Kanoya Ali (00:03):
Welcome to License to Operate, a podcast that takes you inside the work happening on Chicago streets to reduce gun violence and transform lives. I'm Kanoya Ali.

Peter Cunningham (00:13):
And I'm Peter Cunningham.

(00:19):
We're here today with Dr. Lance Williams, who is a leading scholar, I guess, of African-American culture in Chicago and has written several books about some of the well-known organizations here in Chicago. One of them, the Almighty Black Peace Stone Nation, and then secondly, a book about African-American Street organization leader David Boxdale, who was active in the sixties during Richard J Dailey's leadership in the city, and it's called King David and Boss Dailey. So we'll get to talking about some of those, but why don't we begin by just asking you, share a little bit about your personal story growing up and then how you came to this work.

Dr. Lance Williams (01:01):
Wow. Okay. Good question. I have a very unique background in the sense that in the community violence intervention space, that is really a new term for old work. There's always been in Chicago and in urban centers across America, it always has been a network of folks at the community level. When I say always, I'm saying going back to the late, probably late fifties, early sixties, when African-Americans began to populate these urban centers in the north at levels that the population is really significant. It's beginning to grow during the second migration. And so from early on, they have always been groups of men and women in communities who have been involved with trying to help reduce some of the challenges that African-Americans have had in urban spaces and violence being one of them

Peter Cunningham (02:05):
Trusted elders. There've always been trusted.

Dr. Lance Williams (02:07):
There's always been that kind of, so I find the title of the podcast really interesting in terms of license to operate, which I think is important because what it does is it speaks to people in the community who have a certain status, who have the license to kind of go into spaces that other people don't have the license to operate or don't have credibility and voice. And a lot of that has to do with the ability to connect with the most marginalized within the community. So even in African-American community, a lot of times we think about the black community as a monolithic, everybody operates on the same level, but there are different levels of, and different groups and different classes. And when it comes to the most marginalized, even the most educated black folks don't have the capacity or ability or ties to communicate with the least educated.

(03:09):
So for me, and I'm saying all of that because I think that's my life experience, not because of anything to do with me, but just a unique set of circumstances that I end up in a space where I kind of transition these different groups. So I'm saying that to say, growing up as a kid, my father was an original member of one of Chicago's first Black Street gangs, which was Vice Lords on the west side. So he was one of the founding members of the Vice Lords. And at the time that he reaches his early twenties is when the field that we know today as community violence intervention is beginning to come into existence. And those outreach workers that had the license to operate back then were called detached workers. So they were individuals who worked for social service agencies who as a detached, they were detached from the office to go to the neighborhoods and the communities to work specifically with young men who,

Peter Cunningham (04:11):
Young men at risk and

Dr. Lance Williams (04:12):
Like that. And formerly being a young man at risk himself, he had license to operate because he was one of them at one time. But in his early twenties, he was a little older than the guys who were active in the community. So

Peter Cunningham (04:25):
Still true today, right?

Dr. Lance Williams (04:26):
Yes.

Peter Cunningham (04:27):
You got a lot of guys in their early twenties who just a little bit out of the scene, but still connected to it. And the guys in 16, 18, 19 still.

Dr. Lance Williams (04:37):
And it is funny to me, working in the space today, how people speak about what's going on in the streets today as if it's any different than it was in the fifties and sixties. Right now, you'll hear guys talk about you can't talk to the shorties, man. The shorties are the ones that are doing all of that, and it's always been like that. That's nothing new.

Peter Cunningham (04:55):
Right, they forget the fact that the gun violence peaked in the seventies, peaked again in the nineties -

Dr. Lance Williams (05:00):
Yes.

Peter Cunningham (05:01):
And all these guys say, man, when we were coming up, we had rules and all this stuff. We're like, oh, Don't know.

Dr. Lance Williams (05:07):
That's not true. There's this nostalgia about, and I guess we have that with every generation of how good it was back in the day.

Peter Cunningham (05:14):
Right.

Dr. Lance Williams (05:14):
The reality is that what's happening today is exactly what happened yesterday year. So for me, the unique space was I grew up with a father who was a gang chief who was doing outreach work, and I would hang out with them in the summertime, but at the same time, I lived in a neighborhood that had a significant gang presence, but I wasn't a street guy. And my father and his friends and guys that I grew up with who were gang members always, it was no question that I would not be a street guy. There was no question.

Peter Cunningham (05:50):
Your father was like, no way.

Dr. Lance Williams (05:51):
Yeah, there's no way. And it was all of his friends and people that I knew. It was like, Hey, this is not the kind of guy you are. So what happened was I ended up on a trajectory of going to school, playing ball and going to school, and that was my thing, but at the same time, I was still close to the streets because of my father and his friends. And so I learned a lot of that, but I didn't have to learn it from personal lived experience. I could see it from you

Peter Cunningham (06:19):
Had to learn it the hard way, right? Learned it at the table.

Dr. Lance Williams (06:21):
Right. And so what that did was it allowed me to go off to school and do my thing and then get that kind of educational grounding that I was able to allow me to move into a professional space to then be a teacher. I started off as a Chicago public school teacher at a high school, but I was, because of my background working or being around the street guys, the guys that were in the school who were gang banging gravitated towards me, and I gravitated towards them because I understood the culture and they knew that I understood, and some of them knew who my father was and knew some of the guys that I grew up with. So that gave me credibility with them. So I had a license to operate, not because I had the personal lived experience, but because of relationships. And then the third part of it was then eventually going back to grad school and getting training as a researcher. And then what I was able to do was connect the skills that I acquired in grad school as pursuing my doctorate, take those skills, connect them to the lived kind of slash experience of the streets, and then having ties to those guys. And that's a unique thing because a lot of people who are academics, they don't have that connection to the streets.

Peter Cunningham (07:46):
You can't walk up to anybody and say, Hey, let me talk to you.

Dr. Lance Williams (07:49):
And even if they did it, they probably wouldn't understand the culture well enough to really interpret it in a way or feel comfortable or have the guys feel comfortable. So when I find myself, a lot of times, especially as I'm getting older now, even the chiefs of these different street organizations, I knew personally their chief because my father was one of the oldest original members. And so some of the names that you mentioned, those are guys who basically were, even though they were leaders in their own, they had guys that were older than them that I knew

Peter Cunningham (08:32):
Was your father generation older than them?

Dr. Lance Williams (08:34):
So my dad was born in '40, 1940. And so most of the guys, now I'm finding some of them are younger than me. So I can talk about guys that they looked up to as guys that I knew and I had relationships with, not as a relationship, but I knew him and my dad would hang out with him. And so I've just taken those unique kind of experiences that I've had over my life and from an academic perspective, tried to then tell the stories of these groups, but focusing on more of their social political kind of involvement as opposed to just the criminal stuff. Because a lot of that stuff everybody knows, people have written about it. Of course, it's popular media in the newspapers. That stuff is, we know what it is. But the part that a lot of people don't know is the fact that a lot of these groups were involved in social and political movements in the community. And I'm interested in telling those stories.

Peter Cunningham (09:42):
And I know you have told them. So this book, the Almighty Black Peace Donation, is about Jeff Fort, right later became the El Rukns, right? Correct.

Dr. Lance Williams (09:51):
That's correct. That's correct. So my co-author, Natalie Moore and myself wrote this book as a way to all of the stuff that I've written attempts to chronicle the history of African-Americans in Chicago through the lens of street organizations. So it, it's really not about the so-called gang, it's about the history of black people in Chicago through the perspective of how the street gangs intersected with this history.

Peter Cunningham (10:23):
So why did they come into, I mean, I'm familiar, obviously, I remember when the Black Panthers were around and they were moving into social services and feeding people

Dr. Lance Williams (10:33):
Yes

Peter Cunningham (10:33):
And educating kids and doing all those things. And I know a little bit enough about the Chicago history. I'm from New York, but I know enough about Chicago history to know that these guys were, as you said, involved in politics. They were involved in social services, they were involved in trying to make city government work for their people.

(10:52):
So is it unique what was happening in Chicago? Are the street organizations in Chicago unique?

Dr. Lance Williams (10:58):
No, I don't think the street organizations in Chicago are unique. I think what's unique about Chicago though is the hyper segregation. That is a little different than you'll find in other northern cities. I think

Peter Cunningham (11:14):
Different from New York or different

Dr. Lance Williams (11:15):
From la. Wait, wait. Well, LA is, I'm thinking more, I don't even another planet compared to La

Peter Cunningham (11:23):
Detroit,

Dr. Lance Williams (11:24):
To me, LA is a sprawling suburb with kind of urban flavor, but it's not urban like New York or Philly or Boston, those older, it's not an industrial industrial, which is a different culture. But yeah, I think Chicago is different from other major cities in that especially a lot of people like to compare Chicago to New York, which is not a fair comparison because New York is more of an international city. Chicago is a Midwestern industrial rust Belt city. It established itself as an industrial spot. It transformed into an economic and other more contemporary kind of city. But in its founding, it was a different type of thing. And then New York has just such a diverse, contemporary ethnic kind of blend going on. And then a proximity in New York too. It's just because it's a smaller space in terms of geographical landmass, it's almost impossible to segregate people because it's just a compact place. Chicago is a broader landmass geographical area, and it's easier for people to get isolated groups of people to get pushed out and segregated. And I think that changes the dynamics of gangs in Chicago.

Peter Cunningham (12:52):
So I mentioned to you that I went to the library to find your book, and I ended up stumbling on this book from 1927 called The Gang

Dr. Lance Williams (12:58):
Yes,

Peter Cunningham (12:59):
Which was a study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago, written in 1927. Talk a little bit about why the topic of gangs is a matter of scholarship.

Dr. Lance Williams (13:11):
So the topic of gangs is a matter of scholarship, especially in urban spaces because the ethnic diversity in urban centers have always revived around the latest European ethnics are always the lowest on the socioeconomic ladder. And what happens is if you are Irish or if you're Italian, or if you're coming as a later European immigrant, you're coming to a place that really has no economic and social mobility opportunities for you in the door. You got to fight, you got to scrap, you got to struggle in order to make your way. And I think a lot of times we forget this, right? We forget, if you think about the Irish and Chicago when they got here, they get here just maybe a couple of decades before African-Americans are beginning to migrate here

Peter Cunningham (14:10):
From the South.

Dr. Lance Williams (14:11):
So they're new to the space, the Irish. And I think this is one of the things that we try to talk about in a book is the relationship between white ethnic groups and African-American community, right? Because it's a lot of tension between the groups. And then I think a lot of people think about that tension just based on race. And it was much more than that. And it was among two groups of people that have more in common than they didn't, but because of their, it broke. Yeah. Yeah,

Peter Cunningham (14:41):
They're all broke.

Dr. Lance Williams (14:43):
You think about Chicago, and you talk about the twenties and thrash, you're talking about these thousand plus gangs. One of those gangs was the Hamburg Gang out of Bridgeport. Yeah, Richard j Dailey, which Richard j Dailey was the president of for 15 years,

Peter Cunningham (15:00):
Right? Right.

Dr. Lance Williams (15:01):
So the point is, Dailey lived in Bridgeport. Bridgeport was Chicago's first ghetto, so to speak. It was the first area that we would consider the hood, so to speak. And it was an Irish hood. It was a tough place to live. And of course, when you're living in those kind of conditions, you got to be tough.

Peter Cunningham (15:25):
You got to fight for it, fight for your peace.

Dr. Lance Williams (15:27):
We don't think about that. We think about African Americans are the only ones that went through that experience. No, the Irish went through that as well. Now, was there racial tension between the two groups? Absolutely. But it was more than racial. It was economic. It was a fight for jobs, because I always say this, and I think I do a better job in the King David Boss daily book in telling this narrative. But when you study what happened with the Irish in the early 20th century when Irish were primarily just before that period, just before they get the opportunity to work in the Stockyards, it was like Irish, no need to apply for anything in this city. You were not, were not needed. One of my favorite quotes from Irish ethnic male that had immigrated to Chicago, he said they were told in Ireland that in America, the streets were paved with gold. And when he got here, he found out that wasn't true, that the streets were not paved with gold. As a matter of fact, they weren't paved at all. And then he found out it was his job to pave them for slave wages.

Peter Cunningham (16:51):
My people, well, four of my grandparents from Ireland.

Dr. Lance Williams (16:55):
And so then ultimately the Irish get an opportunity in Chicago to work in the Stockyards. But as soon as they get those job opportunities, world War I breaks out, and the poor guys, the Irish guys then get shipped off to fight in World War I as soon as they were about to -

Peter Cunningham (17:15):
Getting settled.

Dr. Lance Williams (17:16):
And even though it was a crap job, it was better than the jobs that they had. Right?

Peter Cunningham (17:20):
Yeah. I mean, they probably already had a pretty strong toehold into the political scene by then, right?

Dr. Lance Williams (17:25):
Well, it was coming

Peter Cunningham (17:26):
Ky Dink McKennan and all those guys, it was

Dr. Lance Williams (17:27):
Coming. But that's coming. That's coming. That wasn't at that point. That comes towards, yeah, I guess around the time of World War I. But they lost a lot of juice, political juice because the guys got sent off and the mayor was a Republican, and they were Democrats, big Bill. So it was a lot of tension between them. But when they come back home from the, only to find out that African-Americans had been recruited from the south to take their jobs and their

Peter Cunningham (17:56):
Stock yards and places like that.

Dr. Lance Williams (17:58):
So most people, when you think about it, you're like, yeah, that's fucked up. And you come back, you've sacrificed your life, you've gone off to war, and you come back. And

Peter Cunningham (18:08):
I read the Warmth of Other Sons, that's all about the black migration up and how after World War I, they came back and they said, we'll take our jobs back now.

Dr. Lance Williams (18:18):
Yeah, yeah. And you had African-Americans coming that were coming back from the war as well.

Peter Cunningham (18:25):
So the point about the gangs is that it's a reflection of something that's going on in the culture. Talk a little bit about that. What do the gangs really mean to the black culture in Chicago?

Dr. Lance Williams (18:35):
What gangs mean? And Thrasher talks about it as well, they don't just mean this for the black community. They mean the same thing for any community that's got, here is my definition of a gang, even though I'm not saying this is the definitions I do versus organized crime. So organized crime uses relationships with individuals who are involved in crime, use their relationships with legitimate business to further their criminal activity. So they could be organized, crime might be involved in gambling or prostitution, or they may have a robbery theft ring, but they somehow have facilitated some relationship with a legitimate business like the police or some elected officials or some other forms of banking or what have you, that allows them to do their launder, their money and convert and in a legitimate way. And gangs are criminal, could be criminal groups that are involved in crime without relationships with mainstream businesses or what have you. So their crime is kind of petty and it's not organized. But what happens is, and this is all ethnic groups, as the gang becomes a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit, it matures, right? From a teen group of guys just hanging out, kicking it on a block,

Peter Cunningham (20:06):
Looking for a buck or two,

Dr. Lance Williams (20:08):
Then they realize, Hey, we can use our unity in a way maybe to extort.

Peter Cunningham (20:12):
And so this is what happened in the sixties and seventies, what happened in the, and then Larry Hoover, right? I mean, these

Dr. Lance Williams (20:17):
Guys kind

Peter Cunningham (20:18):
Of united hundreds of

Dr. Lance Williams (20:20):
Little, but all groups do that. Daley did it with the Hamburg Gang, and it's usually not the gangs that decide what to do is people who look at the gang as an opportunity to exploit. So with the Irish and the Hamburgs. So what happened with them is that they some tough kids in Bridgeport hanging out causing problems, and the older guys in the neighborhood are like, Hey, look, these are some tough kids. And we probably, if we organized them, we could use them to further our interests. So what they started doing in the 11th Ward, you talked about guys like Big Bill McDonough, Hugh, and these were tough guys that elected officials. They started using these young gang bangers daily and his boys during election day to protect their ballot boxes because people would steal the box and then that means that you're losing some votes, or what would happen if you could take these same guys and go to another precinct and steal their boxes, then you could win an election.

(21:27):
And so they were using these guys, these gang guys, these little gang teenagers to do these petty little stunts during election, but that would allow them to win the automatic or committeemen or what have you. And eventually Daley and Tommy Doyle, Tommy Doyle was a Hamburg member, was like, Hmm, shit, if we're doing this for these guys, we could do it for ourselves. And that's what they started doing. And Tommy Doyle was the first Hamburg member who used the organization to win automatic race, which he broke the tradition because before him it was whoever the incumbent was in the 11th Ward, that's who everybody gets behind. And he took his experience with the Hamburgs working for the 11th Ward Democratic Party, and said, we're going to flip the script and we're going to do this for Hamburg. And then he was able to do that and become the A. They got control of the Democratic Party.

Peter Cunningham (22:28):
Yes. Now, did the black gangs Also do that on the south side and the west Side?

Dr. Lance Williams (22:33):
Well, they attempted to do it, but the problem was,

Peter Cunningham (22:35):
and this is in probably the seventies, right?

Dr. Lance Williams (22:37):
Right.

Peter Cunningham (22:37):
Late sixties, maybe

Dr. Lance Williams (22:39):
Daley's move with the Hamburgs that happens in the early 1900s.

Peter Cunningham (22:43):
Yeah, yeah, I understand that.

Dr. Lance Williams (22:44):
Yeah. Yeah. So what happens with, see the difference between black gangs, at that time, there were no Black Street gangs like Thrasher, all of these are white ethnic groups. The reason that you didn't have major Black Street gangs until the late 1950s in Chicago, so that's almost a 40 year difference, is because you had another group of tough black men in the neighborhoods called Policy Kings.

Peter Cunningham (23:19):
And

Dr. Lance Williams (23:20):
These dudes were gangsters, but they were businessmen as well. And so it

Peter Cunningham (23:27):
Was more like organized crime. They

Dr. Lance Williams (23:28):
Were organized crime,

Peter Cunningham (23:29):
Yes

Dr. Lance Williams (23:30):
Where because it was organized crime left no space for gangs because these were the men, not just the men, but the strong men in the community who were businessmen slash gangsters.

Peter Cunningham (23:46):
And they didn't want street noise going on.

Dr. Lance Williams (23:48):
They didn't tolerate that.

Kanoya Ali (23:49):
Policy Kings in New York took that on what they call that, the

Dr. Lance Williams (23:55):
Numbers.

Kanoya Ali (23:55):
The numbers,

Dr. Lance Williams (23:56):
Numbers, that's the same thing. Same thing,

Kanoya Ali (23:57):
Same thing. But it started in Chicago originally.

Dr. Lance Williams (24:00):
It started in Chicago originally,

Kanoya Ali (24:01):
And then they basically flooded through New York. So as far as the Policy Kings though, can you speak to that, some of the major figures in the

Dr. Lance Williams (24:09):
Policy, then

Kanoya Ali (24:10):
What happened to them?

Dr. Lance Williams (24:11):
Yeah, so what happened with them, the Jones Brothers were probably the most prominent policy kings, but they much mouth was the first one In the 1990. He had a policy wheel down on 35th, right around 35th and state. So from the early 19 hundreds, all the way through 1948, they controlled the streets, policy kings running these numbers, and they were generating massive wealth, and they were millionaires.

Peter Cunningham (24:41):
And to be clear, policy king is like the lottery. It's like the lottery, like a locally controlled

Dr. Lance Williams (24:46):
Lottery. So it's important to keep this in mind because these guys, they were using the wealth that they were generating from policy to also support political campaigns. So they had the support of elected officials. They were donating the campaigns, they were organized, it was organized crime. But what happened to them was, if you recall, during this time, you also had the Italian and Irish and Jewish gangs organized crime. So that's Al Capone. And all of those guys, the policy Kings and Al Capone were contemporaries. They contemporaries, and they had a gentleman's agreement that Italian and Irish gangs, but primarily the Italian gangs were controlling the alcohol and bootlegging. But when prohibition ended in the twenties, it messed their money up. They weren't getting any money. So what they had to do was now they're looking at the alternative money, underground money, and they see, okay, we had an understanding with the black policy kings that they run numbers and we do alcohol, but we don't have alcohol anymore.

(26:03):
So guess what? We getting ready to take this numbers thing off. And they went to war, and they killed off all of the policy kings. They won the war. The last policy king was Teddy Rowe, who was killed in '48. And this is interesting history to know, because right as the last black policy king, and remember, this is 40 years of policy kings, and it was about 20 or 30 of them that controlled the whole city. The last one is killed in '51, and after the policy kings are killed, what emerges right after that? Black Street gangs, black street gangs, that's when the Vice lords, my father and them, my father's born in '40, so what, '58? He's what?

Peter Cunningham (26:46):
17, 17,

Dr. Lance Williams (26:46):
18 Years old. You know what I mean?

Peter Cunningham (26:49):
Ready to roll.

Dr. Lance Williams (26:50):
Yeah. But it's nobody there anymore to do what?

Peter Cunningham (26:53):
No elders. The elders are all gone.

Dr. Lance Williams (26:55):
They're all gone. So now they kind of, and they don't know what to do, so they make a mess. And this is when we get the Black street game, we get the lower stones and Disciples really were nothing but the next generation of policy kings, but not with that infrastructure in place to not with that business, to show them how you could, drugs came along. Yeah, drugs came along, but they were, and that was one of the big fights between the policy kings and the Italians that they were fighting to stop the heroin from coming in the community. The policy kings were, they were like, we are against this. We are not with this. But once they were killed off, it was nobody there to really stop the movement of heroin into the community. But so what I'm saying is the history, understanding the history of chronological history, then it explains, so the scholarship is

Peter Cunningham (27:47):
Important. Yeah, it's very important.

Dr. Lance Williams (27:49):
It's very important. But you got to understand the culture and to make the history make sense, right?

Kanoya Ali (27:55):
So even when you just, I talk to you all day. So when you tie in, when LSD, the Lord Stones Disciples did get federal grant monies when they tried to go on a political route, and then there was some obstacles put in their way. Can you speak to that?

Dr. Lance Williams (28:13):
Yeah. So that happens a little. So remember, the Vice Lords are the first major Black Street gang, and their origins go back to the late fifties, 58 or so, 57, 58.

Peter Cunningham (28:30):
You say that was your dad? Yeah.

Dr. Lance Williams (28:31):
Yeah. Because remember, black people primarily lived in two areas of the city at that time. They lived in the area that we call the Near West Side. Now we called it back in the day, juke Town. It was black people lived in that area before they started moving west, going towards North Lawndale and places like that. On the south side, of course, we lived in Bronzeville 1948, restrictive covenant ends. So that opens up the areas and African Americans could start not moving, but they're basically being pushed out of Bronzeville into Woodlawn and into Inglewood, Inglewood, and even

Peter Cunningham (29:12):
All the way even further.

Dr. Lance Williams (29:14):
But Inglewood and Woodlawn are the two first neighborhoods outside of Bronzeville that black people are. And of course, that's where the disciples originate in Inglewood and the Stones originate and Woodlawn. And so they come a little later, and when I say a little later, they come a little bit after the Vice Lords. But eventually what happens is by the early sixties, all three groups are in their clear formation. So by 19 63, 64, there's a such thing as Vice Lords, conservative, vice lords. There's a such thing as the disciples. They were Devil's disciples in their early formation, but they dropped the devils. So they just disciples Inglewood. And the Black Stone Rangers early sixties, what kicks in the mid sixties, the civil rights movement starts a little earlier in the South, but in the north, black power movements, early sixties, mean sixties.

Kanoya Ali (30:10):
Are you talking about after Martin Luther King, after Malcolm X, you

Dr. Lance Williams (30:14):
Got a

Kanoya Ali (30:14):
Surge of people.

Dr. Lance Williams (30:16):
And then what happens? The Black Street gang, lower Stones and disciples, that's a popular movement. They get swept up in that and they become parts of those movements.

Kanoya Ali (30:27):
I heard one of the older ones saying that they started wearing tams to match the Black Panthers. That's right. Because they had started, they were like, okay, we are going to put that in effect with

Dr. Lance Williams (30:39):
Us. And what happened was Black Panthers were the black tams, but the Panthers were trying to politicize and organize all street organizations and bring them in. But all of the street organizations, you have to keep in mind, they were older than the Panthers. It was only so far the Panthers could go with the street organizations because they were a little younger. And it was, you know how it is among black males, we not getting ready to let some That's

Kanoya Ali (31:06):
Love, homie. That's my

Dr. Lance Williams (31:07):
Love, homie, come and tell me how to move

Kanoya Ali (31:11):
Right

Dr. Lance Williams (31:12):
Now. I support what you're saying. That makes sense. But we not getting ready to be Black Panthers. So what they did was they changed the colors of the tams. The Lords took gold, the stones took red and disciples changed from black to blue to distinguish themselves. We with this, but we still who we are, we got

Peter Cunningham (31:36):
Our own thing. Now jump a little bit ahead. I know in the seventies with Jeff Ford and Larry Hoover, they became big time leaders, and of course they both got convicted and sent to jail. And we should talk about Larry in a minute. Just jump ahead for what happened in the eighties, nineties to today, I want to talk about today really, and the conditions that we're facing today, and whether today's gangs are part of that semi political or cultural or community cultural world, to what extent does that still exist or is it different today?

Dr. Lance Williams (32:13):
So it's interesting because although there are remnants of the, I would call it iteration, the last formation that we are familiar with in terms of how street gang were organized. So when we go back to Jeff Ford and Larry Hoover, and especially the Jeff Fort, Larry Hoover areas with the Gangster Disciples and the Stones and Vice Lords to a certain degree, but definitely the Gangster Disciples and the Stones had a different formation from other black gangs to the point where they were organized vertically, which meant that they had an ultimate leader, a chairman, or depending on what phase of the organization, we know that it was clear Larry was the head, the chairman of the gds. It was clear that Jeff was the chief of the Stones after bull made his transition and they became L rutins in that type of thing. The point that I'm trying to make is the difference between yesteryear and today is how the organization is organized.

(33:25):
Back then it was organized top down. Today it's horizontal. It's not a top down. It's not that the organization is completely gone, it's just organized differently. And it's almost like it's organized in a way to respond to what happened to the vertical organization. So what happened in the nineties, late eighties, early nineties, because it was vertically organized, these street gangs, the feds were able to come in and target the leaders, cut off and take 'em off and cut off the head, cut off the head. And what that did was a lot of people say, oh, you cut off the head and the body dies. The body didn't die. It just organized itself differently. What it instinctively learned as an organization is, oh, it doesn't work in the best interest of our organization to have a head and to have top lever leaders. This is not something that I'm saying that the organization did consciously. This is just a way bodies learned to move and operate, to exist, to adapt,

Kanoya Ali (34:29):
Adapt to what was happening at different

Dr. Lance Williams (34:32):
Circumstances, to adversity. So if your organization then becomes vulnerable to having this structure, then what it does is it takes on another formation. So today we have hundreds of

Peter Cunningham (34:42):
Different cliques and crews is the way are often described,

Dr. Lance Williams (34:46):
But you still have individuals who will identify as being a stone. You still have individuals that identify as being gd, bds and vice lords, but how they move is different than before. And it doesn't mean that it ever will not come back to a vertical organization. It probably will at a certain, but when the conditions call for that, it'll reemerge that way.

Peter Cunningham (35:13):
Now you've written a third book more about how young men and the stress and the strain and sort of the impulse thing. Talk a little bit about what that is about because I think that speaks a lot more to the work we're doing today. I mean, as you know, we're all involved in community violence intervention given young guys trauma treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy and impulse control. And just dealing with that, I don't know.

Dr. Lance Williams (35:39):
So what's happening now is, although we still have these formations of so-called street gangs and these factions and cliques and so on and so forth, they don't engage in violence the way they did back in the day with the hierarchy. Back in the day, the groups operated around territory and because they're dealing with lower level street economy, so we would fight over blocks and territories and stuff like that. So now that doesn't exist. And you got these groups that are working horizontally, the strain of the economics has gotten worse. So I always say this even as bad as bad, and I don't want to want anybody to misunderstand what I'm saying about the crack cocaine era, right? But the reality is this, during that era, there were a lot of young brothers who were marginalized out of school who could still get a little money in their pocket that would knock off the edge of being broke, even if you had $5 to $10 at the end of the day. But now that infrastructure, that economy is gone. It's like, and that's been since the nineties, going mid nineties or so, that

Kanoya Ali (36:59):
Dog eat dog,

Dr. Lance Williams (37:00):
Yes.

Kanoya Ali (37:01):
Like man, I'm going to eat

Dr. Lance Williams (37:02):
Regardless. So now what happens is you got to eat off of each other and you have to, it's a lot of robbery and taking and backdooring and stuff around. So that part of the stress. And then economically, we had some other serious problems in the black community. We had some really bad public policies that also brought another level of tension and stress. We had the CHA stuff transformation. We had the CPS ran 22 that did a lot to destabilize the community. And all of this stuff is going on at the same time. We get to the nineties. So you get the schools that are no longer a pathway, you get no housing and not just no housing. But then what happens is people that get displaced from public housing, they get picked up and they get thrown into a neighborhood that was already the neighborhoods that we are working in and out in the hundreds and stuff.

(37:57):
They just get thrown into South Shore, get thrown into Auburn Gresham. I remember in the late nineties, one of the areas I was working over in the eight tray stones and in that area. So historically, that area was always a stone area. And I remember almost to the day when they made a decision about public housing in Bronzeville. This was a neighborhood we called it, what do we call it? Dang, I can't even think of the name. But it was Madden Park. Can't think of the street name for it right now. But though that neighborhood, which were black disciples, their housing got demolished and they took them, their families, and they put them in Auburn Gresham,

Peter Cunningham (38:42):
Not Oakland.

Dr. Lance Williams (38:43):
Yeah, the neighborhood was Oakland.

Peter Cunningham (38:45):
Yeah, keep going. I'm

Dr. Lance Williams (38:46):
Sorry. The neighborhood was Oakland where the housing development was. But they picked that the families up and placed them in Auburn Gresham, and they put them on a block that separated the GDS from the stones. So now you got the stones on one side, the GDS on the other side, and then you put a group of BDS right in the middle of them. And man, you asking for war, it was immediate. And guess who won the bds? Because they coming. They were. So just think about it. Somebody, it's one thing you a stone, this your neighborhood, you from around here, you know the lay of the land. You don't really feel that threat. You feel like bds, what they going to do over here? And then on the other side of the gds, that was their neighborhood they felt. But the BDS were the ones that felt the what had to proof. And they came in and I'm talking about 60 or seven people in just within a block or two. And that one summer got killed and it's still kind of going on to this day. So those things, so the money is dried up, the housing is dried up, the kids can't go to school. And then that's what we dealing, we dealing with the fallout from that. Now that stuff hasn't gone away yet.

Peter Cunningham (40:11):
Are you hopeful about the CVI work that's going on in the city right now?

Dr. Lance Williams (40:16):
To be honest with you, I'm concerned about it because the problem we know for a fact, people from the research community that's really been looking at this can literally quantify, I don't even know if the term quantify is the right term, but they can basically tell us how much this violence is causing the city or costing the city.

Peter Cunningham (40:48):
Yeah, I know. I'm familiar with the numbers.

Dr. Lance Williams (40:49):
It's in the billions. Oh yeah, it's in the billions. So if you got a problem that is a billion dollar problem, but you only have what, a hundred, few hundred million or something,

Peter Cunningham (41:01):
It's try and solve,

Dr. Lance Williams (41:02):
Even if it's a billion problem.

Kanoya Ali (41:04):
But is it a few hundred million they used or something?

Peter Cunningham (41:07):
When you take all the public and private money together, the CVI community is now starting to spend 150 to 200 million a year. I mean, flip program alone is 30 million, CRED is 35 million. That's 65 million right there.

Dr. Lance Williams (41:23):
The ARPA money helped a lot.

Peter Cunningham (41:24):
The ARPA money helped a lot,

Dr. Lance Williams (41:26):
But that ARPA money is gone now.

Peter Cunningham (41:27):
That's gone. One of the reasons we're doing this here. We got to keep on showing people what the positive impact it's having. As you know, gun violence has went down about 40% this

Dr. Lance Williams (41:37):
Year.

Peter Cunningham (41:37):
To what do you attribute that

Dr. Lance Williams (41:39):
The ARPA money is helping getting more people involved and more groups, the traditional groups, the CREDS, the ucans, the everybody else, the activists, all of them. They're getting additional help and support from this ARPA money. So yeah, it is gone down. But then also you have to take into consideration, yes, the numbers are going down, but also the communities are being heavily depopulated. So it's not like a lot of times we look at the

Peter Cunningham (42:09):
40% that has been happening since 1980.

Dr. Lance Williams (42:11):
Yeah,

Peter Cunningham (42:12):
The black community is down about 400,000

Dr. Lance Williams (42:15):
More.

Peter Cunningham (42:16):
That's the size of the entire city of Cleveland.

Dr. Lance Williams (42:18):
Yes,

Peter Cunningham (42:18):
Just the black community

Dr. Lance Williams (42:19):
Down. So if over a 10 year period I have a lot less people in and yeah, the numbers going to go down because, and I think to me personally, and I've always said this, I think that's been the city strategy the whole time. Like, Hey, look, we just got to wait this thing out. We just got to, because like you said, think about this. During the time of the disciples and Inglewood, when David and Larry and those guys were on the streets in Inglewood, it's a hundred thousand black people that lived in Inglewood. 100,000. How many now?

Peter Cunningham (42:54):
Yeah, maybe 50.

Dr. Lance Williams (42:55):
No.

Peter Cunningham (42:56):
Oh, only 30, maybe 20. Oh really? No kidding. That small.

Dr. Lance Williams (43:00):
It's going into the tens.

Peter Cunningham (43:02):
And yet we had over eight a hundred homicides in 2021 and 4,400 shootings. So those Are the highest numbers since the 1990s.

Dr. Lance Williams (43:10):
Yes. The numbers really are not, they're going down, but it's not just the community is being depopulated. And I bet you if you go out to Harvey and Markham and the south suburbs, the numbers going way up. It's just they don't have the capacity to count the numbers out there.

Kanoya Ali (43:30):
Do you see, because I know you work strongly with some of the guys doing the CVI work, do you see there's a different and change amongst the individuals in the different groups where you see a light at the end of the tunnel?

Dr. Lance Williams (43:47):
The biggest criticism of Dr. Lance is that he too negative. I'm just based on what I see, I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Kanoya Ali (43:59):
I respect, I know sometimes you have a difference of opinion, but I respect your opinion. We all kind of get not too big headed about the work that's being done. There's so much that's being done. We just happier that less lives are being lost for whatever reason. We just like, man, if this is curving, some of the violence, whatever it may be, we down with that. And I know you're saying based on the studies and stepping behind the scenes, what may cause it may not be what we think it is. But my question is, if it was up to you, what are some of the things that you would do to help curb some of the gun violence in Chicago?

Dr. Lance Williams (44:43):
No, I think this, and I agree with you that any help that we are getting, especially the young guys is good and lives are being changed. There's no question about that. But in terms of scaling, that's where we are lacking. And so when you ask me what I would do, you got to scale up. The investment in the community and in these groups is doing the work. You cannot expect CRED or activist or MF or anybody that's doing the work to really have an impact without getting more money. They need more resource. All of the organizations need more. And the city's got it too. It's just deciding, Hey, we are not spending money on that.

Kanoya Ali (45:33):
That's all for this episode of License to Operate. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and share this episode with your friends and family.

Peter Cunningham (45:42):
This podcast is a co-production of The Chi Podcast and Cunningham Creative. Until next time, I'm Peter Cunningham.

Kanoya Ali (45:49):
And I'm Kanoya Ali.