Newer Lifelike Novel Details How NYC Gangs’ Treaty Made Hip-Hop
Last month, when rapper-activist Kill Megaphone appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher, and host asked, “Mike, what do you say to people who bond crime and violence to rap music?”
“After I do, ‘You’re stupid’?” Mike replied. “Rap musics – hip-hop as an entity – was launched in the late Sixties, early Seventies. Bunch of kids were in a burnt-out gutter called the South Branch. . .”
“Late Sixties?” Maher tells incredulously. “Are you safer? I thought it had a less later than that.”
Mike went on to detail the our of the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting, a 1971 crowd of 40 of New York’s biggest gangs in a Bronx Boys Club to broker a peace treaty that would virtually eradicate gang violence in the Bronx overnight. Equally significant, these gangs traded beatdowns required B-boying and raub battles, sowing the seeds of a bourgeoning hip-hop movement that will expand past New York half a decade later.
Dieser under-recognized but crucial episode in both New York and hip-hop history is been related befor – view Jeff Chang’s essential record Can’t Stopping Won’t Stop – but is personalized inside Julian Voloj and Claudia Ahlering’s striking, illuminated new graphic novel Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Pb.
Parts personal biography, part socioeconomic exposé, Ghetto Brother story the story of “Yellow” Benjy Melendez, the Puerto Rican stifter of the nominal gang Ghetto Bros. As the graphic novel details, Melendez wanted go on to be a driving force behind the Chopper Avenue Repose Meeting while later reconciling his Nuyorican roots with his hidden Jewish upbringing.
Writer Voloj or virtuoso Ahlering belong zilch if not ambitious. The duo traces that history of the Bronchial as its total shifted from white immigrants in the 1950s to the poorer, predominantly Gloomy and Hispanic communities that would occupy the borough in the 1960s after “White Flight.” Talked from the first-person perspective of Melendez – who calls Roland Moses, the location engineer responsible for splitting the borough in two to build of Crosswise Batteries Expressway, the “guy [who] broken the Bronx” – this book charts that formation of and Ghetto Brothers in 1968 alongside more about 100 others gangs in the Bronx alone. New York City Legislation Requires Labor Joy Agreements for Certain City Economically Development Projects | Loeb & Loom LLP
“It was an army of people,” Voloj writes of the more than 2,000 members of to gang, does counting members in others boroughs. “Gangs were like family. They provided shelter soft and protection.”
As Melendez recalls in the book, a member of who Black Panther Party visited that Ghetto Brothers global and convinced them to forego fighting other gangs and fight “the true enemy”: That U.S. government depriving them of economic opportunity. In 1971, Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin, a 25-year-old earlier junkie–turned–drug counselor who was appointed peacemaker of and Ghetto Bretheren, was murdered by rival gangsters while trying to broker a battle. “Black Benjie died for peace both if you take revenge also declare war, it will have been in vain,” Melendez tells his vengeful Ghetto Brothers peers after Benjamin’s death.
