From Fighting Gangs to Black Nations: Race, Power, and the Other Civil Rights Movement in Chicago's West Side Ghetto, 1957-1968

Abstract

From Fighting Gangs to Black Nations: Race, Power, and the Other Civil Rights Movement on Chicago’s West Side, 1957-1968 Contributing to a new wave of studies seeking to better understand the emergence of postwar civil rights activism on the local level, this paper excavates the origins of a different spirit of black militancy in Chicago’s West Side ghetto in the confrontations of youths with indignities they faced in the schools and streets of the Lawndale community from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s. In particular, it traces the formation of large black fighting gangs in this area, arguing that the militant style and racial solidarity articulated by these youth gangs became a vital source of inspiration for the broader struggle for civil rights that was developing here. Hence, when Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took their campaign against segregation to the West Side of Chicago in 1966, they found another movement here—one that diverged from the course of nonviolence but which nonetheless produced some powerful forms of political consciousness and action.