Chicago: Turning Against the Gangs

THE notion of teen-age gangs evokes memories of the '50s, of leather-jacketed youths sporting zip guns and garrison belts, of the Sharks and the Jets in the urban ballet that was West Side Story. To the residents of Chicago's sprawling black ghetto, however, the images are more immediate and far more menacing.

As of June 24 of this year, there have been 38 gang-related homicides and 316 gang shootings with 398 wounded, most in the city's black South Side. Last Friday, at one violence-ridden project, there were more fatalities--two policemen, walking the streets in a program to improve relations with the community, were gunned down by snipers. Among the black community, there is a growing recognition that the gangs are a cancer within their midst, that they must be stamped out and that no matter what the police and courts try to do, it is the blacks themselves who must ultimately solve the problem.

Such awareness has been long in coming. For years, the city's black gangs have been allowed to flourish under a protective umbrella of white-liberal and black community support. Despite the formation of a special police gang intelligence unit, organizations like the Black P. Stone Nation (formerly and more famously known as the Blackstone Rangers), the Black Disciples and the Vice Lords increased their memberships into the thousands and engaged in shooting sprees, beatings, extortion and intimidation. But for all that, adult black leaders did not criticize the gangs, visualizing them instead as an organized and potentially constructive force in the community.

Y.M.C.A. Support. So, too, did some of the white world. In 1967, the Office of Economic Opportunity financed a job-training program for both Blackstone Rangers and Devil's Disciples. The Kettering Foundation gave $50,000 for legal expenses for inner-city youths. A chapter of the Vice Lords known as the Conservative Vice Lords received Sears Foundation and Y.M.C.A. support in starting several small businesses in their area. Such prominent black personalities and longtime supporters of the gangs as Chicago Disk Jockey Holmes ("Daddy-O") Daylie and the Rev. Curtis Burrell, director of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (K.O.C.O.), helped provide jobs for gang members. But still the killings continued.

For Blacks Only. Initially, black criticism of the gangs had stemmed mainly from the parents of dead and injured children. Recently, however, even men like Daddy-O Daylie began to blow the whistle on tolerance. He had put black capitalism into action by acquiring two filling stations and part ownership in a bowling alley, then hired young blacks to help staff them. But Stones members approached him last summer and demanded he turn over one of the stations to their gang. When he refused, youths reported to be gang members began vandalizing and harrassing customers at his bowling alley. This year, a security guard at the lanes was shot three times by unidentified youths.

Angered and disillusioned, Daylie approached the Cosmopolitan Chamber of Commerce, a local group chiefly made up of black businessmen, and asked them to take a public position against the gangs. Soon after, he began receiving threats on his life. Since then, he has been using his daily radio show and once-a-week TV program, For Blacks Only, to ask blacks to stand up and be counted. "The silent black majority has become the victim of a violent minority," he says. "Once we are honest enough to admit there is a serious gang problem, if we don't do something about it, we are part of the problem."

Even more surprising was the defection of the Rev. Curtis Burrell, formerly one of the gangs' staunchest allies. Burrell ran afoul of the Stones when he decided they were not acting for the good of the community and fired several of them from the K.O.C.O. staff last month. He denounced the gang as a negative element and held a "march against fear" in the Kenwood-Oakland area to muster resident support. Shortly afterward, five bullets were fired through the front window of his home.

Now Burrell, who was put under police protection for a week, is attempting to organize more marches. Like Daylie, he believes the problem is, in the end, one for the black community to solve.

Far Enough. Undoubtedly, leaders like Daylie and Burrell will be able to count increasingly on the support of middle-class blacks in the South Shore area. Normally oblivious to the gangs as long as they were confined to the worst ghetto areas, middle-class South Shore parents recently were shocked when their children came home to tell them of a massive recruiting drive by the Black P. Stone Nation.

The recruiters allegedly went right into the schools, threatening harm to the students or their parents if they failed to align themselves with the Stones. "This gang thing has gone far enough," said one outraged father. Burrell, who is against white intervention, would like to hear similar expressions of black anger more often. "What the police have to do," he says, "is stand out of the way and let black men deal with their sons." If the revulsion against gang violence in the Chicago ghetto continues, this could well happen.

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