I saw the 70's usher in the era of blackploitation flicks such as Superfly, The Mack, Come Back, Charleston Blue, and even slickly packaged Hollywood gangster movies like The Godfather. This was also an era that bred hustlers-turned-authors IceBerg Slim and Donald Goines, and some of the most ruthless true-life gangsters this country has ever seen.

In my hometown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, vicious black street gangs seemingly ruled every inch of the black community, and it was a dangerous time to be a young black teenager living in the treacherous terrain of the urban wilds. My parents did all they could to keep my two older brothers and me from being drafted into the notorious "12th & Oxford Street Gang," one of the largest, fiercest black youth gangs in the history of Philadelphia.

The Oxford Street gang had well over 500 members, divided into gradations and ranks, according to age. There were the "Pee Wees," "The Midgets," "The Juniors," and "The Seniors," and "The Old Heads." There was also 8th & Oxford, 15 & Oxford, and "Uptown Oxford Street," which was 20th Street, and beyond. These divisions boosted the ranks into thousands.

When one of my older brothers was "drafted" into the gang (a term Philly gangs borrowed from the US. military during the '60s and '70s that saw countless young black boys being "drafted" and sent over to Vietnam) my parents packed up and moved out of the neighborhood.

My family moved into a beautiful three-story rowhouse with storm windows, a pretty screendoor, crisp white walls, hardoakwood floors, and shiny brown kitchen cabinets. Our house was newly renovated and located in a section of the city called "Lower Kensington," a quiet, clean community of lower-working-class Irish Catholics.

The long, narrow streets snaked alongside a battery of medieval-like structures amid a booming industrial area teeming with large brick factories built around the turn of the last century.

The factories produced a plethora of products from yarn, steel, paper, ink, clothing, furniture, vitamins, fish and poultry, lamps, refrigerators, cigars, Stetson hats, among others. Plumes of black smoke rose from these factories performed haunting ghost dances above the rooftops. The air was permanently tinged with a sweet, exotic mixture that mingled with the rich, spicy aroma wafting from the nearby beer brewery.

My brothers andsisters were convinced that our parents had gone mad and had endangered all of our lives by moving into this spooky, lily-white neighborhood on the edge of tall buildings and train tracks.

The year was 1968. An uglier, nastier period of segregated America. Of black revolt, race riots, anti-Vietnam war protests, the assassination of a beloved President of the United States and a motley brood of civil rights workers, including Martin Luther King. In the deep South, black folks were being clubbed by police and bitten by police dogs and sprayed with powerful water hoses. Didn't my parents follow the news? Hadn't they heard about the three young civil rights activists from CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) found shot to death inside their car, forced off the side of the road? My parents explained to us that those murders occurred in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not in our city, Philly, though it made no difference to us kids. We heard words like "Freedom Ride," "agitators," "meddlers," spat from tight white lips on television. We saw Governor George Wallace standing in front of some school, saying, "Segregation now. Segregation forever."

Then why had my parents moved into a white neighborhood?

We waited breathlessly for the white-hooded night riders of the Ku Klux Klan to burn their cross on our front stoop, and the bone-chilling racial epithets of "Niggers go home" followed by the sound of our window shattering and the explosion of a Molotov cocktail in our brand new living room as the entire house erupted in flames-but it never came.

To our chagrin and relief, our polite white neighbors floated past us wordlessly, like gentle-eyed white ghosts examining every inch of these strange black aliens who'd just dropped in on them from the moon. But it wasn't a look of contempt or racial hatred and disdain, but a mixture of awe and fascination. They did not make us feel as if our presence was an encroachment upon their sovereign territory, an unheralded incursion onto sacred ground.

Cute white girls giggled and pointed. But my parents warned me and my brothers not to approach them or talk to them. "Down South Emmitt Till was lynched for just whistling at a white woman," my mama said seriously. We looked at her. Who? None of us kids-black or white-would've spoken to each other anyway. Because we were afraid of our parents.

We soon found out that there was a small Irish gang in the new neighborhood, who sometimes clashed with the rival white gangs in the surrounding communities of Fishtown, Bridesburg, Frankfort, Port Richmond, and K & A, (Kensington and Allegheny), the largest white gang in the city at that time.

Tommy Norton was the leader of the local Irish gang, a soft-spoken kid with a thick, muscular build, pitch black, slicked-back hair that matched his dark, hawk-like eyes. He commanded a crew of over thirty kids that included the Farrell brothers, Tommy, Joey, and Mikey; Crazy Franny Cockery; Billy; Ickey; Big Albert Dougherty; and Monk, a burly, ruthless kid with long, blond hair and menacing, simian features.

We would later play each other in the most competitive football games.

No matter where you lived, gang contact was unavoidable. During this time, the 12th & Oxford Street gang became the subject of a film entitled, In the Jungle, a documentary that depicted the daily brutality and lifestyle of several local black gangs and members of Oxford Street. No script or acting coach was needed to convince the viewers that the shootings and stabbings and deadly turfbattles were as normal a routine as little league baseball games in safe white neighborhoods.

I attended Penn Treaty Junior High School, a predominantly white school deep in the heart of Fishtown. Almost fifteen years after the Brown vs. The Board of Education decision, the city of Philadelphia was just getting around to desegregating the schools. The city bused black kids out of their communities, which made none of the white adults happy. Fishtowu was one of the most racist areas in the city, and almost every day we had to fight our way through a gauntlet of angry white boys and adults who waited for us after school.

Since the Oxford Street gang ran my junior high school, I had no choice but to fall in to avoid being savagely beaten or murdered by the racist white Fishtown gang and rival black gangs.

Oxford Street not only protected me, but also gave me a sense of dignity and pride and respect. There was an adrenaline rush in being part of a crew of roughnecks well known for being the biggest and toughest set in gangdom. They carried themselves like field marshals, shrewd generals, and fearless warriors. They even had a unique sense of style. White cool caps twisted to one side identified us as members of Oxford Street. (Other gangs wore different color caps.) We wore gray khakis with our pants legs rolled up over white hightop converse sneakers or white buck, rubber soled shoes. We flipped up the collars of our jackets. The more fashionable gang members wore silk and wool pants, embroidered knit sweaters, and leather or suede jackets.

Pretty black girls in junior high school naturally gravitated towards me because I rolled with a baaad ass crew. That meant that I had to portray a tough guy image and represent the gang 2417, no matter where I was. I remember the first time I was arrested and sent to a juvenile faciliry for spray painting the walls of my school with my corner boys' names. I was "Mr. Boo" and my partner was "Big Rob." School security handed us right over to the Philadelphia police. Rob had spent time inseveral juvenile joints and was not at allintimidated or frightened.

He told me that if any sucker gritted on me (a gang term for another gang member staring too hard in an attempt intimidate you), to grit back harder. Young cats would walk boldly up to you, stare right into your eyes, and say, "Where you from, boy?" not a question as much as a challenge.

"You walk right over to him and say, 'pussy, who you grittin' on! Give me a fair one!"' (Translation: Bitch, why are you looking at me like that? You wanna see me? You wanna rumble? Then don't be grittin' on me like that.) My buddy Rob told me that if anyone asked me what gang I was from, to say loudly, "I'm from 12th & Oxford Street! O.X.!"

But no one challenged me when I went through the Philadelphia Youth Study Center because the reputation of guys I grew up with preceded them. Guyslike Frank and Pep, Fats, Husky, Point, Cricket, Big Puzzle, Big and little Frog, Mad Dog, Solo, Nackie, Tiny, Tommy "Little Beaver" Sykes, Big Beaver, Cochise, Clack, Cartoon, Ant Man, Martin, Will Kill, Apple, Charlie Brown, Lefty, Charlie, Machine Gun Mike, Butchie, Big Chinaman and Little Chinaman, and the leader of our gang, Dirk Leach, among others dead or alive or too numerous to mention.

After school let out in the afternoon, I hung out with my boys in the old neighborhood. That's when I started drinking cheap Thunderbird and Tiger Rose wine, which made me violent and crazy whenever I drank too much. I'd gotten a taste of the gang life, and my strict disciplinarian parents had no idea what I was involved with in the streets.

Being from a gang meant that I was forced to show a disinterest in an academic pursuit of excellence. It meant that I couldn't dare dream of a prosperous future or express aspirations beyond the confines of the squalid, bullet-riddled ghetto I chose to return to. Verbalizing an independence and individuality meant alienating my homeboys who would never consider leaving the hood. It was considered an act of betrayal that had deadly consequences. No one respected a "corner hopper."

I dreamed of attending college (and many years later, I briefly attended Temple University under their continuing education program). I wanted to be a singer, a musician. I was born with a natural athletic prowess and the gym teacher at Penn Treaty Junior High encouraged me to join the track team because he said I was so fast I could one day be a track star.

Not one of my crew knew I was an avid reader who secretly devoured every book I got nly hands on. I'd memorized large sections of the dictionary and had an excellent command of the English language that always gave me a sharp edge in debates with teachers and classmates. I was magnetically drawn to large words, but rarely used them outside the classroom. The vernacular of the mean, lawless streets was the only weapon I could use to gain respect and honor. A propensity for violence and ruthlessness was what sealed a reputation, and since I was a thin, wiry-framed kid, I had to establish a rep for being good with my hands. I moved with the speed and quickness of an agile cat. Whoever threw their hands up at me-large or small-got smoked.

The gang stigma followed me well into my adulthood. It did not take me beyond the confines of my old neighborhood, and when I finally ventured out into the world, I found that I had no other education or a trade to economically excel in a free market society. Who would dare hire an ex-gang member with no marketable skills? Of course, as a teenager I'd entered job training programs under Reverend John O'Sullivan's OIC training program, but that was only a condition of my probation or a court order.

In order to survive, I was drawn toward earning money through participating in illicit activities: selling drugs, slinging, hustling, stealing, and running scams. Heroin and speed were big in the mid-seventies, and I sold small quantities of it. My downward spiral accelerated when I began snorting speed and cocaine. I drifted about mindlessly in a drug-induced state of confusion and black rage and hopelessness.

I was in a shoot-out with New Jersey drug dealers in 1976. Amid the hellacious gun battle, a Jersey cop shot me poiut blank in the chest, and I was pronounced DOA (dead on arrival) at Cooper Hospital in Camden, N.J. The state charged me for the murder of a drug dealer - though "new evidence" proves I was not the "actual triggerman" - and I did several years in Rahway State Prison.

In another foreign jurisdiction, I had to let those Jersey boys know that I wasn't no coward, that I still represented my set. I signed up for the boxing team headed by Lieutenant Fortune, and shortly thereafter became Rahway State Prison's Welterweight Champion after defeating the Latino who held the belt. I successfully defended my belt several times until I was paroled. I left Rahway State Prison with hopes and dreams of parlaying my pugilistic skills into a career as a professional fighter. I trained at Joe Frazier's Cloverly Gym but found the business inhabited by sleazy individuals, bigger crooks who only wanted to exploit me. At that time, I had a strong resemblance to a young Joe Louis, aud even called myself "The Little Brown Bomber." My handlers saw an opportunity to sell that image without even bothering to invest time in my training or workouts or my financial well being. I was fresh out of prison, with no real income, and the years it would take me to reach the top of the ranks was a reality exasperated by my beautiful ex-model girlfriend pressuring me for sex two or three times a day. It did not take me long to lose interest in boxing. I quit going to the gym.

When I think about it now, I could have made something of myself if I'd been more disciplined. Maybe, just maybe, I could've been a contender for the welterweight title of the world.

Copyright 2005

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