During the week of the Kendrick Lamar Pop Out Concert scheduled for Juneteenth in Inglewood, I was busy reviewing my research on the history of Watts. Watts figures in the penultimate chapter of the hybrid memoir I am writing because I owned a home (or a few mortgages) for five years – 2004 until 2009 — in that unincorporated area of Los Angeles. Since I am mixing the history of Los Angeles with my own personal experience as a writer in this city, I knew that in writing about Watts I needed to include some history on the Watts Uprising of 1965. Both the research in my manuscript and my statements here draw heavily on the article by Alex Alonso titled “Out of the Void: Street Gangs in Black Los Angeles.”

The Watts riots of 1965 that were sparked by police officers using excessive force on a Black family during a traffic stop were pivotal in the history of street gangs in Los Angeles. After six days of riots that left thirty-four people dead, L.A.’s rival gangs focused on unity and the ability to work together. And they were successful during a three-year period.

 At the Pop Out concert, Kendrick and others reflected on his concert’s ability to draw rival gangs and various other participants together to celebrate the Juneteenth holiday commemorating the end of Black enslavement. But why gangs? And how do gangs figure into the history of the City of Compton and greater Los Angeles?

As Alonso clearly delineates, Black gangs in Los Angeles developed as a reaction to the white racism that was fundamental in founding this country. As Black migrants left the segregated South and their numbers grew in the rapidly industrializing Los Angeles of the 1940’s, Black residents sought homes beyond the Central Avenue corridor to which they were limited by racially restrictive covenants. The KKK and white teenage hate groups like the Spook Hunters organized to keep Black residents from moving into predominantly white parts of South LA and adjacent cities such as Downey, Compton, Lynwood, and South Gate. Black teens formed their own clubs in order to protect their neighborhoods and combat the white violence being perpetuated against them and their families.

Over the years leading up to the Watts Uprising, South L.A. and cities like Compton became increasingly Black resulting in little need for these groups of Black youths. Yet the formations remained within the deteriorating political and socioeconomic environment of the era, and many of the Black gangs began to engage in Black-on-Black violence. L.A.’s Crips and Bloods gangs filled the void left by former street clubs that had engaged in the positive street behavior which initially resisted white racism and then advocated for Black power. And street violence began to mirror Black socioeconomics as gangs on the Eastside battled with the more upwardly mobile Westside gangs.

Black gangs in L.A. have always been connected to politics – initially, the politics of racism, and later the politics of the Black Panther Party and the revolutionary uprisings in Central America. Regarding the BPP, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter who was president of the LA-based Black Panther Party was also a member of the Slausons gang. Carter and BPP member John Huggins were targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence agency COINTELPRO, and they were both killed at UCLA’s Campbell Hall in 1969. After COINTELPRO decimated L.A.’s Black Power Movement, the behavior of street gangs became “self-genocidal” in nature.

These “self-genocidal” tendencies broadened in scope during the time of revolutionary upheaval in Central America. Alonso states that between 1979 and 1988, there were more than 2,994 gang-related murders in L.A., and these occurred when the US Government was allegedly involved in facilitating the distribution of crack cocaine amongst Black gangs in order to fund the CONTRA counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua – further proof of just how intertwined Black gangs are in the politics of not only L.A., but the nation.

When Kendrick Lamar beams onstage about members of rival gangs coming together to join him at his concert, there are layers of culture, history and politics that deserve to be reckoned with. Black South L.A. formed in resistance to white racism, and California dreamin has rarely been our state of mind no matter how many sunny afternoons fill a calendar year. So many dreams have passed on, packed up and left, been either locked up or tragically shot down. And like Kendrick said, Black L.A. hasn’t been the same since…

Unlike other cities, greater Los Angeles, like its Eastside, has demanded that its rappers stay true to the streets or connected to their working-class roots in ways that other cities have not.  That is part of LA street culture and culture, as evidenced by Kendrick’s stage, is something we live in the moment without rationalizing about history and politics. Until we must. And then we analyze to discern if the social connections are real, partial, or just make believe.

How much of the history and politics of street gangs in L.A. is conscious to Kendrick Lamar and those who celebrated both on and offstage with him on Juneteenth? That is a question I can’t answer. But I can reflect on the history and politics of this topic in my memoir which I must hastily get back to writing.