Parental Discretion Is Advised Page 2

  Decades of fraught racial tensions throughout Los Angeles also added to the ticking bomb that was inner-city life in South Central. Before an influx of black suburbanites flocked to Compton between the 1920s and the 1950s, the city was predominantly white. Integration of the city was met with resistance as home owners, real-estate brokers, civic leaders, and law enforcement worked in tandem to keep Compton white. Although a 1948 decision by the Supreme Court ruled against restrictive housing practices, the Federal Housing Administration routinely denied loans to blacks in areas not covered by restrictive covenants (alternative agreements that served to perpetuate residential segregation on private properties). As a matter of policy, these restrictions also extended to Asians, Mexicans, and Native Americans. Black families were forced into nearby neighborhoods like Watts. There were some residents around Compton who didn’t resist the growing integration, and even profited off blacks by selling their homes for more than they would to a prospective white buyer. However, the enterprising practice came with great danger as white property owners received threats or, in more severe cases, were beaten by other whites for listing their properties with realtors who sold to both white and black buyers.

  Of all the areas around Los Angeles where this practice was happening, Compton was disproportionately affected, and the city became a battleground of sorts. Whites pushed back against the thousands of black families trickling into the suburb during the 1950s and ’60s, mostly coming from the South. White residents felt the uptick in black families negatively impacted their property values, and they turned to violence as a means of intimidating and pushing away their new nonwhite neighbors. Black Korean War veteran Alfred Jackson and his wife, Luquella, were met with a mob of white residents assembled in front of their moving van to demand they leave when the couple arrived in Compton in 1953. It took the brandishing of firearms by Alfred and a family friend who was there to help them move to turn the crowd away. Standoffs like these continued, and mobs of angry whites grew in their aggression. Soon they resorted to bombing and firing weapons into the homes of black families. Crosses were burned on lawns: the fiery declaration of war that was the hallmark of the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidation tactics against blacks. White gangs like the “Spook Hunters” violently harassed black families. Mobs formed under the slogan “Keep the Negroes North of 130th Street.” This defiant fight against inclusivity echoed back to the early years of World War II, when the Compton City Council forcefully resisted construction of a public-housing complex in the neighborhood because it was considered “Negro housing.” The message was clear: protecting Compton’s whiteness was essential.

  Violent reactions among white communities took place across the nation as millions of blacks fled the South, where Jim Crow laws and lack of economic opportunity stifled their livelihoods. Cities like Oakland, Boston, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles became choice destinations. Skilled black migrants in LA found employment that provided a middle-class income, making the idea of the California Dream a reality. A victory in the battle for housing parity came in 1963 with the California Fair Housing Act. Drafted by William Byron Rumford, the first black person from Northern California elected to serve in the legislature, and better known as the Rumford Act, it sought to end racial discrimination by landlords and property owners who refused to rent or sell to minorities. Under the act, ethnicity, religion, sex, marital or familial status, or physical handicap couldn’t serve as the basis of denial. However, the relationships between blacks and whites in South Central, and across the country, never rebounded—not that the trauma from slavery, segregation, and centuries of institutionalized racism in this country will likely ever heal. Blacks continued to feel treated as second class—feelings that were compounded in south LA by inadequate access to public transportation, decent schools, affordable housing, or high-wage jobs, as well as being overlooked for opportunities of political influence in the community, and being discriminated against by the police strictly because of the color of their skin. It was enough to create a powder keg that would combust in Watts during the summer of 1965 on a sticky August afternoon.

  It was a routine traffic stop with a familiar setting: A white cop pulling over a black motorist. California highway patrol officer Lee Minikus pulled over Marquette Frye after getting a report of a reckless driver. The twenty-one-year-old was behind the wheel of his mother’s 1955 Buick Special with his older stepbrother, Ronald, weaving down a stretch of South Avalon Boulevard in Watts. Frye told the cop he was trying to avoid potholes but admitted to indulging in a few drinks earlier. He goofed his way through a sobriety test he couldn’t possibly pass, shucking and jiving for the spectators lurking close by. The sobriety test failed, Minikus radios for the car to be impounded and he places the young man under arrest—typical DUI protocol. Ronald went to fetch their mother, Rena, to claim the car and immediately upon arrival she berated her son for driving under the influence. “I told you about drinking and driving,” she seethed. “Let me smell your breath.” Most accounts say Frye was cheery and joking with the responding officers—until his mother arrived. Frye’s demeanor changed and he began cursing and shouting at the cops. His mother jumped on one officer’s back and Marquette took a swing at another. An officer attempted to subdue Frye and swung his baton at his shoulder but missed and struck him in the head. Rena and her sons were hauled off to jail. The crowd of spectators swelled to nearly one thousand, and they became furious as talk of what happened turned to rumors and speculation—one widely spread, and incorrect, story was that the cops beat Rena. A mob formed. For many, this was the last straw, as they were already frustrated with law enforcement and being disenfranchised by city officials. The prior autumn saw the appeal of the Rumford Act, after the California Real Estate Association launched an initiative that pushed against it. Proposition 14, later to be found unconstitutional by state and US Supreme Courts, legalized discrimination under the guise of protecting property owners’ absolute discretion of selecting renters and buyers. The Los Angeles Times endorsed the initiative, and it passed with 65 percent of the vote. Frye’s encounter with the officers was a tipping point for the residents of Watts, who were fed up and angry with the police and their position in LA. They decided to fight back.

  Rocks were hurled at police cruisers. Officers not pummeled with objects got pulled from cars and beaten. Store windows were smashed, and many businesses were set ablaze. Warfare enveloped the streets, intensifying over the course of six days. Nearly one thousand buildings were left damaged or destroyed. More than thirty people lost their lives with over one thousand more injured. Property damage was estimated at $40 million, and more than 3,400 people were arrested. “We all got pissed and went out and burned up our neighborhood,” one demonstrator said. “We brought ‘the man’ onto their own land. That’s the only way we could communicate.” Following the riots, whites took flight out of South and West Los Angeles neighborhoods.

  The civil unrest in Watts and across the country during the civil rights movement unmasked the racial angst felt by blacks in large cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York—places once seen as a refuge. A generation of blacks were sick and tired of being treated as inferior to whites. No longer were they going to silence themselves or keep the peace the way their parents told them they needed to in order to get by. They had had enough.

  Eric “Eazy-E” Wright and the men of N.W.A were a part of the next generation. And soon the anger and frustrations that boiled over from their parents and the people in their neighborhood would provide the inspiration for a musical revolution.

  PANIC ZONE

  The world came to know him as Eazy-E—the man who blazed a trail with incendiary and profane music that shook America to its core, altered popular music seemingly overnight, and established the West Coast as a hip-hop capital. He was the embodiment of the black male America feared most: violent, menacing, criminal. The “godfather of Gangsta rap,” Eazy built a rap start-up from the streets of Compton that, when adjusted for inflati
on, was generating over $20 million a month by today’s standards. Before all that, though, he was Eric Lynn Wright, your local “street pharmacist.”

  The influx of crack cocaine in South Central kept Eric in demand and flush with cash and, really, what more could a hustler ask for coming up in Compton during an era when hangin’, bangin’, and slangin’ was a way of life? In 1985, Eric was twenty-one years old and deep in the drug game. But his choice of profession didn’t reflect his upbringing as much as it did the budding street-savvy business acumen that made him a multimillionaire.

  A nurturing two-parent household wasn’t enough to keep Eric away from the lure of the streets. He dropped out of Dominguez High School during his sophomore year. For a moment, he considered following in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a career with the post office, but he hated “workin’ for somebody else.” Around the same time, a slick drug trafficker named “Freeway” Rick Ross was busy transforming South Central into a crack capital with wholesale cocaine—first as a powder, then as the smokeable “ready rock.”

  “Ready rock” was as addictive as it was cheap; however, its toll—physically and emotionally—was astoundingly destructive. While the typical one-gram package of powdered cocaine sold for $100 and was only 55 percent pure, one-tenth of a gram of crack only cost between five and twenty-five dollars and often was between 75 and 100 percent pure, making it far more potent than regular cocaine. Crack first showed up in the United States in 1981 in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Houston, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. In just a few short years it reached pandemic levels. By 1996, crack was available in twenty-eight states—a number that spiked to forty-six the following year. It was widely accessible throughout the streets of South Central, from big-time dealers like Freeway; groups of Jamaicans, Haitians, and Dominicans; sophisticated networks organized by splinter groups from the Bloods and the Crips; and street entrepreneurs who realized the swelling profits available in the drug game. Eric was one of those street entrepreneurs.

  At five foot four, he certainly didn’t exactly look like your typical dealer, but nothing about his short exterior should lead you to believe he was one to test. “That boy could fight. He’s all muscle. If he locked on to you, you’re in trouble,” said Greg Mack, LA rap-radio pioneer and friend of Eric’s. Short, broad-shouldered with a clenched jaw that usually meant business, Eric was a formidable presence, despite his diminutive stature. And he made for a surprisingly disciplined drug peddler. He didn’t get high. He didn’t even really care for liquor. Each morning he woke up early and read the Los Angeles Times cover to cover. He then got dressed in his signature look: white T-shirt, tube socks, Dickies or jeans, and dark sunglasses known as locs—his Jheri curls spilling out of his baseball cap. He’d venture down South Muriel Avenue, a street filled with houses of red-and-brown brick or pale-colored stucco with manicured lawns and handsome brick-and-wrought-iron gates. “Everyone thought he was some radical street thug. That was his structure. Even early on, he was very business,” recalled former girlfriend Tracy Jernagin.

  Eric never went anywhere without a wad of cash stuffed inside his sock, his ankle warmed by $2,000 worth of bills at any given time. After checking his pager he’d walk from his house to the corner of Caress Avenue and Alondra Boulevard where he then used a pay phone to make his deals, returning calls to those he knew who hit his pager with the right code: for an eighth of an ounce, better known as an eight ball, the page needed an “8”; half an ounce was “12.” The phone is still there today, dusty and unused. He often operated out of the Atlantic Drive apartment complex, a pink two-story building less than a mile from home on South Muriel. Close to a highway underpass, the building’s horseshoe layout and tight driveway made it nearly impossible to see most of the units from the street. It made for an ideal, round-the-clock drug bazaar. The sign on the building’s façade that warned “This is a crime watch area” wasn’t nearly enough to deter dealers, particularly the number of Crips who descended upon the stucco complex to make deals. By the time Eric was in elementary school, the Crips and Bloods had carved out territory throughout much of South Central. Eric was down with the Kelly Park Crips, whose turf was on the east side of Compton near his home. Kelly Park was a lush grass field behind Colin P. Kelly Elementary School with brightly colored playground equipment, concrete benches, and a basketball court. Eric was known around the neighborhood as “Casual.” He wasn’t a hard-core gangbanger by any means, even if he later created a wildly exaggerated image of one in order to sell records. Eric got along with differing Crip factions in the neighborhood, not a surprise considering he sold them great rock at fair prices. He wasn’t out snuffing adversaries via drive-bys or rolling the streets ready to drop you over gang beef, but he didn’t back down from a fight, either. “If you looked at [his] knuckles, they were gone. They were dimpled. He had scars and shit,” recalled Mazik Saevitz, who briefly worked with Eric’s label as a member of hip-hop duo Blood of Abraham. Eric was guarded and said very little, keeping a grim expression on his face and sunglasses covering his eyes.

  Despite how Eric carried himself, his propensity to snap when provoked, or the gangster tales he spit as a rapper, he was nothing at all like the Crips in his hood. And most certainly he was unlike Raymond Lee Washington and Stanley Tookie Williams, the Crips’ infamous cofounders.

  The intent of the Crips—which morphed out of a cluster of previous collectives—was to continue the revolutionary ideology of the 1960s and to serve as community leaders while aggressively protecting their neighborhoods from other, larger local gangs like the LA Brims and the Inglewood Chain Gang. Introduced by a mutual friend, Raymond Lee Washington and Stanley Tookie Williams formed an alliance to eliminate all street gangs and create a “bull force” neighborhood watch. “I thought, ‘I can cleanse the neighborhood of all these, you know, marauding gangs.’ But I was totally wrong. And eventually, we morphed into the monster we were addressing,” Williams said. The Crips adopted the color blue and began to map turf in Compton. Near Centennial High School, on Piru Street, a street crew was formed by Sylvester Scott and Benson Owens as a way to challenge the insurgent gang and defend itself against the Crips. The Pirus (Owens established the West Pirus) were the first Bloods gang. Red was the gang’s chosen color, as many of the non-Crip street gangs called one another “blood.” In 1974, a twenty-one-year-old Washington was sentenced to five years at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, California, for second-degree robbery, the first Crip incarcerated there. Washington recruited his fellow inmates into the gang, much to the chagrin of black prison collectives such as the Black Muslims and the Black Guerrilla Family, groups whose ethics, morals, and values didn’t align with what they had heard about the more volatile Crips outside of prison walls. When Washington was released from prison and returned to Los Angeles, he discovered that tensions between the Crips and the Bloods had erupted into all-out war.

  Gunplay, instead of squaring up fist-to-fist, was now the norm to settle disputes. Recruits looking to build their credibility resorted to crimes that escalated in their senselessness and heinousness. Disillusioned, Washington, who strongly opposed guns, began distancing himself as he wanted the gang to cease internal feuding and work toward a truce with the Bloods.

  But Washington didn’t get to see that happen. On a late August night in 1979, he was hanging out on the corner of Sixty-Fourth and San Pedro Streets when a car pulled up and the unidentified occupants called him over. Washington usually didn’t step up to cars if he didn’t know who was inside, but he recognized the occupants and exchanged a few words with them before a passenger drew a sawed-off shotgun and blasted into Washington’s stomach. He was rushed to Morningside Hospital and died in surgery. An arrest was never made. A few months later, Tookie vanished from the streets after being convicted of quadruple murder. He was sentenced to death and was later executed by lethal injection, after pleas for clemency and a four-week stay of execution were both rejected by Governor Arn
old Schwarzenegger in 2005.

  A decade after they were founded, the Crips and Bloods had become an unstoppable force, with both sects having grown exponentially. Blue and red territories were divided across LA and beyond, with splintered sects establishing borders alongside Latino gangs. Shared hand signals were used for identification. Pictographs etched in spray paint on walls and buildings sent messages, marked territory, and warned rivals not to fuck with them—if your name was painted on a wall and crossed out, chances are your days were numbered. Turf is a gang’s prized possession, and no piece of land was off limits. Gas stations, schools, liquor stores, even Burger Kings became claimed territory. And warring over turf got bloody, fast.

  “You couldn’t wear blue over here, you couldn’t wear red over there. I had to learn the color scheme,” said Greg Mack. “I literally took a change of clothes for wherever I went so that I could change and be in the right color in the right area. Didn’t want no mistakes.”

  Kids who had made it just beyond the throes of puberty were aggressively recruited. Just consider the milieu of South Central at the time to understand the appeal of falling in line with a gang. Work was scarce. Crime was spreading like a plague. Single-parent households struggled to stay afloat. Gangs provided a distraction. For these youths, there was a feeling of power, family, a sense of belonging, protection, strength, and pride. The growing spate of high school and junior high school students being drafted into various Crip and Blood sets went far beyond South Central. In Denver, for instance, about two dozen Crips from California arrived and drafted about four hundred members to establish new gangs named after Los Angeles sets. Police officials went as far as dubbing the surge “Criptomania.” “When I first came to California it was a bit of a culture shock,” said Tracy Curry, better known as the D.O.C. “The whole idea of the gangbanging shit was a bit much.”