By the 1990s, hip hop had grown to be one of the most prominent musical genres, if not the MOST prominent genre in America. Possibly it became the most prominent musical style in the world. I’ve never been to a country where you didn’t hear it playing in stores, on the radio, in restaurants, or blasting out of car windows. This is true even in Luxembourg which I would consider to be the least hip hop-like place I’ve ever been. A lot of journalistic writing has been dedicated to uncovering the roots of hip hop in the likes of James Brown, The Last Poets, and various other obscure funk, jazz, and soul bands from the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve encountered less journalism or historical studies that have examined the social origins and influences that fed into later hip hop culture. There is one group of African-Americans who may not have directly influenced the genre in the beginning, but they certainly embodied a lot of the themes that had become prominent in the music by the 1990s. Natalie Y. Moore and Lance Williams’ The Almighty Black P Stone Nation does not examine this cultural connection, but it does lay a groundwork for a cultural historian to see how the hip hop movement and some of what it stands for did not emerge out of a void.
This history begins in the south side of Chicago with its heavy concentration of African-American people, many of which were there because they or their ancestors migrated from the South to escape the racism and poverty, to the booming city of Chicago where the steel industry and others needed manual, unskilled laborers. That is where two young teenagers, Jeff Fort and Eugene “Bull” Hairston dropped out of school at a young age and formed a gang called the Blackstone Rangers. Part of their motivation was strength in numbers when facing off against their rivals, the Disciples, who preyed on kids from other neighborhoods who had to pass through their turf to get to school. The Blackstone Rangers soon got involved in all the crime that gang membership entailed including drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, extortion, protection rackets, and street violence. But the Rangers took a slightly different turn from the Disciples and other gangs.
Fort and Hairston established a strange alliance when the ministers at a Presbyterian church took them under their wing and allowed the teenagers to use their property as headquarters. It was a symbiotic relationship since the church received federal aid money for a job creation program because they worked directly with troubled teenagers who had some social capital in their neighborhood. The Blackstone Rangers also benefited because they had a legitimate looking place to go, keeping themselves off the streets and out of the eyes of the police. They also participated in the job creation program, directing unemployed youth towards occupations that benefited them and their families. But the Rangers also stole money from the church and some critics even say the ministers allowed this to happen in order to stay on the good side of the gang. Whatever the case may be, the Blackstone Rangers grew in stature and reputation all over Chicago. They chartered other gangs from all over the city, renamed the organization the Almighty Black P Stone Nation, and Fort and Hairston set up a ruling council of twenty one leaders to oversee the whole corporation. They got even bigger when they began doing business with La Cosa Nostra. When Bull Hairston got sent up the river for a very long paid vacation in the penitentiary, Fort took over the leadership position and ruled the Nation until he died. Even when he himself got sent to prison, he commanded the gang from behind bars.
But something else happened to Jeff Fort while he did his time. Like so many African-American people who end up in jail, he found religion and like so many of those others, the religion he found was Islam. Fort had joined up with Noble Drew Ali’s cult the Moorish Science Temple and when released, he announced that he was changing the Black P Stone Nation into an unorthodox Muslim sect he called El Rukn based on Noble Drew Ali’s teachings. This temple was run out of a building called The Fort. But El Rukn was not entirely pure and holy; while there was an element of sincerity in Fort’s newly designed religion, it was also used as a cover for the same old gangbanging that the Black P Stone Nation had been involved in all along. El Rukn also began embracing militant Black Nationalism and started stockpiling heavy artillery including machine guns and explosives. One member even got busted in a sting operation when buying a rocket launcher from undercover FBI agents. The feds also wiretapped El Rukn when they sent a delegation to Libya to meet with Moammar Gaddafi.
The writers of this book are not upfront about how they feel in regards to this gang. They point out some of the positive things they were responsible for like helping teenagers find jobs, working with Martin Luther King when he visited Chicago, embracing Black Power, embracing Islam as a means of community building, running youth groups through El Rukn, and sometimes preventing inter-gang violence rather than promoting it. Yet they also point out how their gangster stance was detrimental to the African-American community. By selling heroin and crack on inner city street corners, by running prostitution rings that pimped out young black girls, and extorting money from Black business owners they were hypocritically harming the community they claimed to be supporting. The strange irony is that Jeff Fort and his followers couldn’t see the schizophrenic nature of what they were doing and in fact appeared to genuinely believe in all its contradictory facets both good and evil. The authors do point out the gang’s strange ideological orientation to society, but they are also strangely dismissive of their later stances regarding revolutionary violence. They write about their potential for terrorist activities as if it is just an eccentricity, downplaying it as a threat. Their unwillingness to thoroughly engage with the potential for destruction that the Black P Stone Nation had in their collection of weaponry is a weakness in the writing.
The other huge flaw in this book is the writing itself. The subject matter is examined from a distance without any insiders’ points of view. It reads like a listing of events as if the gang was never really made up of individual people. It is the type of bird’s eye view prose you get when reading a 20th century author’s accounts of ancient Roman history. You just can’t see the world through the eyes of the people being written about. The writing is also stiff and stilted, lacking in flow due to there being too many short sentences that make it an uphill battle to read. This book is a good example of how amateurish writing can make a fascinating subject matter look bland and uninspired.
The Almighty Black P Stone Nation is not a great piece of writing, but it does serve as a good introduction to this contradictory and influential African-American social organization. It covers the territories of gang culture, street culture, youth culture, prison, social conditions, political ideology, revolution, outlawry, Black theology and religion, inner city violence, and it even touches on fashion. All these themes show up in rap lyrics and the Black P Stone Nation had an unusual way of bringing all these elements together as if the whole gang where the atom that split and exploded into the subculture we now know as hip hop. All of this happened under the tutelage of the visionary Jeff Fort. But his vision was distorted and he might have been just a little more crazy than not. He certainly could see farther than he could reach. This book is marred by too much reporting and not enough analysis. That analysis will hopefully come later because there is a lot to unpack here. The ability the Black P Stone Nation has for holding together over such a long period of time despite all its contortions and contradictions may say something important about the nature of human societies. Those secret forces may be malignant or they may be benign, but we won’t know what they are until this subject matter gets taken up by a more analytical scholar.
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