As the population of vast areas of philadelphias

As the population of vast areas of Philadelphia’s north side became
exclusively black in the 1960s, gang ghting became increasingly intrara-
cial. In 1973, for example, two North Philadelphia gangs, the Valley gang
and the Norris Street gang, fought over an abandoned area known as the
‘graveyard’ which consisted of ‘3 or 4 acres of smashed brick and twisted
tailpipe’ (Lieber 1975, p. 42). In Los Angeles, con ict-oriented black
gangs began to form in the housing projects in Watts during the 1950s. A
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little farther north in the Florence/Firestone district, which was under-
going racial transition, the Slausons emerged partly in response to attacks
by whites on defenseless blacks. However, white ight led to turf- and
honour-based rivalries between the Slausons and various Watts gangs. A
few years after the formation of the rst Crip gang in 1969, marauding
Crips, belonging to different sets, such as the West Side Crips, Main
Street Crips and Grape Street Watts Crips, began to victimize youth
living on Piru Street in Compton, who then banded together for protec-
tion. The Pirus, Brims, Bishops, Blood Fives, Swans, and other gangs
formed the nucleus of the Blood Nation. By the early 1980s not only were
Crips ghting Bloods, but different Crip sets were also locked in deadly
turf- and honour-based feuds (Valentine 1995, pp. 45
–
50; Quicker and
Batani-Khalfani 1998, pp. 18
–
20).
Extreme racial segregation in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis and
Cleveland has virtually eliminated confrontations between black and
white youth gangs (Dawley 1973; Hagedorn 1988; Decker and Van
Winkle 1996; Huff 1996). In New York, however, black-white gang vio-
lence has persisted in places where black housing projects were built near
white working-class neighbourhoods. In South Brooklyn, for example,
the proximity of the predominantly black Red Hook Houses to Carroll
Gardens, an Italian neighbourhood of brownstones, has been the source
of more than thirty years of interracial youth violence (Barron 1997;
Martin 1997).
The increased violence associated with gang ghting in impoverished
African-American neighbourhoods can be traced to growing joblessness
among youth, especially in cities like Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit
and St. Louis. Another reason why a destructive con ict subculture
began to emerge among African-American youth was that opportunities
for illegal work as bouncers or numbers runners declined. By 1940 Italian
gangsters had seized control of numbers gambling in Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Cleveland and Detroit, and, in 1952, Sam ‘Mooney’
Giancana took over Chicago’s lucrative black-operated policy racket
(Pinderhughes 1987, p. 147; Schatzberg and Kelly 1996, pp. 78, 102). The
failure of black street gangs during the 1950s and 1960s to develop into
criminal organizations, or even to provide major services to white crim-
inal organizations, re ected their inability to in uence the operation of
crime or to launder money because of the political and economic mar-
ginality of urban black communities (Ianni 1974).