Gangs: 1940-1990

3.d

1940s-1990s: Growth and Change in the Post-War Period

With rising Latino immigration during the period of 1950s and 1960s, and a growing population of Black Americans migrating from the American South, gangs resurfaced in cities such as New York. Although during the 1940s, New York spent huge sums on building large, urban high-rise public housing, whereas much of the accommodations built during the 1950s and 1960s were low-rise and in outlying areas, which helped settle much of the gang-on-gang violence as compared to other American cities experienced at the time. Despite being spared gang warfare, gangs formed among the youth of the Latino and black populations in New York. Gangs were responsible for 11 murders in Manhattan in 1957.

During the period of 1960s, almost two-thirds of the gang members belonged to the Black community, or they were Puerto Rican. With the huge influx of the black population in the Northern American cities, the Mid-western gangs resurfaced. During the Great Migration period, the 1910s and 1920s, over one million blacks to these cities resulted in large, extremely poor populations, fostering an environment conducive to gang formation. The large and rapid migration resulted in a huge population of black youth, which in turn formed a pool of potential gang members. The athletic groups were also actively involved in the fights, which fueled the formation of gangs.

One last factor in understanding the gang formation was the 1919 Chicago race riot, in which white youth gangs terrorized the black community, prompting black youth to form groups for self-protection. However, the formation of the Mid-western gangs from the black community did not begin until after WWII, coinciding with the Second Great Migration. Black gangs such as the Black P-Stones, Devil's Disciples, and the Vice Lords were organized in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. By the late 1960s, the public housing construction in Chicago had allowed gangs to consolidate their power in black neighborhoods, and the Vice Lords, P-Stones, and Gangster Disciples dominated the area's drug trade.

By the 1970s, these and other gangs had grown into "super gangs" with more than 1,000 members each. Gangs in the American West expanded dramatically during and after the 1940s as a result of three factors: increased Mexican immigration, the Sleepy Lagoon murder, and the Zoot Suit Riots. The latter two events served to unite the Mexican immigrant population and turned many young people into gang members, giving rise to the so-called Cholo. From the 1940s to the 1960s, black gangs emerged as a criminal force in Los Angeles, owing largely to social exclusion and segregation. White youths' racial anti-black violence directly contributed to black youths forming self-protection societies that evolved into black gangs by the late 1960s.

As the war on crime superseded the war on poverty, the idealism of the 1960s social movements gave way to notions of "revolutionary suicide" as police violence against Black Panthers and other radicals took its toll. Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evans, and Martin Luther King Jr. had all been assassinated. Bell hooks wrote, "After the slaughter of radical black men, the emotional devastation of soul murder, and actual murder, many black people became cynical about freedom." As Cornel West put it, "nihilism" spread after the 1960s. By the early 1970s, Los Angeles' black gangs had formed territorial-based groups, and two federations of black gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, had emerged.

The practice of forming federated alliances of local street gangs began in the 1960s and spread rapidly during the period of 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1970s, two gang alliances emerged from the Illinois prison system: the Folk Nation and People Nation alliances. These two alliances included a mix of white, black, and Hispanic gangs. They claimed the territory in and around Midwestern cities and Chicago. The Latin Kings, a Chicago-based Latino gang, were another of these federated alliances. In the West, nearly every major city in California reported gang activity by the mid-1970s, and it was frequently associated with gangs affiliated with the Bloods or Crips.