James F. Short,Jr.
Gang Research in Chicago

Full text of a Presentation at the Chicago Gang History,
Undergrduate Research Conference.
November 9, 2000.

Short on Thrasher: Streaming Video

John Hagedorn: When we decided to do this undergraduate research forum I thought about asking Jim Short to come out here because Jim's research is on Chicago, and it is, some of the most respected and influential pieces of research on gangs that has ever been done. I first read, Group Process and Gang Delinquency, and Jim is going to read parts of it to us for an hour and a half (laughter) And I don't know if you know this, JIm, when I wrote People and Folks, I did all this research and I really hadnt read much theory. And so as I was writing the chapters, before I started writing a chapter I'd go and I'd read a few books. The first time I ever read most of these books, like Cohen or Cloward and Ohlin, I'd look at my data and read some more and say, oh heck What I'm reading applies to this, or it doesn/t and then I'd write the chapter.

And then I got to Jim's book. And there were two things about it.. First, it was too hard, it was too difficult. It just was hard to read and understand. There was all these things that he said in the book that I'd say "Damn, you know that (laughter) that makes sense.". And I'd go back and have to read it again. Dammit I read that book so many times until I could finally get through it. But it was one of those books that you just, it just, has something to say. And I said to myself, "I could one never know that much and I could never do research on this level." This book was just intimidating. But it's a book that I kept going back to and then I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting Jim and learning from him. I send him everything I write and he writes comments back and tells me that I'm being too rash and (chuckle) he tells me think this through and don't say that. I thought that the best way to end this conference is for Jim to talk about his research because we're about to engage in something that may not be as extensive as what you did back in the sixties but hopefully it's going tobe a major effort to do research here in Chicago and to involve people. I think as we start itís only proper that we should learn from your experience and hear what you have to say. So it's my pleasure to present Jim Short.

Short: Thanks John. I must tell you that I'm humbled by being here after having sat through Timuel Black's lecture and talk this morning and listening to Doug Thompson and David Johnson who were here and others who talked about the importance of doing insider research. And what can insider's contribute to the research process that those of us who are not inside but who approach it from more academic perspective can contribute and a marvelous session on gentrification and itís implication for communities and gangs.

It always feels like home when I come back to Chicago. I lived here for nearly eight years but fell in love with it nevertheless. And I've been there for a long time and I still come back to Chicago. But I am goning to focus specifically on gangs and on the history of gang research just a little bit to review some of that and to talk about change. Because really the thing that impresses me most every time I come back and when I try to keep up with the literature is that while my colleagues and I had got a snapshot of history back in the late 50ís and early 60ís and we did come back for some follow up research in the early 70ís, so much has changed in the evolution of gangs as a formal organization, the evolution, and how the development of Chicago itself has influenced that.

I was remarking on the irony of talking about needed research and gentrification what it does to communities in the gang, of meeting here at the University of Illinois Chicago which displaced quite a number of communities in the process of being built. And there's still people who are angry about that. And society has yet to come to grips with dealing with the victims of so called progress. And until we do we're goning to continue to repeat those mistakes. And I just feel so strongly that what we heard this afternoon earlier was a good example of how insiders can help to inform the process. I still am, I guess I still believe in my heart of hearts that people don't purposely displace communities and destroy communities and so forth, that they don't often times if we understood we'd be able to deal more effectively with problems like urban redevelopment and so forth. So I'm hopeful that something good like that will come out of what John and his colleagues are doing.

Letís start with the first official sort of history of gangs in Chicago, which as most of you know is Frederic Thrasher's book The Gang: A Study of 1313 Gangs in Chicago. Keep that number in mind: 13 hundred and 13 gangs. Now Frederic Thrasher was a bachelor, who apparently never married and he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago as I was a quarter of a century after he was there. And I don't think anybody ever questioned him as to exactly how he counted those 13 hundred and 13 gangs. But anyhow that's what he wrote his book about.

Hagedorn: I've counted the dots on the map, there are 1313 of them

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Short: You counted them? (laughter) I'm not counting I can tell you that. However Thrasher was not the only person to talk about gangs. John mentioned earlier and most of you are familiar with the work of Clifford Shaw and his colleagues at the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research. Shaw and his colleagues though didn't say much about gangs. They talked a lot about friendship groups about neighborhood traditions and how those were related. And how disorganized communities found it difficult to deal with problems of crime and delinquency. Now as I've gone back to read those old books there's an innocence in the descriptions of gangs in both Thrasher and Shaw that seems to be missing in studies of gangs in the 60ís and in contemporary gangs.

Thrasher, for example, referred to members of some of his gangs as street urchins. Now when was the last time you heard street urchins applied to anyone you know? Shaw's protagonist, Stanley, the story of the jack roller, when he describes how he felt on finding himself in a very hard and drab reformatory cell, he said "Before I had just been a mischievous lad, a poor city waif, a petty thief, a habitual runaway, but now as I sat in my cell of stone and iron, dressed in a grey uniform with my head shaved, small skull cup, like all the other hardened criminals around me, some strange feelings came over me. Never before had I realized that I was a criminal."

Now that language is a little arcane. But there's an important insight. And that is what Shaw and later a historian by the name of Tannenbaum referred to as the dramatization of evil. We dramatize for kids oftentimes their behavior as though it were criminal when maybe it was a fairly innocent act that got them involved. Now I'm not making excuses for the violence and the shootings and so forth but I am saying that we need to realize something that the media have forgotten and many scholars have forgotten as well: that gangs are comprised mostly of kids. And these kids have the same problems as all kids do growing up.

There's also an innocence in some of the, in the gang kids that we studied in a sense. An innocence of problems of growing up. And that's why I say we have to remember that they're kids after all. And that we need to help them and not just lock em up and throw away the key. It reminds me, the dramatization of all of this and the media hype, reminds me of a few years ago when my grandson was was 7 years old (he's just seventeen now). His mother told me, my daughter, told me that one day the boy came in and announced that he and his friends were now a gang and their name was the Radical Dirty Dogs. (laughter) Well now, Suzie asks, she said well, you think I should be worried? (laughter) And I said no, probably not. And then of course after a few days the boy's behavior didn't change and the Radical Dirty Dogs apparently disappeared. Well gangs don't disappear in the inner city and there are good reasons why they don't. And that's what in part, Timuel Black was talking about this morning. And what these young men were talking about this afternoon as well. Again, one other historical note: Thrasher, for example, in one of the documents that he has, this was published in 1927 by the way, he said residents in the vicinity of south of the stockyard were startled one morning by a number of placards bearing the inscription the Murderers, 10000 strong - 48th Street. It was their way of drawing attention to a gang of 30 Polish boys who hung out in the district known as the Bush. Well the murderers were certainly not 10000 strong, but they were involved in a lot of things. That I need not go into here.

I'm going to try to keep from lecturing too much and to leave some time for some discussion here. But it's hard to get an old professor started in and then get him to stop and after a few minutes the hour is over. So I have to watch myself here. But I do want to impress upon you the notion that WWII was actually a watershed, in, not only in gangs but in the evolution of that we now call youth culture. Following WWII a number of changes occured which brought into being for the first time eversomething called a youth culture which really had a nationwide impact. I was delighted this morning when Timuel Black recommends you read Dickens, because Dickens deals a lot with conditions in London slums, and in other large city slums, that were very similar to the conditions that we now associate with gangs. But that was not a nationwide impact. The nationwide impact was that because of the affluence following WWII, more women working, being out of the home, the media were picking up, and the commercial interests were realizing that kids who had money to spend were an extremely important market. There were other things as well that were occurring following WWII. And it was at this time that gangs also emerged as a, if not a nationwide problem, at least a major problem in large cities. And that's when our studies began.

In 1958 I was asked by the University of Chicago to head up a research project in collaboration with a new program sponsored by the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago. It was called the program for Detached Workers. I was talking to Timuel Black at lunch and I told him I was associated with it and he said you know those YMCA workers were courageous, they were fearless. They'd go in and work with those gangs even though they might have been in danger. Well, they weren't really terribly in danger because that was before guns became so available. I have two guns that were given me in the, in our research. They're what used to be called zip guns. And they're both, these were not the wood kind that were propelled with rubber band but they were cap pistols that had been wrapped to contain an explosive and had a copper tube inserted in the barrel and a device to so that they could put a .22 shell in and it would go off. Well now the guy who shot with that gun had no idea where the bullet was going. And so it was almost as dangerous to the kid who was shooting as it was to the kid out in front. And you didn't have guns with, well particularly Timuel mentioned the automatic ones where you don't have to know anything about a gun except how to pull the trigger and sooner or later you're going to hit something. Maybe that's what you aimed at. So there are differences now that just borders the magnitude of different in terms of the consequences of the sort of fighting that goes on compared to what it was back in our day.

Or, when I say our day I mean back when I was doing research. The program for detached workers consisted of a very small number of young men who were sent, most of them just out of college, they were hired to work the streets and meeting gangs on their own terms. Nearly all had some characteristic that would appeal to gang members. One of them was a little all American football player, another was a very good football player, played for the University of Iowa, he was a good, high level. A couple of them were Wheaton College football players that my friends knew, came in with my brother here, knew them actually. There was a schoolteacher, a former paratrooper in the Korean war, a former CIO worker, CYO worker. Those workers served as our ethnographic eyes and ears for the gangs with whom they were working. Now you have to know a little something else about the workers. The YMCA program was a very loose program; they were not heavily programmed. Once in a while they would schedule programs like pool tournaments, boxing matches, softball games and so forth but by and large what they did is simply to hang around with the gang members, those that were wherever the hang outs were and try to keep em out of trouble. They did a lot of individual counseling, they did a lot of arbitrating, moderating conflicts. They would try to help them if the kids were in trouble in school, if they want a job they try to get them jobs.

Getting jobs incidentally was not the trouble, it was not the big problem in those days, it was keeping jobs. Cause kids who'd grown up with the easy , I don't mean easy in a good sense, but the free floating life of the streets are not used to the discipline of the work place. It's bad enough with the discipline of the schools, but the discipline of the workplace is even worse. So the program could get a lot of jobs for the kids at that time but they had an awful hard time keeping them on the job. These young men didn't respond well to taking orders from people who didn't understand them anyhow. And, so there are many things that we could talk about in that connection too. Now keep in mind that when we were studying gangs, this is before the development of the supergangs, of gang nations, and the spread of gang culture throughout the United States. Keep in mind also that youth culture was far less developed and exploited commercially than it now is. This was still in the early evolution of youth culture as we know it today and before gang culture had spread very widely.

There were gangs in most large cities, certainly, and city government and social agencies were struggling to figure out what to do with them. The boy's clubs, the CYO, the Chicago Area Project, the Chicago community committee. There were a lot of detached worker programs, so many in fact that having a detached worker came to be a mark of prestige among gangs. I was telling David at the break that the head of theYMCA program got a telephone call one day and the young man on the other end of the phone said Mr. Boone, he said, we want a worker. And Nick Boone who'd had quite a lot of law enforcement experience and other things, he said well who are you and why do you want a worker? And this young man said well we're a small club that beat on Blackstone. And you can guess what was to happen there. Boone says well why do you need a worker? He says mac you ain't nothing unless you got a worker. (chuckle)

See that was a mark of prestige. Now the Blackstone Rangers became the Black P. Stone Nation and the El Rukns and so on. That's another aspect of history that really needs to be told. And that's why I am so enthusiastic about what John and his colleagues are doing here. We tend to look upon gangs in terms of the stereotypes, even terrible stereotypes like West Side Story which is so romantic. But also in terms of the stereotypes that these are kids, who because they got themselves in trouble, we don't need to worry about them anymore. Well of course we do because they all come out of prison, they all have to fit back into the larger society and what we do with them in prisons doesn't help them very much. Now we're fortunate that most do manage to survive that experience. And I'm just fascinated by the stories I've heard today. I was talking to both John and David about one of my former graduate students who now teaches at North Carolina has a project studying the Luther Crips in Los Angeles. That's one of the smaller branches of the Crips. But he's learning a lot about young men who are members of that organization who are both gang members and some of whom are gang members but not gang bangers and some of whom are both. And that distinction which was made in this earlier session is a very important one. Gang membership because of the way it's evolving has an influence on the lives of young men and oftentimes young women which extends beyond the gang banging and which in fact can be used as a force for positive good. And we have some very good examples of that involved in this project.

Well that's the problem, another problem with old professors, they tend to talk off the cuff and not stick to what they're supposed to be talking about. When I contacted the Chicago Police Department when we started doing our project because I wanted to know what the Police knew about gangs. They had a youth division headed by a big Irishman the name of Mike Delaney, really a wonderful guy. I got to know him pretty well after it happened. I said, asked him well what do you do about gangs? Do you do anything about gangs? He said yeah we have a list here of all the gangs in Chicago. And I said well gee, could I see that list. Sure. Well I took the list - there were 300 gangs. Now compare that to the 1313 that Thrasher's (laughter). There's a gap there someplace. But the anomaly there was that when we started looking for those gangs, most of them we couldn't find. Because the gang situation at that time was so fluid. I mean, we worked with the Egyptian Cobras, the early Imperial Chaplins, the early Vice Lords, the Englewood Cobras, oh gosh I can't remember them all but that was before. I mean at that time it was so fluid that you never knew from almost from week to week or month to month what your gang membership lists were like. And we had a terrible time with it. We tried to make lists of members so we could do police checks, we could do self reports, we could see who we were observing and so forth and it was so fluid that it was very difficult to keep up with.

In addition to not being able to find many of those gangs, we were not interested in most that we could find because we had particular theoretical interests. And John mentioned the theoretical, I'm glad someone appreciates the theory part of this because you know a very famous social psychologist once said that there's nothing so practical as a good theory. And you know most people think well theory, what can I do with it? The truth of the matter is if you don't have a theory then you don't know how to interpret what it is that you're finding. You get statistics, you get an isolated piece of data here or something, unless you've got some idea as to how this fits into a larger picture, which is really what a theory is, then you don't have much, you can't know how to apply it. Because all of our observations are time bound, space bound they're bounded by all of the limitations of human observation, particularly in statistics. And I'm not an anti statistics person, not as much as John is, but I, but I really do appreciate the importance of qualitative work and that's mainly what I'm going to talk about today.

Well, I'll make a long story very short: over a three year period we studied 12 black gangs with more than 400 members, 8 white gangs with about 150 members, 120 young men who were black but lower class not members of gangs, a few dozen middle class black non gang members and comparable white groups lower class non gang members and white middle class kids. All of the kids that we, all of the young people we studied were members of groups of one sort or another, that we wanted to keep the group context before us all the time. Our basic method of studying gangs and our entree to them was by means of observation of these detached workers and that of graduate students that we sent out from the University of Chicago to meet, to spend hours and hours on the street and the interesting parts of this book are really the parts from those observations, theyí\'re not in the statistics.

Each week our cardinal rule was in the research project was that every worker was required to come in and talk to us. And I did very little of the interviewing because I was involved in a lot of other things. But one of my graduate students would interview these young men for at least an hour, often times it would run two and three hours, and they would start to tell us what happened when they left our office the last time, every contact they had with the gang, with gangs or with individual gang members, until the time they came back to the office the next week. So it's a pretty complete detailing of what they did. The graduate students went out with the workers, I think there may have been one or two graduate students who went out on their own without the workers that's where they got what they had, but most of them went with the workers. And they were instructed similarly, as soon as you get with that worker you tell me what happened, you write a report. So I have several thousand pages of observation of work.

The workers were wonderful to work with. At the time we were trying to fill out a theoretical design which would compare conflict gangs with drug gangs with more economically oriented gangs. We found out that they didn't exist in just those pure forms. We thought we'd located a drug-using group on the near Northside once. One of the workers I remember when he left his interview with my graduate student, he stopped by my office and said don't worry doc, I'll keep him out until seven to keep him studying. Well that wasn't exactly what we would have thought of it. It didnít quite work out that way.

Well anyhow, the graduate students were also first rate observers. We learned a lot from them and that was I said the more interesting part. Now we did a lot of other things: we did personality tests, we did sociometric tests, we did a lot of things. But I want to give you a flavor of what our observations were like and it may help those of you who were members of gangs and maybe are members of gangs who want to do research here to get a feel of what we did.

There was one, I'll tell, it'll give you a little flavor of what gang conflict was like at this time. One of my workers in his weekly report makes this observation. He said:

" I was sitting there talking to the Knights. Now I gave pseudonyms at this time because the names of the gangs were too much in the news and so forth and I didn't want to put anybody on the spot. So the Knights were actually the Imperials, the Vice Kings were obviously the Vice Lords. I was sitting there talking to the Knights about things in general and began reemphasizing my stand on guns. They were really trying to keep the guns out of the hands of the kids, because they told me they'd collected quite a few and were waiting for the Vice Kings to come down and start some trouble. At one point I told them flatly that it was better they give their gun to me rather than the police but while they agreed with me they repeated that they were tired of running from the Vice Kings and if they gave them trouble from now on they were fighting back.

I had a chance to see what they meant exactly because while I was sitting there in the car talking to William, the remaining guys having gotten out of the car in pursuit of some girls around the corner. See these are normal teenagers after all. Well William told me that a couple Vice Kings were approaching. I looked out the window and noticed two Vice Kings and two girls walking down the street. I didn't know them as Vice Kings because I only know their chiefs like Errol and Pappy and so forth. William then turned around and made the observation that there were about 15 or 20 Vice Kings coming cross the street and in an alley and wandering up the street in ones or twos. At this point I heard three shots go off. I didn't know who fired them, those shots, and no one else seemed to know because the Vice, I'm gonna quit saying Vice kings and say Vice Lords because all of you know what I mean and, because the Vice Lords at this point had encountered Commando Jones and a couple of other Knights and were coming around the corner talking to the girls.

The Vice Lords yelled across the street, to Commando and his boys and Commando yelled back. They traded insults and challenges, Commando being the leader of the Knights and a guy named Bear being the leader of the Vice Lords. At this point I got out of the car and tried to cool Commando down because he was halfway across the street hurling insults across the street and daring them to do something about it. And they were doing the same thing to him. I grabbed Commando, this is what the life of a street worker was like at the time, and tried to get him back across the street. But by this time the Vice Lords had worked themselves into a rage and three of them came across the street, yelling that they were the mighty Vice Lords and attacking Commando and the Knights. He said, I tried to break this up but I wasn't too successful. He said, I didn't know how the Vice kings, how the Vice Lords and, I didnít know them and they were really determined to swing on the Knights so we had a little scuffle there. Well to make a long story short at this point along the street came Henry with a revolver shooting at the Vice Lords. That was one of his boys, one of the Imperials. Everybody ducked and the Vice Lords ran and Henry Brown ran around the corner. When he ran around the corner I began to throw the Knights into my car because I knew the area was hot and was trying to get them out of there before the police came. Henry came back around the corner and leaped into the car also. I asked him if he had the gun and he told me he didnít. Since I was in a hurry I pulled out in the car and pulled him and the rest took the rest of the boys with me."

Now this was a minor skirmish. Nobody was hurt fortunately. Those guns weren't too accurate in those days. But then the worker continues, and this is a very interesting observation. He said,

"In the car Commando and the other boys were extremely elated. There were expressions like "Oh Baby did you see the way I swung on that kid... Oh Man did we tell em off! I really let that one kid have it! Did you see them take off when I leveled my gun at them? You were great baby and did you see the way that "I....and so forth.

The worker, who had been a former paratrooper said it was just like we used to feel when we got back from patrol where everything went just right. The tension was relieved. We had performed well and could be proud. Now that's what gang conflict was like at that time. It was, we describe it as a non zero sum game because most of the skirmishes that occurred in those times nobody got hurt very badly. In fact, a very interesting thing happened. The detached worker program let it be known to each of their gangs that look, if you're planning a humbug, if you're planning a fight, we're gonna, if we find out about it, we're gonna do everything we can to stop it. If necessary we'll tell the police. So you know what happened? You might think well then they wouldn't tell them. Truth of the matter is they told them every time. These kids weren't stupid. They knew that if they were to get into a serious fight somebody was gonna get hurt. So the rumors always were passed around. Now that isn't to say that the sort of guerilla warfare that was described here didn't occur. That was exactly the form that was, that it did take place. And you would have ambushes, things like that, which weren't planned enough so that the workers would even find out about it. But if there was a large scale humbug --like we're gonna meet here at the park and the Vice Lords and the Imperials are gonna have it out --then the workers nearly always found out about it and were they able to head it off. Now that changed dramatically of course with better guns and more guns. They're just so many more guns. When the workers got guns from the gangs in those days it was, it was an event. It was, I mean. And this was, this was at a time when West Side story was being told and so forth. But it's changed a lot

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Well I'm not gonna bore you with a lot of this stuff. Iím want to give you one little incident about which will tell you something about the drug. Well actually there are two things Iíve gotta do here. Iíve got to watch myself here Iím getting, Iím taking way too much time. I talked about the observers, the detached workers and then our graduate students. Let me illustrate for you the difference between them with this little incident. One of our workers, very early on, took one of our graduate students to a pool hall which was a gang hangout and a drug hangout on the near SouthSide and in the middle of the evening the worker sidled up to our graduate student observer and he said well did you see the drug transaction going on? Now wouldnít he have been there all evening seeing the same thing that the worker had but he hadnít seen what was going on. Now what it, what had happened was that periodically one of the boys who was playing pool would be interrupted in the pool game and he would hand his pool cue to somebody else and then, oh not many people would even observe it, he would sidle up to a young woman whoís also there and then he would go over to a coat which was hanging on the wall. Now the girl was making the contact with the buyer, the boy was playing pool was a member of our gang was carrying heroin. The boy never knew to whom he was selling, he just knew that all he had to do was put the drop in the jacket, in that jacket that was hanging on the wall. So he didnít ever have to know to whom he was selling. It happened this one boy was also the only heroin addict in this particular group. It was not a heavy drug using group. They smoked a lot of marijuana but they never used any hard drugs. Now we had, that was one of our of my groups. One of the white groups we had was a group that was into drugs very heavily. But not into heroin cause it was too expensive. They were into pills. They would take every pill no matter whether they knew anything about it and as a result they really got pretty crazy. One of our graduate student observers after heíd been walking on, working with this, observing this gang for several months, described a hanging session in which the group related tales about some of the crazy things and the humorous things that the various drug users had done. And this just give you a little bit of the flavor of what these kids are like.

He knows that the relating of these tales was greeted with laughter from all. Often the worker and observer would mention an incident and Bush then would fill in a correct amount of details. Some of the incidents mentioned were the following:

"The time Willy was so high he walked off a roof and fell a story or two and all he broke was his nose. The worker thought he had been on a roof while Bush maintained he fell from a boxcar. Well these legends get a little mixed up sometimes. Bush said it was over a week before he even went to the doctor. The time Schnooks, Baby and Jerry climbed on a roof to wake Elizabeth. There were girls in this group as well. One of the guys reached through the window and grabbed what he thought was Elizabeth's leg to wake her up. Turned out to be her old man's leg and it woke him up. The more recent incident in which Sunny leaped over the counter to rob a Chinaman, who proceeded to beat him up badly. When the police came Sunny asked if they arrest this man for having beaten him up. He was doped out of his mind and didn't know what was happening."

Well, the point though, and there were a number of other stories they just craziness, as the observer said these tales may be in the process of becoming legendary within this group. It became a part of their culture. To tell and retell these stories and some of them could get larger and larger I suppose as they were told. What we were watching, and we didn't even realize at the time, we were watching the evolution of a drug subculture. These kids were not part of the heroin subculture but they had very much their own pill popping sub culture.

Well there are a number of other incidents that were reported that we could go into but I, as I say I'm talking too long and I really don't want to take too much time. I want to tie this in though with youth culture because I think that is our topic more clearly. There are two examples that I could cite for you of how gang culture and youth culture tended to come together and then have implications even to the larger society. Some of you will remember the name Sam Cook, who was a great gospel and blues rock singer who died at a very young age. The brother of Sam Cook was the member of one of our gangs and the boys in this particular gang spent a lot of time singing their do-wops on the street and that was a part of youth culture which was also a part of gang culture which of course became a part of the larger youth culture.

One that I had witnessed myself, I was at a dance held at the Maxwell street YMCA which I understand doesn't even exist anymore. Went by a lot of boxing matches there and a lot of other things there. I was, it was after a boxing match and the boxing match was real interesting. I was sitting next to the leader of the Egyptian Cobras we were on the edge of the ring and I heard two young boys who might have been 9 or 10 behind us one whispering to the other, said that's the buck, he's the leader of the Egyptian Cobras. I was obviously in the presence of celebrity. (laughter) These kids were looking up to the Egyptian Cobras. That's you know again the way gang culture gets going and keeps going. But after the boxing match we went up to the second story room where there was a dance being held. And I saw a dance style I didn't recognize and I asked what it was and I was told it was the horse. And there was another one then that I saw and I said well what's that one? That was the watoosie. Well I don't know anything, and very few of you in this room are old enough to remember it, but those dances became very popular all over the country. The Horse and the Watoosie. And they started, I don't know where they started, but, not with the Egyptian Cobras but they started in the ghetto. So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there is a good deal of feedback between gang culture, youth culture, and assimilating becomes extremely important in trying to understand what youth culture is about as well as what gang culture is about.

Now I know that many of you probably most of you were here with Eli Anderson trip just a couple weeks ago and Iím sure Eli told you about, new stories about how his observations indicate for example that the violence in the ghetto is no longer non zero sum. A lot of times itís decidedly zero sum. And Eli is the best, has the best writing of this that I know of how that dynamic works among kids that are the members of gangs or not but gangs are certainly a very important part of it.

Well I'm going to pause here, there just, as I told John, I can talk for hours on this stuff and I'm so delighted to be a part of this project because I know John Hagedorn more than anybody is so sensitive to what he calls gangs in the post industrial era. And I'm sure we're going to hear a lot more about that, get a lot more documentation about that as we go along. So if there are questions, I didní' talk as long as Timuel did (laughter) but my throat's dry.

I could listen to Timuel Black for two or three more hours. Question? Yes?

Question :During the time that you were doing your research some of t'he groups were being politicized. Timuel this morning talked about the Black P Stone Nations receiving the money to serve the community, the Vice Lords and the Disciples were also a part of that. And receiving this money gave them a level of legitimacy within the community. Today we're finding for example the Almighty Latin King Nation specifically in New York participating in political activities, standing on street corners saying that they have solutions to problems. Here in Chicago we have 21st century Vote. Okay now my question is this, in terms of doing research where gangs are concerned we have a conflict going on. The conflict exists between that part of the group that says we're politicized we wanna be about improving our community and the other side of the group which is still engaged, involved in drug sales and violent behavior. Where do the two merge and can we separate them and explore and explain them in our research process?

S:You know that's a great question. And boy if I had the answer I'd sell it. For a lot of money. You're absolutely right. The problem as you know all too well is that there aren't just two discrete parts to that. It oftentimes those who want to help the community and get into politics are also involved in the other side. And that has been the undoing of the efforts of community organization that the Vice Lords and the Black P Stone Nation and so on. Some of you may know that the MacClellen Committee, a congressional committee held hearings into what had happened to all that money which Ford gave out. And most of it just disappeared, it didn't disappear but it didn't go to the purposes for which it was intended. So the problem of separating the legitimate from the illegitimate has always been a problem. You know, and you can go back in American history, John D. Rockefeller was none too gentle with the way he made his money you know and yet he got legitimated. Now Iím not suggesting that the gangs are gonna be able to get either the sort of money or the sort of legitimacy that John D. Rockefeller did. But organized crime has often times been what Dan Bell used to call a queer ladder of social mobility. And again I'm not excusing the violence and the involvement in crime of the gangs but somehow we've got to find ways of making legitimate opportunities for these young people so that they don't have to get so much involved in the illegitimate world. I say your question is a wonderful one, if it were as simple as having the legals and the illegals that would be one thing. It isn't. They get intertwined and that, it gives them all a bad name.

Also I would say this, you said they were becoming politicized. While we were here, you see we left the field, we did not do field work after the fall of 1962, the Vice Lords were already calling themselves the Conservative Vice Lords but they had not gotten into community organization at all. This was before any of the federal money went to the nation. And so, in fact we were very curious about the political activity because we were here during the Kennedy/Nixon campaign where Chicago put it over the top for Kennedy. And we were very much part of that and we wondered. And the Muslims were getting started but were not yet as powerful as they later became we even asked our gang members and we asked our observers about these groups and whether they were getting excited about an election or what they thought of a nation for Islam and so on. They were not interested at all at that time. And our workers would sometimes observe a Muslim trying to recruit among the gang members and there was just no success at that time.

So the politicization of the gangs did come later and it became a very important factor and it, there probably was a great missed opportunity there. But it sure it sure never resulted in the sort of achievement that anybody, a lot of the too. And in part there was a lot of naivete about that. We gave money to gang kids who had no experience in the management of money, or in the running of training programs or the running of businesses. Now nobody in their right mind would do that but we did that. And without any sort of guidance. No wonder the businesses fail. The money was fraudulently used. It's not the first time that money's been fraudulently used in Chicago. But you know we act as though that was news but it shouldn't have been at all. We should have anticipated that. But we didn't. Yes sir?

Question: It appears seems that politicization of the gangs began around the time that Jeff Fort was invited to Nixon's inauguration.

S:Well that was Timuel's story, I hadn't heard that story. Itís a great story.

Question: They actually of course scheduled Johnson, that only J and southern Democrats and their Great Society. They did not choose between guns and butter, they chose both guns and butter. And part of the butter was the jobs for youth programs in order to prevent the recurrence of the Chicago Riot. And these jobs for youth programs had to have supervisors for the gang members. And they signed up of course their gang members and these supervisors of course there's no supervision they just listed all their gang members as attending for that day so that they were paid their daily wage. And the gang members of course signed up for every available program and of course lobbied for more programs to get more money that between the prostitution more money and drug operations.

Short: Well that's very interesting observation but I have to say that that's only part of the story. Because a very large part of the story also was that when those grants and the community action program part of that, when they did become successful or seem that they were going to be successful they were cracked down upon unmercifully by the political powers that be. Now again I'm not making excuses for the excesses and subversion that took place here. There's no question, it did. But when Chicago found that these political, that these community action committees were suddenly getting a big following then they cracked down on them. Inspectors would go into restaurants that were around, while the gangs would eat, you can always find something wrong in a restaurant, and they did and they shut em down. I mean, this sort of thing happened repeatedly. So it was, itís a two way street that's all Iím saying. And again there was a lot of naivete. And some of it was by sociologists I have to say. I mean, ______ was the head of that program. He's a great sociologist but why on earth he expected that programs that were that set up with those few controls would work I don't know. I think he's probably wiser.

Question:To add to your response to these gentlemen's statement it's important to remember that almost a million dollars was put in the hands of inner city youth for the most part who had little if any management skills.

Short:Absolutely.

Question: And some suggest two points. One: that the monies were being given to these organizations to empower the organizations so that they could become a force against the Black Panther Party which already had free breakfast and health programs, and at the same time to try to prevent future riots.

Short:It was a divide and conquer.

Qustion:It was a divide and conquer. Also these monies were being given because they knew that in the hands of these inner city youth that the money would be abused and misused and it provided an opportunity to lock the leadership up and that was the beginning of the end of the organizations of Chicago. You see what the result was.

S:I t'ink that that's a very good comment. See there are no clean hands in this business. I mean, thereís enough chicanery to go around. Everyone's. And we're not in the blame game. But we are beginning in the smart game. And that that's really what we need to do now is to get smart about what we're doing and what our research is telling us. But keep in mind, now I speak as a member of the establishment, that when establishments get threatened you're always going to have resistance. And you know that's the way the game is played. But we're never going to get change unless we get organization and information and skills among the currently dispossessed. Among those who, the have nots in society. And that's happening worldwide. And people are scared, and they have a right to be scared but they also ought to be smart. If they were smart theyíd realize that in the long run theyíre going to be a lot better off. You know I heard Ralph Bunch talk in the early 1950ís, when he was United Nations. He was talking in Hawaii. I was at a meeting in Hawaii, I forget why I was there.

Hagedorn: No you don't. You don't forget why you were in Hawaii.

Short: :Ralph Bunch said to a very large crowd, which was a very mixed race crowd. He said look folks, you white folks had better wake up to the fact that the great majority of people all the world over are people of color. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner weíre going to be able to have racial harmony and progress. If you don't realize that, in the long run, you're dead, you're toast. Now you know I may be putting it a little bit dry. It won't happen in my life time and probably not in my grandchildren's time but it's going to happen and itís just absolutely insane that we continue the racial divides that we have in our society. My brother lives in a racially integrated area in Blue Island. You know, and why we haven't been able to get people to do that and to shop together and to learn together and live together I doní' know. But it's gotta come. Sooner or later. Now I'm becoming a preacher (laughter). You've got a very good preacher sitting over here.

Hagedorn: One of the things that has struck me as 'íve been trying to piece this story together is the 60's, there's a change of tenor. There's certainly, there's probably stacked up violence by the end of the 60ís there was all sorts of things going on. There's also a change in tenor of the response. And by 1969 we found the text of the first Mayor Daley, and Hannrahan, State's Attorney, their war on gangs. And they had a, they gave a press conference where they declared war on gangs. And itís really a remarkable document. But one of the effects of that war on gangs was massive incarceration of gang members. How do you see, I mean you obviously did this stuff before then, how do you see that impact of prison fitting into this politicization question, the evolution of gangs, what's gone on, how do you look at that?

Short: Well again thatss a particularly good question because of the escalation of prison population. It's an unbelievable thing; we have more people behind bars than any country in the world except the old South Africa and the Soviet Union. And that doesn't speak very well for us. Jim Jacobs did a dissertation for the University of Chicago on Statesville, and it was about Joliet. What he found there and this was, well Jim must have done his research in the 60's, was that the gangs were better organized in prison than they areoutside. Which is not at all surprising. I mean you have total institution, youíve got control. What's happened since that time of course is that the gangs, the same racial and ethnic conflicts outside the society are now being reenacted in the prisons.

You have the Aryan league, there are hispanic groups, black groups, and probably going to be oriental groups, Asian groups now. Although their rate in prison's not so high. But I think one of the great unexamined questions, and ití' to the discredit of sociologists that we havenít really looked at this question is: what happens to communities when you take that many people out of it, and what happens to communities when those people come back? Now a number of years ago a good friend of mine whoí' now dead who worked for the Illinois Institute for Juvenile research, Harold Finestone, did a nice piece of research on what happened to Italian and Polish prisoners, of Polish and Italian backgrounds, what happened to them when they came back to their communities. And it was a great study of the ethnic community as well as of the prisoners. The Polish community was much more resistant to the return of the Polish, I mean, their codes are more rigid, they're much less accepting of these people when they came back, they're less willing to help them. The Italian community was, of course they have a great tradition of organized crime among other things, found it easier to fit them into the political structure of the communities and of the cities. And ethnicity does make a difference.

Nowadays, when you have so many communities that have been devastated by the removal of a large proportion of their young men that has an impact on every institution in the society. And then when they come back, having been indoctrinated even more in prison, unless they're very lucky, and those of you who done time can maybe appreciate this better than the rest of us, it, the question of how those people turn themselves around. I'm full of admiration for a couple of you who talked about being in prison or having gotten yourselves straightened out. But as you know, it's not easy. And when you have large communities impacted that way it's even more difficult. So that, we've got a major problem. And if you look at our prison population you know that a very high proportion of community members in some areas are going to have had that prison experience and what's going to happen to them. What's going to happen in terms of voting rights, in terms of participation in other institutions. The very, very difficult question. That's something, you know, maybe your undergraduate research students could do something with.

H:So I should lock em up for a while? (laughter)

Short:Yeah right. You know I bet some of them have brothers, fathers, who have been, been through that experience.

Hagedorn: And students who have been through that experience who are coming back to college.

Short: That's again another interesting thing this grad student, former graduate student of mine who was studying the Hoover Crips, how did he make his contact with the Hoover Crips? Through his students. Undergraduate students at Washington State University and University of Iowa. Now that's real interesting because these are LA gang kids who've been through a whole lot. What did they have going for them? They could play football. They could play football. And so when Steve, who was a football player himself, weighs 250lbs on 6í5î, when he approaches them they feel right at home. Yes sir?

A: I like your situating your discussion of gangs and the post war emergence in the larger phenomena of youth culture. How much do you think the study of youth culture should be involved in gang research? Is that a necessity?

Short: Oh absolutely. I donít think you can understand gangs unless you do understand youth culture. As I was looking for a verse from Sullivan and I think John knows the verse ___ this wonderful book called getting paid. Getting paid is meets even. Youíre getting paid. And hereís what he said, in regard to youth culture, he says in each community the adolescent male appeared to exert a domain of interaction in a limbo separated from household school and workplace. The cultural meaning of crime is constructed in this bonded meleu of interaction out of materials supplied from two sources: the local area in which they spend their time almost totally unsupervised and undirected by adults and the consumerous youth culture promoted in the mass media. Then he goes on to say you know, that the reason that they steal a lot of times is because they want to buy the artifacts of human culture. Eli Anderson talked about it, or at least he writes about it, why it is that people get killed sometimes over a pair of shoes or a jacket. Youíve got to have something to hang onto and if thatís what youíre hanging onto and that gets taken away or threatened then that threatens your whole being. So if you donít understand whatís going on in youth culture I donít think you can understand gangs. I really donít.

Question: And also to keep in view that he's bringing youth culture into the picture, keep in view the relations between the "criminal" kind of activity and the kind that's standardly regarded as legitimate. The borderlines awfully fuzzy.

Short: It's been awfully fuzzy in a lot of ways.'

Hagedorn: You know Jim thatís one of the things I'm not quite sure that we see it the same way I think that's a tremendously important part of what's happening with gangs, when neighborhoods start changing and devastating the stores change, you see all these shoe stores are up there. That's what's going on, gotta buy the shoes. I mean right. Gotta get some money to buy those shoes and stuff. And all that's true. But one of the things that's different about the gangs today, in many of the gangs today is that the that theyíre multi-generational form with a lot of older people deeply involved setting the pace. And while kids are watching TV and relating to them, . the gang itself is no longer just that peer group and so it s important to study those influences and understand what teenage kids do and how they measure status. But there's another set of influences that are immediate and sort of complicated. That are organizing, helping organize those kids lives.

Short: Oh no question about that. I don't want to discount that at all. All I'm saying is that, in fact the youth culture of course is a two way street from the classes, among the classes. Talking about those dance styles they migrated up. Look at the dress styles. Where did the grunge look come from? It didn't come from a mature high school. It came out of the ghetto. The styles of youth now a lot of times are coming out of the ghetto. The popularity of Latin music. You know that has come out of the Hispanic ghettoes. So it goes both ways.

Short: Jerry gave a very nice introduction to the session this morning about the importance of undergraduate research and he made a beautiful point that maybe getting undergraduates involved in research may be the way to break down this artificial barrier between teaching and research.
Hagedorn: We can, if there's more questions, we can go to an informal basis here.

Short: I feel as though Iíve been greatly rewarded by meeting with you people here.

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