Black P. Stones - a Civil Rights Group Turned into a Street Gang with the Finesse of a Black Nationalist Organization

You can thank the American Gangster show on Centric for this one. The Black P. Stones was a gang formed in Chicago that started out as a civil rights organization that morphed into a black nationalistic group. Some of you may wonder what the difference between civil rights and black nationalism is. Well the later describes organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League headed by Marcus Garvey that advocated a Black national identity. The philosophies of such organizations do not promote multiculturalism and have a promote ideas of self-segregation and isolation away from the mainstream society.

While Marcus Garvey is often seen as the forefather Black Nationalism may have started with Martin Delany in the 1800s. Civil rights, as it played out in the United States with the African-American Civil Rights Movement, took a different approach. The distinction is made because there were other civil rights movements around the world that had nothing to do with African-Americans, such as that in Northern Ireland. It was a precursor to other movements such as the Black Power Movement that encouraged self-sufficiency and racial dignity. The documentary on Centric says that even though the Black P. Stones were involved in petty crimes they were still supported heavily through philanthropists and even public agencies.

The idea that this organization, a gang yet still a force by which racial progress was being made, was supported through activities other than those that are typically associated with gangs such as prostitution, racketeering and the drug trade fascinates me. As you can imagine the Black P. Stones did not continue to receive that federal money for long. What fascinates me about street gangs is that a lot of them started out with a purpose that was completely different from the reality of what those gangs have turned into today, and not just in the African-American community. Everyone had a different idea of how the goals of the civil rights movement would be achieved, and though America likes to focus on Martin Luther King and Malcom X there were other players behind the scenes. Look up Jeff Fort for more information about how all of this went down in Chicago back in the sixties. Chicago may not be the cultural force for the African-American community today that it was back in the sixties, but its contributions to the national discourse about self-sufficiency and self-awareness in the Black community cannot be discounted or ignored.