Summit of Gangs Takes Aim at Peace

Each day they gathered at the Howard Johnson, urban street warriors seeking peace in the American heartland.

From Chicago came the Gangster Disciples, a regimented squad in three-piece suits and African head wear. Latino veteranos arrived from California sporting T-shirts with portraits of Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata etched in brown ink. The Kansas City Bloods and Crips greeted them all with heads swathed in red and blue bandannas.

In the hotel banquet room, they offered prayers to enslaved ancestors. In the lobby, they drew stares from Midwestern cowboys. In the bar, between turns at the digital dartboard and karaoke machine, they poured pitchers of beer and spoke of loss and regret.

“People think we’re going to come in, do a little partying, do the wild thing. But we’re on a mission here,” said Fred Williams, an ex-Crip from Watts and an organizer of this weekend’s gang conference, formally dubbed the National Urban Peace and Justice Summit.

As this rare meeting of former rivals ends today and the 200 gang leaders, community activists and official observers head back to the 26 cities from which they came, few have any illusions that peace is now firmly in their grasp.

But for three days, at least, some of the baddest kingpins from America’s ghettos and barrios agreed to sit down and talk about life, not death.

“Who speaks for urban America?” asked Carl Upchurch, an Ohio-based civil rights activist who was the event’s national coordinator. “That’s what this is all about.”

At a time when gangsterism is sweeping the country--taking root in at least 1,000 American cities, according to the research of a USC sociologist--it is being closely paralleled by a rising consciousness over the self-destructive costs.

Weary and battle-scarred, many gang veterans have come to realize that the violence, once justified by a vague notion of community control, has careened out of control. Through truce movements, as well as ethnocentric fashion and rap music, they have tried to channel the negative power that has earned them so much notoriety into something that can rebuild the communities they helped destroy.

Sharif Willis, the 41-year-old chief of Minneapolis’ Vice Lords, said he has been working to bring together warring factions since his 1991 release from prison, where he spent six years for killing a man over a dice game.

He stood on the same stage with Wallace (Gator) Bradley of the Gangster Disciples. Bradley is credited with forging a truce between his gang and the rival Vice Lords in Chicago--making the notorious Cabrini Green housing project murder-free ever since a sniper killed a 7-year-old boy last fall.

“The Man has said we are the problem, Grandfather,” said a Chicano leader clutching an eagle feather as he offered a Native American blessing at the summit’s opening session Thursday night. “No, Grandfather, we are part of the solution.”

A few problems did surface, although nothing apparently to justify the fears that seemed to have more than a few Kansas City residents on edge.

Some of the local gangs complained that their turf--selected for its central location--was being exploited by outsiders who did not pay them due respect. This was remedied by letting them take center stage at a hastily called press conference.

Meanwhile, many of the Latino leaders were miffed that the summit seemed to be dominated by the African-American entourage, despite assurances that everything would be equally balanced.

While UCLA professor Armando Torres Morales delivered a keynote speech Friday, several dozen black gang members wandered off, leaving him in a half-empty auditorium. But when newly appointed NAACP executive director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. took the podium a short moment later, the crowd flooded back in.

“That’s no respect,” said Guillermo (Chuco) Velasquez, who heads a substance-abuse center in Michigan.

But in an arena where there historically has not been much to cheer about, any signs of hope were considered cause for celebration.

Gang leaders attended a buffet breakfast hosted by Mayor Emanuel Cleaver II, who invited them to go shopping at the upscale Country Club Plaza. “We want to make you feel welcome,” Cleaver told them.

During visits out in the community, Beto Villalobos, a 60-year-old activist from Whittier who spent 20 years behind bars, met with youths at a juvenile detention center.

Closing his eyes, he listened only to their voices, ignoring the color of their skin. “They’re just kids,” said Villalobos, a pachuco during the zoot suit era.

Chavis, who helped underwrite the event, along with other top church and civil rights leaders, delivered an impassioned plea for peace, predicting that the summit would change the course of American history.

“We are going to come together like this nation has never seen before,” he told the crowd at All Souls Unitarian Church. “Not only are we going to come together, but we are going to stay together. Because the adhesion that brings us together is blood itself.”

The gains have been difficult to measure. In Watts, where a truce between Crips and Bloods last year captured national attention, there has been a dramatic reduction in incidents among gangs at the four housing projects. But 1992 was still a record year for killings in the county, which is home to approximately 1,000 gangs--about 300 of them Crips or Bloods.

The truce efforts in Minneapolis looked so promising that local foundations gave Willis’ crew cellular phones, walkie-talkies and beepers so they could respond if trouble erupted. But last fall, his nephew was arrested for slaying a police officer and authorities have severed all ties with the group.

The problem, as most of the summit participants see it, is that they must struggle to survive under the weight of a system that has tried to doom them to failure.

The rhetoric of the weekend touched on the devastating effects of economic exploitation, police brutality, racial division and substandard education. “Gangs,” said Spike Moss, a Minneapolis activist, “are nothing but a symptom of our oppression.”

But no group was repeatedly singled out for blame more than the media, whom participants accused of reporting about gangs without acknowledging the social context that fuels them.

In fact, most of the discussions and presentations seemed to degenerate into verbal tussles with the press corps, which had come from around the country to record the event. Journalists were invited into meetings, then thrown out. The entire agenda for Saturday was held behind closed doors.

When some of the younger gang members made public statements, the older ones stepped in and told news crews what to quote and what to ignore. During one interview, a young man from Detroit wearing thick gold chains told a reporter that he was a hard-core gang member, that he thought the peace summit was a joke and that he would keep on killing until the day he was locked up.

Suddenly, he walked away.

“I was just lying to you,” he sneered, as if to say such a sensational account would have been invented by the media regardless of his true words.