It was in the context of the Black Power movement that the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panthers in 1966 to unite, educate, and organize Black people with self-determination, self-reliance, and self-defense to lead our people in a proletarian revolutionary struggle against capitalism and imperialism; for the liberation of not just the Black community but of the world. The Black Panthers became the largest and most effective Black liberation organization to come out of the Black Power movement, earning it the FBI’s designation as the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. Repression soon followed. The FBI and local police forces around the country declared war on Black Panthers, which led to the assassination and false imprisonment of key leaders in cadre and the destruction of its many community service programs. Finally, the Panthers had devised tactics to unify our people, subvert our differences, and effectively move us against our collective oppressors, but the government smashed them.
It was in the ashes of the Black Panther Party that the Crips and Bloods were born. In Los Angeles, California, before the advent of the Panthers, tribalism in the form of gangs like the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Businessmen, and Watts Farmers had reincarnated itself amongst our youth in the 1950s and early 60s. Slausons gang leader Bunchy Carter subverted this reactionary tribalism when he joined the Black Panther Party in prison and came home and revolutionized the Slausons, turning them into Black Panthers, which led to the establishment of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles.
Under Bunchy Carter’s leadership, [it] became one of the most active areas of the Black Panther Party in the country, unifying the black youth and elevating them past reactionary tribalism to revolutionary nationalism. In 1960, a conflict led, instigated, and facilitated by the government between the Black Panthers and another power, another Black Power organization called the US organization led to the murder of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, thus neutralizing two major leaders in the Black Panther Party in L.A. Shortly after this, Geronimo Pratt, the only Black Panther qualified to take over the leadership of the party in Los Angeles, was framed for a murder that he did not commit, and after 27 years of incarceration, he was released after the FBI was forced to admit that they had proof all along that he could not have committed those murders he was in prison for. So, in 1969, all three leaders of the L.A. Panthers had been neutralized, and the party itself have been effectively neutralized as well. Without the revolutionary leadership and guidance of the Panthers in our communities, the youth in L.A. reverted back to reactionary tribalism, forming the gangs that we now know as the Crips and Bloods.
The Crips started in 1969 in East L.A. Originally, they formed with a similar mission as that of the Black Panthers, to serve and defend their communities, but without any of the class consciousness, organization structures and revolutionary principles of the Panthers, thereby allowing their early righteous intentions to degenerate into a struggle for power and domination, in essence, becoming a reactionary tribal army mobilizing against their own community. Through sheer aggression, the Crips rapidly expanded from neighborhood to neighborhood, recruiting the youth into its army and making enemies along the way. Neighborhoods who didn’t want to join the Crips and opposed their attacks on the civilians in their communities became rivals to the Crips. However, individually, these rival neighborhoods could not defend themselves against the much larger Crips gangs, so they unified into an anti-Crip alliance called the Bloods.
The Crips raised the flag—The Crips raised the blue flag as a symbol of their tribal army, and the Blood raised the red flag as a symbol of theirs. Each tribe developed into its own customs, traditions, history, and ways of speaking that emphasized its own tribal allegiance. This concludes part one of “From Revolutionary to Gangbanger.” Part two of “From Revolutionary to Gangbanger” will come next. Thank you.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
