Free Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang Page A

Fort Apache cops intensified their stop-and-frisk operations in the neighborhood, with the pretext of stopping the Skulls. One afternoon cops were seen beating down residents on Longwood Avenue, including a Skull member. Members of the Young Lords joined angry residents to encircle the police and jeer. Mercado led his Skulls into the angry crowd. Since the Lords and the residents only wanted to yell, he says, “We started it off, threw the bottle, all hell broke loose.”
    Police cars were smashed and set afire. Besieged, the cops retreated for more support. When they returned, they were showered with rocks and Molotov cocktails from the tenement roofs. Perez says, “We told them, ‘Get the fuck out of here! This is a liberated zone.’ ”
    The battle raged back and forth through the week, along Longwood and down to Prospect, up to 163rd and down to 139th. At times, the police vehicles cruised slowly through the neighborhood, so that everyone could see their drawn guns. The Skulls and the Lords had found a common enemy.
    â€œAfter we had battled the cops for about four or five nights, one day we were hanging out with the Savage Skulls,” Perez continues. “And they said, ‘You know? You guys ain’t so bad after all. They told us you’re a bunch of fuckingcommunists and that you was here to hurt the community.’ They told us straight up that some anti-poverty pimps in the neighborhood had paid for them to firebomb us. And it was funny. We said, ‘We
are
communists!’ ”
    The rapprochement between the Young Lords and the Savage Skulls reached its peak late in 1970 when the Young Lords began a health care campaign. First the Lords seized an X-ray truck from the Lincoln Hospital and placed it on Simpson and Southern Boulevard to provide free services for the community. Then they staged a full-scale takeover of the hospital. In both actions, the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads served as the first line of defense against the cops.
    But the relationship was short-lived. By 1971, the Young Lords refocused on exporting their revolution to Puerto Rico. With the Lords in San Juan and the Panthers off the streets, the youth gangs were left to fill the void of the revolutionaries.
The Other Side of the Sixties
    The story of the Bronx gangs is a dub history of 1968 through 1973, the other side of the revolution, the exception that became the rule.
    At 162nd and Westchester, in the Hunt’s Point section of the South Bronx, Benjamin Melendez and his friends formed the Ghetto Brothers. They spawned a number of other gangs—including the Roman Kings, the Savage Nomads and the Seven Immortals. The Savage Skulls had taken their name from Melendez as well. Across the Bronx River, a small band of hardrocks at the Bronxdale Houses called the Savage Seven grew and adopted a new name, the Black Spades. By 1968, the stage was set for a new generation of gangs to take over the Bronx. What should have been five years of revolution instead became five years of gang strife.
    This generation was a different breed than the Wanderer generation, the silk-jacketed, doo-wop singing gangs of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Nor were they the optimistic youth of the mid-’60s period of brown/Black crossover, the bugalú/boogaloo generation, who had danced their nights away with James Brown, Joe Cuba, and Pete Rodriguez. And most of them did not share the college-bred, high-flying idealism of their peers, the political radicals. Only one in four youths in the borough even graduated from high school.
    The gangs were a vanguard of the rubble. They were rough, grimy, dirty-down, all cut sleeves and Nazi patches. They had no reason to sing sweet harmonies. They were the children of Moses’s grand experiment, and the fires hadalready begun. They did not dance in integrated clubs. Those venues had closed, and the borough was resegregating, isolating Black and brown and white. They did