City Lords, Essay Example

The cultural subgroup is a gang (they call it a “club”) named the City Lords, a subset of the Vice Lord Nation gang, but also its founding and central branch. They live in the Lawndale area of Chicago’s west side in the mid-1960s. This area is a ghetto. The Vice Lord Nation began in 1958. Its founders were Black inmates of a juvenile detention center, The Illinois State Training School for Boys. When they were released, they brought the gang to the Lawndale neighborhood, which had a history of gang violence. The club started out as primarily a social group, giving parties, but under pressure from surrounding gangs, it became more of a traditional gang. As it grew, it became more structured and several branches formed.

Membership in the group can be ascribed or achieved. Long-time residents might become members purely by virtue of their geographical location. If a teen moves into a neighborhood that is in Vice Lord territory, he might be befriended by some of the gang members and invited to join them on a social level until they have checked him out. At that point, he might be included in activities beyond the social. Others might be invited to join based on their behavior or accomplishments, such as proving they are good fighters. Finally, members of gangs defeated by the Vice Lords might be integrated into the group if they are willing to join and have some value to the group.

Membership is fairly fluid. Although the club issues membership cards and has special clothing markers, not every member has a card and not everyone wears identifying clothing all the time. Because they live in such tight-knit communities, members of rival gangs would recognize them as Vice Lords regardless of such markers and vice versa. Also, some members, when they get into their twenties, will stop engaging in gang fights and other gang activities because they have jobs and have families to support. Nonetheless, they are still considered Vice Lords and are treated as such when they hang out on the corner with active members of the gang. Members who are in prison are still considered part of the gang and those who move to different areas may retain their affiliation with the gang, even if they live in another gang’s territory. They might also choose to ally themselves with the other gang and there is no indication that changing affiliations based on geographic change is subject to penalties.

The older members of the group teach the younger or newer members how to behave by example and by including them increasingly in gang activities. This is not to say that rank or participation is necessarily determined by age. One gang member noted that the “Midget Lords,” who were thirteen and fourteen years old, were far more vicious fighters and more likely to have guns than their older peers. The primary value espoused by the group is that they protect each other and they protect their territory. For example, if a neighboring gang came into Vice Lords territory and started picking on little kids, taking their money, even though those children were not old enough to be Vice Lords, the gang would retaliate against the invaders. Part of their sense of mission is to protect the people who live in their territory. (A few years after this study was written, the gang had actually taken government grants to open a restaurant, employment center, and community center in their neighborhood; they had shifted to community service and organizing and entirely away from gang fighting.) Mostly, though, at the time of this study, they protect their members and provide social events for them. They also work together to make money, so newer members would learn from their seniors how to “hustle,” which might include begging, gambling, or strong-arm robbery. They would also be inducted into a culture that uses shared consumption of alcohol as a bonding ritual and honors its imprisoned or dead members as part of that ritual. Most of the behaviors engaged in by the club are common in the neighborhood (fighting, gambling, drinking, etc.), but the club puts them all in the context of a cohesive (mostly) group identity and shared purpose.

The equality of members depends on the situation. The City Lords are the senior branch of the gang, so they have a certain amount of social capital amongst other branches and also serve in a leadership role on issues affecting the whole Vice Lord Nation. There is a president and a board for each branch and for the whole Nation, which serve make decisions affecting the area under their control (the board structure serves the legal purpose of diffusing blame for decisions to go to war from a single person who might be indicted to a group with no one person responsible). Each branch has a warlord who advises the board on when to go to war, so in formal decisions about retaliation or defense, he would have a lot of power, but in other decisions, he would not. Within each branch, there are sections, which may or may not have a formal hierarchy and within sections there are informal cliques in which all members are equal, regardless of age, rank, or status. The general ranks in the Lords are Senior (generally over 18), Junior (16-18), and Midget (under 18—or in one branch, just really short guys). Some branches have a “Pee-wee” rank as well for young boys who aspire to join the club. In social settings, such as “pulling jive,” (drinking alcohol before a fight or while hanging out), all members are equal. A very young man who had just joined the club would be invited to drink, the same as the most senior member. The status of a member might also affect whether or not an attack on him would generate retaliation by his section, his branch, the whole Nation, or none at all. For example, when Cave Man, generally accepted as the founder of the club, was attacked, the entire Nation went to war against the offending gang. If a younger member of a section were jumped for his money, the section might decide to let it go rather than risk fighting for someone who has not established his value to the group.

The ideal traits for members include dedication to mutual help, loyalty to his fellow-club members, the ability to make money through some form of hustling, and good fighting ability—whether hand to hand or with a knife or other weapon. Access to firearms and the ability to use one is a benefit, but does not confer higher status. Most fighting does not involve shooting. In one case, a member recounts taking his shotgun to a “humbug” (fight), but then states that he cut three members of the rival gang. Also, the member must be willing to set aside differences for the good of the gang. For example, when two branches of the gang were fighting each other, they temporarily joined forces to fight off another gang, then returned to their previous dispute. Members are often defined by how much “soul” they have; to have soul means to try really hard at whatever you do. Deviant behavior would be anything that threatens the good of the group. There is a lot of room for a variety of vices amongst members. In their social roles as “street men,” members can try to manipulate and cheat each other, which is not seen as betrayal, but as part of a game. For example, when two friends did a robbery together, one of them mentioned he was going to take his share of the loot home and then try to sell it the next day. The other encourage him to hide the loot in an abandoned building so “The Man” could not find it and arrest him, but really so that the second friend could more easily steal the first’s share. Had the first one fallen for the ruse, he would have lost the game and the other would have gained some social status for “whupping the game.”

From a mainstream point of view, many of the Vice Lords’ activities would be considered criminal. They steal, mug people, do drugs, gamble, drink, engage in fights, and even shoot each other. Seen from inside their living conditions, however, their behavior looks more like survival than criminality for the sake of doing wrong. If they did not engage in fights with rival gangs, they and their neighbors would be victimized. Without access to straight jobs, most of them would not have any legitimate way to make money, so theft and robbery make sense to them. The idea of a mutual aid society is no different than that of a fraternity or other group like Rotary or the Masons. The criminal aspects of the Vice Lords activities reflect their poverty and lack of access to other means of helping themselves, as evidenced by the change in focus that occurred after the study concluded.

Their mission, as stated above, is to protect their members and their territory from violent attacks by outside groups. This mission extends to providing mutual aid to their members and people in their territory. The aid provided can range from physical protection from robbery or other violence, to monetary aid, to protecting each other from the law. Later on, they expand their mission to include community organizing, job training and help finding work, and keeping teens off the street. They later become marginally involved in the Black Nationalist movement, but club loyalty still outweighs ethnic solidarity.

If I were a member of the club, since I’m female, I’d have to be a Vice Lady, a member of the female auxiliary. Despite the name, the Ladies are free to choose boyfriends from other gangs and are recognized to be strong fighters, even intimidating the men sometimes. The Ladies have their own organization, which seems to run parallel to the men’s, but not much information is available from the study.

This is definitely a gemeinschaft community. Members are expected to set aside their personal differences or private plans to come to the aid of the group at any time. They seem to do so willingly because they know the others will also do the same. Every time they go into a “humbug” to defend their group, they risk getting killed. This is not an abstraction to them since so many of their peers have been killed, so they clearly place the group above their own lives.

Works Cited

Keiser, R. Lincoln. Vice Lords: Warriors of the Streets. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group, 2002. Print.