti-gang radio show with Run DMC and Barry White, a former member of the pre-riot Watts gang, the Businessmen, that received over 1,500 calls. The station decided to hold a “Day of Peace” concert and rally in November. These events supported the efforts of the Community Youth Gang Services (CYGS) to organize a holiday truce from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day.

CYGS was successful in lining up dozens of gangs, including a number of eastside Latino gangs and the mostly Black Bounty Hunters (Blood) set of Watts's Nickerson Gardens projects, to sign temporary truces. By 1988, black churches, civil rights and nonprofit organizations mounted competing efforts to forge a broader, permanent truce. Bickering between community leaders ended these initiatives, but the idea took root among key gang leaders and activists. The breakthrough moment came at a peace summit later that year, when a Cirkle City Piru named Twilight Bey stood before flashing cameras and shook the hand of Danifu, one of the founding Crips.

Brothers weren't ready for this yet. The media had incorrectly described Bey as a shot-caller. He had never made that claim, but soon his own Blood comrades were coming to his house to threaten his life. Bey stood his ground. He told them he was ready to die for peace, and then he demonstrated with his fists, and slowly won the respect of his homies. He was one of a new breed of street soldiers.

Bey was from the Watts projects of Hacienda Village. During the 1950s, Simon Rodia's gift of beauty-from-rubble, the Watts Towers, marked the physical and psychological center of the city. After the ‘65 Uprising, the action shifted to the revolutionary motion and light on 103rd Street. As the long decline began in the 1970s, the four major public housing developments—Jordan Downs to the
northeast, Imperial Courts to the southeast, Nickerson Gardens to the southwest and Hacienda Village to the northwest—became Watts's irregular heartbeat and tortured soul.

Down the middle of the city ran the old railroad tracks. The train line that had once delivered big-dreaming southern Blacks to Watts was now the dividing line between the Bloods on the west and the Crips on the east. At Hacienda Village, there were the Cirkle City Pirus, and at Nickerson Gardens, the Bounty Hunter Bloods. On the other side, there were the Jordan Crips and at Imperial Courts, the PJ Watts Crips. Edwin Markham Intermediate School, located directly across the tracks from the three major spires of the Watts Towers, was literally in the troubled heart of the city.

Administrators at Markham figured that 10 percent of the students banged. The 1,600 seventh-to-ninth graders knew the number was closer to a third.
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They called it “Gladiator School.” It was where youths underwent their rites of passage into ganghood.

“All of the factions went to that school,” says Aqeela Sherrills, who grew up with his older brother, Daude, in the Jordan Downs projects. “In ‘78, one of the brothers from my neighborhood got killed up there by a brother from Nickerson Gardens. And that started the war. So when I got there in ‘81, it was scary.”

The older guys in the neighborhood, Sherrills says, “told us when somebody asks you where you from, you fire on him. That was like a sign to say you about to get jumped. Somebody asked me where I was from, I was like, okay, those are the words. So I stole on this cat, we got into a fight, and then eventually I was associated with the crew that I ran with.” Whether he liked it or not, he was representing for the Jordan Downs Crips.

In 1984, when Aqeela was in the ninth grade, he and his homies got into a fight with kids from Nickerson Gardens. Later that afternoon, as they sat on the track-field bleachers, their rivals came back with guns and shot his best friend in the head. Boys who played with each other in athletic leagues just a few years before were now deadly enemies, handed a cold destiny by history and geography.

By 1986, the gang leadership at Jordan Downs was changing. The Jordan Downs Crips were fading, and a new generation of Crips grew from the ground up. In the sprawling projects they cliqued up in different factions like the Playboy
Hoo-Rides, the JDC, Eastside Kids, the Sunset Ave. Boys, the Young Hustlas and the Watts Baby Locs. In time the Baby Locs took over, and began “courting in” all the shorties from the cliques into a set of sets, the Grape Street Crips. “ ‘Courtin' in',” says Daude Sherrills, “is when everybody got to fight each other. That was a part of your initiation process.” The new Grape Streets positioned themselves outside the traditional Crip/Blood axis. Instead of red or blue, Daude says, “The whole ‘hood started banging purple.”

In high school, Aqeela distanced himself from gang life, got a job after school selling candy in the shiny exurbs of Orange County, and was accepted to Cal State Northridge in 1988. Daude had a more difficult time. He was determined to make up for getting kicked out of junior high and being held back a grade. He attended night school to graduate with his class in 1986. But as just another eighteen-year-old in Watts, he had no job prospects, and returned to his old ways.

“I was crackin', selling weed, beefing with rivals, escaping raids and escaping shootouts, the whole nine, just trying to survive. I didn't care if I lived or died. It was no role models, no teachers, no preachers, no
imams,
none of that was around,” he says. Instead he saw his friends heading off to prison or into early graves. On his twentieth birthday, with the news that his girlfriend was expecting his first son, Daude finally decided to save himself.

Both the Sherrills, who had grown up with the Nation of Islam, noticed that Minister Farrakhan had launched the “Stop the Killing” campaign. Across town, Imam Mujahid Abdul-Karim from the local Masjid al-Rasul was working to end the violence with Nickerson Gardens O.G.'s—an effort which included Loaf, one of the Bloods who had set off the war with Jordan Downs at Markham in the late ‘70s. At the gym in Nickerson Gardens, the peacemakers put up a new mural, entitled “Crossfire (The First Word on Peace),” a memorial to the dozens of residents who had been killed in gang warfare. The words on the wall read,
KEEP THE FUTURE ALIVE, and NOBODY CAN STOP THIS WAR BUT US
.
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