The Great American Sectarian Conflict

Lasting for over forty years and claiming more than 15,000 lives, five times more than were killed in Northern Ireland, the sectarian conflict in South Central Los Angeles is the most severe example of the racial struggle that exists in most of the major cities across the United States.  South Central is divided into many different neighborhoods, in which gangs are the most powerful influential force, and these gangs are affiliated either with the Crips or the Bloods.  The violence between the two gangs is largely related to drugs and the territory in which they sell them, however, the root cause of the nations largest gang land, located in the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest state, is the poverty inflicted upon the African Americans that live in South Central.  In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s the economy began to rebound from the Great Depression, largely due to a boom in manufacturing for the war in Europe, and then to supply the United States’ own war machine.  For the first time African Americans were incorporated into the mainstream workplace, after being locked in the south’s agrarian economy since the end of slavery.  African Americans began to migrate to large urban centers where industrial jobs could be found, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as many others.  These jobs gave African Americans a chance at a lower middle class existence, something could not easily achieve in the South.  Los Angeles did not have the Jim Crow laws that plagued the South, but there was rampant racial prejudice.  African Americans were segregated from the White Los Angelenos by restrictive covenants that forbade the sale of land to African Americans outside specific neighborhoods, and these Black neighborhoods are what became South Central Los Angeles.  These geographical divisions were heavily enforced by an essentially all White police force through aggressive intimidation and harassment.  The first generation of African Americans we mostly willing to tolerate this abuse, the places they had come from in the South had been much worse, where African American males were routinely executed.  They were willing to turn the other cheek in the face of this harassment because Los Angeles had given African Americans a level of affluence many of them never could have imagined growing up.  After the war the Detroit automakers took advantage of this labor pool, and built several factories to capitalize on the booming auto industry.  In 1948 the Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer banned the use of restrictive covenants as a tool of racial segregation, African Americans slowly began to move out of South Central, but it wasn’t until the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act that is was made illegal to refuse to rent or sell property based on ethnicity, religion, sex, marital status, physical handicap, or familial status.  However, the following year the California Real Estate Association sposonered California Proposition 14, which overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act with a constitutional amendment.  Resentment was growing in the African American community, mostly with the second generation African Americans who had gown up in Los Angeles, and sparked by the Civil Rights Movement.  Young African Americans, excluded from institutions like the boy scouts, and bound by geographic restrictions, began to form street clubs as social groups.  These clubs would meet at the local street corner or the neighborhood park, there were rivalries between clubs, but they generally not involved in organized criminal behavior.  By now South Central had become economically depressed, the automakers had closed their plants, and African Americans faced racial discrimination in hiring.  On August 11, 1965, in the Watts neighborhood Lee Minikus, a CHPD officer pulled over Marquette Frye, Frye failed a sobriety test and was placed under arest.  Minikus refused to allow Frye’s brother Ronald to drive the car home, and ordered it be impounded.  A struggle ensued that landed Marquette, Ronald and their mother in jail, a crowd had gathered and they retaliated by throwing various objects at the Police.  The police withdrew, but the angry crowd lingered and grew until the mob started lotting and vandalizing the area, this was the beginning of the Watts Riot, a plea to stop the violence by leaders from the African American community fell on deaf ears, and rioting would continue for another four days.  The National Guard was called in, and it would take more than 10,000 troops to quell the violence, 34 people had been killed, 1,032 injured, and 3,952 arrested.  Similar riots would break out in Detroit, Chicago and other similarly economically distressed areas, but what characterized these riots from previous race riots, was the fact that in the past race riots were usually White people rampaging in African American neighborhoods, this time African Americans were vandalizing White owned businesses.  The Watts Riot changed the dynamic of the street clubs, instead of being social groups, they were getting organized, become community and political entities.  The riots that occurred across the country and continued until the end of the decade had a profound effect on the white establishment, the Watts riot was a reaction to that establishment, and now it in turn reacted.  Federal Authorities targeted the leaders of the large African American organizations, while local authorities went after leaders of neighborhood street clubs, and by the end of the decade almost every prominent African American leader  from Martin Luther King and Bunchy Carter to Fred Hampton and Bobby Seale had either been killed, incarcerated or exiled.  The result was the collapse of nearly all these new African American organizations.  In this vacuum of leadership emerged the third generation, born out of the violence and impoverishment.  The police had always considered the street clubs as gangs, but now they were truly making that evolution.  Raymond Washington formed the Crips in 1971, the Crips were different than what came before them, they carried guns and they were a criminal enterprise.  The Crips were powerful enough to force many other smaller gangs to join them, until several gangs joined together to fight the growing influence of the Crips, and they called themselves Bloods, the moniker given to African American soldiers who served in Vietnam.  Since then the two gangs have been at war with each other, grinding up 15,000 lives in the middle of Los Angeles.  Then in the early 1980’s crack cocaine began to flow on to the streets of Los Angeles, and the Crips and Bloods became the largest distributers in South Central.  California implemented  a series of strict laws regarding crack cocaine that led to felony jail sentences, now the authorities had the power to being arresting large numbers of black men, which led to the fourth generation.  The fourth generation were raised in a broken community and in broken homes, fathers and mothers are driven apart either through imprisonment, drug use or gang related fatality.  The number one allure of the gang for young African Americans is group unity, just like the street clubs, the Crips and Bloods are something to be a part of when no one else wants you.  The only economy in South Central is the drug trade, the Crips and the Bloods are the only people who are hiring.  In 1992, in response to the acquittal of four LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King, South Central would burn again, except these riots were not isolated to businesses, and spilled out into other Los Angeles neighborhoods.  The riot was server enough that national attention was brought to South Central, promises were made, a truce was put in place, but the city never invested any money in building up South Central, and the truce collapsed, and over fifteen years later the gang war continues.  South Central is a war zone, slowly simmering as sirens blare all night long, and helicopters roar overhead, it erupted in 1965, and again in 1992 with far more devastating effects.  The greatest form of oppression is when the oppressor breaks down the oppressed to the point that they begin to oppress themselves.  South Central is the Gaza Strip located in the middle of Los Angeles, and just like the Gaza Strip it is a monstrosity entirely created by the people who surround it. and then want to go to war with the people that have been victimized inside.