Since 1968, the wars between black and Latino gangs had left dozens dead and placed neighborhoods in a state of siege. But the killing of Cornell Benjamin, a high-ranking member of the Ghetto Brothers, finally brought about a crisis. Would the gangs escalate the violence into the bloodiest war the borough had ever seen? Or would they attempt to end the crisis by ushering in a new era in the Bronx?
As the meeting proceeded, gang members stepped forward to bitterly denounce each other. Waves of tension swept through the room. But there was also a sense that something historic was happening. In attendance, and profoundly moved, was a 14 year-old Black Spade warlord known on the streets as Bambaataa, watching closely and envisioning the future.
In the end, Benjamin Melendez and Carlos Suarez of the Ghetto Brothers led the dozens of feuding gangs to agree to sign a peace treaty. In that instant, the hierarchy of street cool in the Bronx shifted—from nihilistic gang-banging to promethean party-starting. It was a moment that unleashed a pulse of creative energy that would eventually coalesce into the cultural movement that would be called hip-hop.
After the treaty, the Ghetto Brothers gang became something of a social services agency, offering a city-funded peacemakers program that tried to provide new opportunities for the alienated youth. But, of course, the money would run out.
The future was not in politics. It was in culture.
Melendez was leading the Ghetto Brothers’ band, a post-bugalu Latin funk-rock band made up of his blood kin and gang family members. At wild peace parties across the South Bronx, they literally filled the void left by the gang truce and governmental retreat with doo-wop and Britpop harmonies, stabbing JBs-ish guitar licks and soaring Santana-styled leads, blazing Afro-Latino breaks, and the occasional aguinaldo.
By the following summer, in the West Bronx and the Southeast Bronx, guitars had given way to turntables and gangs were giving way to crews, as DJs Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa shaped a new Bronx youth culture that would become the voice of a generation.
Until now, the story of the Ghetto Brothers, the Bronx gang peace, and the seeds of the global cultural explosion called hip-hop has remained a hidden history. But in the musical and social ferment of this lost era are all kinds of narratives and lines of inquiry waiting to be explored, including:
• the still largely unwritten street-level cultural histories of the Bronx; • the nature of racial segregation between young blacks and Latinos in the Bronx; • the continuities and difficulties of cultural crossover in hip-hop; and • the central role of gang peace in hip-hop’s creative surges throughout the movement’s history.
This EMP panel offers an unprecedented opportunity to document and understand the beginnings of the hip-hop movement and the emergence of a generation’s music and culture in a whole new light.
The panel will include a multimedia presentation, including
• historical footage of the 1971 peace meeting and of Bronx gang leaders;
• maps documenting the social ecologies of the gangs and the crews;
• photographs and documents of the era;
• and, of course, very hot, very rare Bronx music.