The Vice Lords were basically put together as a group.  We were fragmented in the early 50's, not having a real name in terms of Vice Lords or anything like that We started out as a social-athletic club like most of the so-called gangs today started out.  We didn't have malt shops.  We didn't have recreational halls where we could go and socialize and learn to cook and learn to read.  We had what we called bare bones gangs. 

But anyway the gang situation, as far as the Vice Lords were concerned, were born and identified as a gang back in 1958 and this came through St. Charles boys reformatory.  The way they came together, a group of men from the West Side, a group of young men from the north side.  It became a west side, north side, southside type situation.  So the guys from the West side, they tried to come together for their survival or to get special privileges as a group.  It's just like anything else, everyone tries to separate and do their own thing.  The common denominator was that west side, south side.  They didn't necessarily know each other.  Some did, but had to band together again here.  The way society is structured, to even get some positive endeavors or do some negative endeavors. At any rate, that was the common denominator in terms of putting groups together.  Some guys did well.  Some guys didn't

We were all called a couple names — Pueblo, we had a guy we used to call Shotgun, we had another guy we used to call Tex — nicknames and what not.  When they went into St. Charles they formed a bond because there was some problems in terms of south side, west side, north side, so these guys bonded together and they found out through their endeavors that there is some power here.  We could get certain perks out of the situation.  Maybe four or five guys worked in the laundry.  Two or three of them worked in the kitchen, this kind of thing.  So, naturally the westsiders would look out for these guys.  You only get one biscuit, they'd give you a biscuit and a half, these kinds of things.  They had control of maybe the laundry, maybe the athletic equipment, etc., etc. 

And when they were released from St. Charles they brought this thing to the street.  And as a result of that, they started recruiting.  People were out in the street, just like they were.  No identity, they felt unloved, they were in essence, nobody.  Everybody wants to be recognized as somebody, like Reverend Jesse Jackson," I am somebody".  I maybe poor, I maybe whatever it is, but I am somebody.  I'm a human being.  I want no less nor no more than what anybody else has or what I can accomplish in terms of my own skills, in terms of trying to build what it is a business or learning how to be a plumber or whatever.  I want to do the same things everybody else wants to do.  And that's to earn enough money to take care of my family if in fact I have a family or when I get a family.  Through the years 1958 to roughly 1961, 62, we started off like all the rest of the gangs. 

Our thing was snatching hub caps off the cars, the few cars that were out there. Let me go back just a little bit.  When I was born and raised we saw a car every now and then, we still had horse and wagons here, and the trolley cars, and street cars, and what not.  But, given those times, they had what they called to South Water Market.  We were able to make a few pennies by going over to the South Water Market and unloading trucks.  This was actually when I was about 13, 14 years old.  Rather than steal or snatch a pocket book and so forth and so on.  And this was actually before I moved to the west side and got with the Vice Lords.

We got $25,000 from the Field Foundation for a summer beautification project.  And what we said we were going to do.  We said we were going to take most of these young guys, 14 upward, and take some of the moneys that was given through some of the programs like, we had a number of programs going that were hiring young kids for a quarter an hour or something like that.  Our thing was, Let's put this kid a position were he can earn some money, he can go home and give mom $15-20 , he ain't got to snatch a pocket book.  So we got 125 slots from the programs, I forget the name of the program right now, but anyway, what our thing was, was to dig up all of those what we call parkways out there, were there was nothing but glass, tin cans, beer bottles, wine bottles...  We were going to take all of that, dig out the big boulders and all, and put grass and flowers out there, and we did that.  We went (to) kids mainly from the west side, from Pulaski all the way over to Ogden Avenue.  And some parts of Cermack Street. 

Over time, this became a little bit too sophisticated for us given, I was a highschool dropout.  It became to sophisticated, we didn't understand a lot of the ramifications in terms of business how and when.  So we asked for some money to do a partnership situation whereas we would bring in expertise in terms of being running business.  They were to advise and counsel, but not make decisions and this was one of the things...  Each one of the guys that were involved, we had about 15 programs, we had a professional person working with that individual, teaching him the ropes.  This particular individual had another man under him learning as he learned.  So, our situation was for the older guys to work themselves out of those jobs that the young men had the job and in return, he teaches the guy on the end.  This is the way we were trying to structure it.  We got the money.  And we hired some guys from New York, California, Georgia.  We had some people come in that were pretty good people, they understood what we were going through.  And they really tried to help.  A lot of them really put their hearts into us.  We learned pretty fast it was still very complicated.  A lot of this right now, today, I don't understand, in terms of what we were trying to do. 

But we started showing a measure of success.  And that was something that the city couldn't stand, given blacks don't , the Disciples, the Cobras, this, that, and the other.  If one group can do it, then here comes the rest.  So, what are we doing?  We're training gang members. (City leaders said) "What the gang members are doing, the''re buying guns and so forth and so on" .  What they didn't know is that through the police commanders, the YMCA acted as our fiscal agent.  We never touched any money.  Anything that we wanted to do in terms of having something built or renovated.  We get a requisition for what we needed, the requisition went through their approval and went right to the builder or the contractor.  They bought the material, they did this, they did that.  We were able to do that with our annual reports and our quarterly reports. (City leaders) were afraid we were buying guns.  They were trying to discredit us. 

In 1968 we went to Washington D.C...  Just started a new program through the labor department.  At the time, they had young people, like yourselves, that could identify with other young people that were able to sit down at the table and talk about some of the problems and try to get them to understand what they were going through and in fact, these people had access to either fund or reject a program.  We were fortunate enough to receive money out of them.  From that, we decided that we should travel to New York.  We had one young man over in Central Park.  His name was Chino Garcia, a Hispanic brother.  In reading about some of the problems that were happening in Central Park back in those days, Chino had a positive attitude.  He, in terms, was tired of seeing these people killed and knocked off and there was no rewards, no progress whatsoever, behind that.  We decided we sit and we talk, that we would have a couple of meetings.  We went to New York and one of our things was to have an exchange program. 

During that time, we were making what they called the..... African garb and what not.  They were into leatherwork.  So we said, okay, give us five of your guys and you take five of our guys.  Our guys will show you how to make the Dashikis and you guys show us how to make the wallets and wha tnot.  That worked out pretty good.  Chino came up with the idea of doing a national.  In other words, lets dice the United States up into four parts, with a regional director in each of the four districts and we'll house this thing in Washington D.C..  Hubert Humphrey at the time, thought it was a grand idea.  He backed us all the way.  And our thing was just like exchange students you have now, you have a girl from Germany, coming from where ever, and we exchange the ideas with you and different things like this and we thought that this would work pretty good. 

We had a meeting in East St. Louis.  It was ratified and everything was okay.  We housed the place in D.C.  My brother-in-law ran, he was the first president of it.  And the thing was to open up lines of communication.  You need some help over here in this region, Georgia, New York, whatever it is.  Don't go out to the authorities.  We opened up a lot of communications.  We hit the other three regions and we'll come in and we'll talk.  We'll sit down, w'Õll negotiate whatever your problem is.  We don't know your problems, we don't live here.  We come here, you don't know our problems, but we're with you.  They were't asking for anything other than a chance to show that we had a whole lot of intelligence and skills going to waste simply because a person didn't get a chance.  Didn't get a break. 

Sears and Roebuck were pretty much in our favor.  We opened up a place called Teen Town, which was a teen hang-in for young guys.  The police at the time were coming around and two or three youngsters on the corner were being arrested simply for standing on the corner.  I was arrested; I was a working man.  I had kids at the time.  I would get off of work...  There's a friend of mine standing on the corner, Hey, How you doing?, shake hands and what not.  Just when the police roll up at that particular time and I got to go home.  I'm thirty-four years old and they're telling me to go home.  Get off of the corner.  I just got home from work.  That's insulting.  Okay?  But this was the way things went.  I could talk about this for a hundred years. 

We had what was called the African Lion.  And that was given basically with our culture.  We had what they called the khufees, the dashikis, the little fans and stuff, the bull tails to swat the flies out of your face, and this was some of the things we exchanged with some of the other groups in terms of whatever they were doing in the garment business and we learned from each other.

Where the African Lion Roared Once, Bobby Gore looks today on bleak devastaton

We had two Tastee Freeze Parlors.  We had what was known as Simone Cosmetic which was a cosmetic endeavor for blacks.  Sammy Davis Jr. funded the seed money to get that up off the ground.  We had what was called the West Side paper stock company.  We were the first, well, I won't say people that thought, but in terms of the gang situation, we were the first ones that came up with a real proposal in terms of recycling paper.  And our thing was to work through the schools, have the school kids bring papers in whichever classroom came up with the most papers, they would get free lunches for a week or something of that nature.  Or the if the school produced such and such we had X amount of money set aside for them to get books or whatever the school wanted to use it for. 

The money came through the National Bank of Chicago and some of the expertise in terms of running some of the businesses came through the Britannia Corporation, based on the recycling and whatnot.  There were what was known as the Tenant Rights Action Group.  Most of you have probably heard of slum landlords.  You here of people making you pay 4 or 5 hundred dollars for something that you wouldn't put your dog in.  And they had nerve enough to come and put you out of there.  They set your furniture on the street and then people would come by and help themselves to everybody's stuff. 

We had what was called the House of Lords.  We had two of those.  These were teen hang-ins to keep the police from arresting these guys on the corner.  During school hours, the place was closed.  Two hours after school is out, that was all dedicated to homework and tutoring inside the place, for reading, writing, so forth and so on.  After 7 o'clock, then the gangs, the little white folks that they could shoot pool, play the ping pong, cards, checkers, and chess, that kind of thing.  Then we had the management training program.  We got a group of young men together to learn management training in terms of the businesses that we had.  And that money came through the Youth Action, which was a department of the Labor Department, so they did train 20 of our teams in youth management, in business management.  Then we had Malcome X GED program.  This is during the time when Malcome X.  Anybody that wanted to go and try to get their GED and then decide back in the mid-50's, the mid 60's ask why the schools couldn't be opened at night and be unitized in terms of parenting skills and home economics or whatever it is in terms of the older people that had kids could utilize the building.  It's just opened 5 hours a day and it's closed the rest of the time and we're saying, Let's put this to some kind of use.  And we asked the board of Education to help us develop some programs for these hours.  It was a no good idea at the time, but now they're trying to do it. 

[Question: jmh] What is your analysis of why they came after these programs? 

We couldn't be allowed to succeed.  We were way beyond what they thought we could go before we saw a part with the little moneys that they were giving us.  In the early sixties, we had a program that we worked together with Harvard University and the program was put together to go all the way back to the 1700's up until now and talk about the diversity of groups in the communities who had this behavior and how they might with the white flight.  They recognized a lot of things that we were proposing to them.  As a result of one of our endeavors, they built George Carlin High School.  But this was another era.  But inside this report I got one part, this thick, and there's four other parts.  It pointed out exactly what they could've done and didn't do.  Instead of taking the Willis Way, they could've built a couple more schools.  What they did, they patched up a couple of schools and painted the Willis Wagons and so forth and so on and made a promise to do George Carlin's High School.  This was a partnership with Harvard.  There were a lot of things that were pointed out in the results of this situation where they could stop a lot of problems on the West Side, had they just spent a little money, but they didn't.

[Question] Can you talk about your situation?

What I went through?  Cess pool.  When I went into jail, they still had what they called the batons.  I do'n't know if you're familiar with the Marx Bill.  They stopped that years ago, in the 70's.  There was no talking, you don't care how hot or cold it is, you always had to have your clothes on.  You couldn't look behind you, you could look on either side of you, but you couldn't look behind you.  You could speak to the person in front of you, but you couldn't speak to the person on either side, and you walk a lot.  Every morning, at a certain time, you get up for breakfast.  Lunch at a certain time.  They tell you when to get up, when to lay down, when to wash, take care of your personal situations and what not, they take away all of your freedoms, basically. 

It is a punishment situation, but some people, as with everything, you're always going to have somebody who's going to always do well.  And as a result of that, they caused a lot of problems down there.  They're to the place now, where they're taking the books away from the guys, they disbanded most of the educational programs that they had there.  I was fortunate enough to graduate from Lewis University and Northern Illinois University.  My first couple of years, in terms of the college situation, I did my best to graduate with honors and that was hard.  And the more I found out, learned what actually makes this society tick, and what makes people tick, the more I wanted to learn.  And I tried to put myself in a position where if whatever it was that I tried to do, it would be useful and helpful to people.  But I can also say, even though the rape situation is what a lot of people like to hear about, it wasn't that prevalent in the institution, in terms of raping and all that stuff, it wasn't that prevalent.  And then again, too, at the time I was incarcerated, I would feel safe to say maybe a good 50-60% of the institution was black and gang members and Hispanic.

 [Question] Do think that there's chances today that the gangs -- the gangs are much different today then they were back then -- could they become, could the Vice Lords become a model for gangs today?  Is that a possible thing to happen.  How you guys transformed the group, could that happen today?

He bought his.  We had certain stars:  one star elite, two star elite, three star, five stars is universal elite.  He could go anywhere that Vice Lords are and be recognized as universal elite, and what he's says, that basically counts as long as heÕs not doing anything wrong.  He cannot make that final decision.  He has to go into that group and talk with whoever leading this gang here.  He's bringing a message from the main guys, but if they don't want no part, they got the option to do that, to say that, we don't want no part in that.  Maybe the next endeavor we get into, maybe we'll want a part.  But the way things are going now, these guys would be challanged because they're not thinking of the next guy.  Some of them have relatives that don't have shoes, don't have food.  And these guys are out there spending 2-3 thousand on a weekend buying drinks for everyone in the place.  And $5 thousand of gold on his neck, so heavy he can't hold his head up, he's got so much gold on him, could feed the whole neighborhood.  What about Ms. Mable, that's eighty something years old now and changed your diapers and babysitted for you