Can't Stop Won't Stop (60 page)

Some had called it an Uprising, others a Rebellion. The official term was “civil disturbance.” Korean Americans simply called it by the date it had begun, 4-2-9,
Sa-l-Gu
. Whatever the name, these days would mark the hip-hop generation's passage through fire. After this, there would be the backlash.

In the park after the truce. Eazy E video shoot, 1993.
Photo © B+

 

 

And so our brief subject today is taken from the American Constitution and these words, “Toward a more perfect union.” Toward a more perfect union.

—Minister Louis Farrakhan

We are facing a potential bloodbath of teenage violence in years ahead that will be so bad, we'll look back at the 1990s and say those were the good old days.

—Criminologist James Alan Fox

First there were the parties. With calm restored to the streets, spontaneous celebrations broke out across from Lynwood to Watts, South Central to Compton, Willowbrook to Inglewood, as rival gang sets tied their colors together, fired up the barbecues and broke bread. Parks that had once been exclusive turf were thrown open. Public spaces were public once again. The rapper Kam summed up the vibe in his epochal single, “Peace Treaty,” its hydraulic “Atomic Dog” bassline pumping a giddy joy:

I'ma always remember this

Because my niggas made the history books

And now the mystery looks a lot clearer

The man in the mirror's got power

It's now or never

More than ever

Black people got to stick together

For Los Angeles's war-weary youths, the gang truce and the Uprising unleashed a burst of creative energy. Rappers like DJ Quik, Compton's Most Wanted and Above The Law were making noise on the national charts. From the fiercely competitive freestyle ciphers at the Good Life Café on the westside to the intergenerational ferment of spoken word, free jazz and hip-hop in Leimert Park to the free floating parties at the Pharcyde Manor in Hancock Park, an underground was taking shape. At the Hip-Hop Shop on Melrose, b-boys and b-girls gathered to advance the elements. Graffiti writers like HEX and SLICK were engaged in a new age of style wars. Some were joining the surge of energy that was transforming street fashion and graphic design. A number of grassroots magazines, led by
URB
and
Rap Sheet
, captured the local scene and articulated a new West Coast aesthetic.

In the streets, gang members turned their attention to creating a future for themselves and their city.

Everyone seemed to agree that economic development was the key to saving Los Angeles. On May 2, Mayor Bradley named Peter Ueberroth, the head of the city's 1984 Olympics, to be the head of a private-sector organization that would be called “Rebuild L.A.,” charged with mobilizing business, government, and community investment. It began assembling a board of directors of nearly one hundred city, corporate, Hollywood and community players, including the likes of Jim Brown, Danny Bakewell, Johnnie Cochran, Michael Ovitz and Edward James Olmos.

Ueberroth predicted that Rebuild L.A. would convince five hundred corporations from three continents to invest more than $1 billion in the city.
¹
Economic consultants told them that to begin to turn around the inner-city, they would need to raise $6 billion and create more than 90,000 jobs.
²
But by any measure, the organization was a complete failure. Ueberroth stepped down from the leadership after only a year, leaving the organization in disarray. Over the next four years, Rebuild L.A. raised less than $300 million. Only half of the thirty-two supermarkets that the organization had been promised
were actually built. Vons Corporation had pledged to build two stores but opened only one, in the supermarket-starved city of Compton, and sold it as soon as it could. Rebuild L.A. was, in Mike Davis's words, “the cruelest joke of all.”
³

At the same time Rebuild L.A. was announced in May of 1992, an alternative proposal to rebuild Los Angeles, purported to come from the Bloods and Crips, circulated through the streets, the media and upper levels of government. Its provenance was in question, particularly because of the document's closing words—”Meet these demands and the targeting of police officers will stop!”—a threat that clearly had not been sanctioned by the peacemakers and that seemed inimical to common sense. But the proposal's details drew interest and support from many gang leaders.

Among other things, the $3.7 billion plan for inner-city investment called for three new hospitals and forty additional health care centers to be built and the replacement of welfare programs with manufacturing plants. It demanded increased lighting of city streets, $20 million in business loans and community job creation, new books and accelerated learning programs in inner-city schools, and community policing that incorporated former gang members. “Give us the hammer and the nails,” the document read, “and we will rebuild the city.”

For a brief period before and after their 1971 truce, the Bronx gangs had turned to the government for relief as they sought to turn themselves around. But two decades later, this generation of gangs would have no Great Society and no Mayor Lindsay. The infrastructure of aid and rehabilitation had been replaced by Bush's “thousand points of light,” which usually took the form of do-for-self, faith-based grass-roots nationalism or the trickle-down charities of the anything-goes, everything-is-for-sale marketplace.

To be sure, the new generation was not interested in government promises. Kam put it in the Nation of Islam's terms: “Less government relief checks, more labor.” They readily admitted that they would need to do their part to make peace work. “We've got to show people that this eye-for-an-eye stuff is out the door,” Charles “Q-Bone” Rachal of the Five-Duce Broadway Crips said. “But we have to do it ourselves. All that hand-out stuff from the ‘60s was messed up, and those people who did it messed up. We're the generation of the ‘90s, and we've got to show action.”
⁴

So gang members met with the Korean American Grocers Organization, who immediately got the point but could only promise a handful of jobs. That was a path Ice T had already known to be useless. “They aimed at Korean people because they felt Koreans were one step above them, so that's the closest step to the system,” he wrote of the burners and looters in
The Ice Opinion
. “They didn't know the Koreans are just as broke as them.”
⁵
In time, many more Black and brown faces appeared behind the counter of these stores, but most of the 2,000 destroyed Korean-American businesses would never be rebuilt, and tiny markets and laundromats could never replace the hundreds of thousands of jobs that corporate flight had spirited away.

Gang peacemakers seized on Minister Farrakhan's up-from-the-bootstraps optimism and leapt into entrepreneurship. Two men from Jordan Downs secured a contract from the Eurostar shoe company to sell a “Truce” brand sneaker. With funds from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, they opened a storefront they called the Playground, where they sponsored basketball games, created a community hangout, and sold the shoes. In a year, the venture was over. The burden of economic and community development, one of the shoe company's representatives later said, was “more of a job for the president of the United States than for a shoe salesman.”
⁶

The most audacious idea came from Daude Sherrills, who had come to the first peace meeting at the Masjid with a proposal for a nonprofit organization that he called “Hands Across Watts,” a government-funded group that would create jobs for former gang-members and sponsor job training, child care and recreational programs. A week after the Uprising, when the Crips and Bloods publicly announced their truce at a press conference at Jordan Downs, Sherrills and Tony Bogard presented the plan, announcing $100,000 as their fundraising goal. When corporate money did not rush in, they took to the streets to sell car-washing solution, soft drinks, and peace treaty T-shirts. The organization secured federal, city and private grants and job-training contracts, but Sherrills left after disagreements with Bogard over its direction.

Soon after, Bogard was shot dead by another PJ Watts Crip, allegedly as the result of a dispute over cocaine profits. The deal had nothing to do with Hands Across Watts, but grants, contracts, and donations evaporated, and the organization crumbled. “Economics plays a major role in maintaining the
peace,” Bogard had once told a reporter. “If we had industry and venture capital, we wouldn't have all the drug selling and robbing that's going on. Economics is the key to everything.”
⁷
It was a tragic epitaph.

At the corner of Florence and Normandie, three of the four corners remained burned down. Tom's Liquors was the only building that remained. Behind it, one billboard advertised the television talent show, “Star Search.” The other read: “Looking for a new career? Join your LAPD. Earn $34,000 to $43,000.”
⁸

“A lot of things was promised,” Daude Sherrills says. “They didn't put a billion dollars in the truce movement. So this is where we're at today.”

But against all odds, the gang truce held in Watts and spread. In the weeks after the uprising, gang homicide tallies plunged, and stayed there.

Police were skeptical. “I'm concerned as to the true motives of the gang members as to why they would make peace,” one policeman said. “Is it so they can better fight with us, so they can better deal dope or so they can better be constructive in their neighborhoods? That would be the last item I would choose because gang members have a thug mentality.”
⁹

Peacemakers came to believe that police were actively trying to undermine the truce. Hours after the National Guard had left town, newspapers reported the appearance of a crude flyer that read:
To all Crips and Bloods: Let's unit
[sic]
and dont
[sic]
gangbang and let it be a black thing for the little black girl and the homie Rodney King. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If LAPD hurt a black we'll kill two. Pow. Pow. Pow
. From there, the anti-gang rhetoric accelerated. The sheriff's office issued a gang intelligence briefing which stated Black Muslims had organized the gangs to loot and burn, and warned that Crips and Bloods were preparing to attack police stations. Mike Davis scoffed, “This is right off that movie
Assault on Precinct 13
.”
¹⁰

Was there a disinformation campaign afoot? On May 22, the CBS Evening News reported a bizarre story alleging gang members were trading drugs for military weapons from local U.S. Army bases.
¹¹
No one was ever arrested in connection with the alleged transaction, and the story sunk like a rock. But the next day, the
Washington Post
reported that four thousand weapons had been
stolen and were probably in the hands of gang members. By May 27, outgoing Chief Daryl Gates was spinning on Larry King's CNN show, “You know, I'd love to see peace in the city, peace among gangs,” he said. “But I just don't think it's going to happen. These people simply don't have it in them, I don't believe, to create peace among the gangs or in any other way.”
¹²

Gates was contradicting at least one of his own officers on the ground. Deputy Chief Matthew Hunt, the police commander of the South Los Angeles area, admitted to the Police Commission, “There's no question the amount of violent crime has decreased. People in the community say they haven't heard a shot fired in weeks. They are elated.”
¹³

But it had become clear to peacemakers that LAPD was out to disrupt and harass peace meetings and parties. At some events, cops appeared in large numbers without provoking an incident. At others, they forcibly broke up the meetings. In Compton, Congresswoman Waters and City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas came in person to intervene with police who were harassing gang members leaving a peace meeting.