Youth gangs establishing turf in at least 9 Southern cities - Rise in activity linked to reverse migration pattern

The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - Tuesday, August 19, 1986

Author: COWLES, ANNE COPELAND, LARRY, Anne Cowles and Larry Copeland Staff Writers: STAFF

At least nine cities below the Mason-Dixon Line have been hit by a wave of youth gang crime similar to that plaguing Atlanta. Their activity is evident in police reports across the Deep South: Timothy Antwan "Peanut" Harris, leader of Atlanta's most notorious youth gang , DownByLaw , pleaded guilty Monday to the murder of 16-year-old London V. Jackson, member of a rival gang , Five Percent Nations. Similar incidents have been recorded in Jackson, Miss., Nashville, Memphis and Chattanooga, Tenn., Birmingham and Mobile, Ala., Charlotte, N.C., and Charleston, S.C.

They call themselves the Q Boys or the Vice Lords, the Black Gangster Disciples or the State Prison Pimps.

But these youth gangs do not walk the streets of Chicago or New York City. They call the South their home.

At least nine cities below the Mason-Dixon Line have been hit by a wave of youth gang crime similar to that plaguing Atlanta. Their activity is evident in police reports across the Deep South:

- Timothy Antwan "Peanut" Harris, leader of Atlanta's most notorious youth gang , DownByLaw , pleaded guilty Monday to the murder of 16-year-old London V. Jackson, member of a rival gang , Five Percent Nations.

- In Jackson, Miss., a member of the Q Boys youth gang was shot in the back last month during a fracas in the parking lot of a shopping mall. Two members of the rival Vice Lords were charged with murder.

- Officials in Memphis, Tenn., have set up a four-member task force to wipe out youth gangs , some of whom have initiation rites that include robbery and car theft.

- Chattanooga, Tenn., police 18 months ago identified 15 to 20 youth gangs , whose biggest crimes are auto theft and assault and battery.

Youth gangs first appeared in the South in 1979, when Birmingham initially reported gang problems, according to Walter B. Miller of Cambridge, Mass., who has studied gangs for 20 years. Miller has not included New Orleans or Miami in his research on the South because the gang problems in those cities "are a different kettle of fish."

"It was always a mystery why the Old Plantation South cities did not have gang problems while cities in the Northeast and West were having problems with gangs ," said Miller, former director of the National Youth Gang Survey from 1975 to 1980. The survey was funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and Harvard Law School.

"Then in 1979, Birmingham began to report youth gangs . I was flabbergasted at first. Then other Southern cities followed in 1984 and 1985: Memphis, Jackson, Chattanooga, Mobile. In Nashville there were stirrings. . . . Now we have Southern cities, some of whom have rather serious gang problems," Miller said.

Like many Northern gangs , the members of the Southern gangs come from mostly low-income communities. Most Southern gang members are black males in their early teens to mid-20s.

Miller and other experts attribute the spread of gangs into the Deep South to reverse migration among poorer blacks. That is, as factories started closing in many heavily industrial Northern cities, black families, many of whom were descendants of blacks who went north to get the factory jobs, came back south to Memphis and other Southern cities.

"Blacks who left the South years ago for better opportunities in the Midwest began coming back to the South in the 1960s. I'm sure that's part of the picture," Miller said.

Maj. George Curry, head of the youth unit of the Nashville Police Department and a criminal justice professor at Belmont College there, uses Ford's new Saturn plant in Tennessee as an example.

"We're getting a type of people we've never had before because of the new industry," Curry said. "This type of industry draws people from the urban areas whose children have been living in these gangtype of situations."

For whatever reason, gangs in Memphis and Jackson are more identifiable than gangs that have sprung up in Southern cities farther to the east.

In Memphis, the first major Southern city south of Chicago, the gangs use identifying symbols, such as pitchforks, crossed canes, stars and bunnies. Some of the gangs also have adopted the names of long-established Chicago gangs , and one Memphis gang leader is a 17-year-old who led a Chicago gang with the same name.

Memphis Deputy Police Chief Fred J. Warner, head of a task force set up to fight gangs there, said he is aware of seven gangs plus numerous social clubs.

Three gangs in Jackson, Miss., also have adopted the same names as Chicago gangs - The Folks, the Blackstones and the Vice Lords.

The Vice Lords wear berets, and members of other youth gangs use "hand signs, or they might stand a certain way in a group," said Jackson Police Chief L.C. Smith.

Jackson Mayor Dale Danks Jr. appointed a 62-member task force last month to find solutions to the gang problem after the fatal shooting at the Jackson Mall, where as many as 150 youths were gathered. Two other Jackson teenagers were injured in the exchange of gunfire, which culminated an argument between rival street gangs in west Jackson.

Atlanta apparently is in the early stages of gang evolution. Youth gangs in Atlanta do not appear to have identifying paraphernalia or any organized leadership.

In 1983, Atlanta police identified 22 school social clubs, or fraternal organizations, whose members in some instances had been involved in scuffles centered around school rivalry.

But a few weeks ago, Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner George Napper said that a new organized youth squad had identified seven youth gangs . At least some of those gangs evolved from school social clubs.

School social clubs also have grown into gangs in Charlotte, N.C., and Mobile, Ala.

Youth gang activity in Chattanooga was at a peak a year and a half ago, when police identified 15 to 20 small groups.

"They have more of a structure to their gangs up north. We don't. The gangs up north have more history to them. We're just at the beginning stages," said Rudy Utt, supervisor of probation services for Hamilton County, Tenn., Juvenile Court.

Even in Charleston, S.C., a cradle of Southern gentility, three youths were killed within one month last year in clashes police attribute to "cross-town animosities." One of the teen victims was stomped to death.

The killings caused concern in the community about gangs , but police said youth gangs do not exist in Charleston.

According to Miller, argument over whether a city has youth gangs is "absolutely classic. Disagreements over the definition of gangs are as common as pro-abortion, anti-abortion arguments.

"Police normally are very reluctant to admit that a gang problem exists in their city," Miller said.

Miller, through hundreds of interviews, has come up with six components that characterize groups that the interviewees were willing to call gangs : illegal activity; identifiable leadership; identifying with a territory, facility (such as a housing project) or enterprise; being organized; associating continuously; and having specific purposes.

"There is a classic stereotype of a `real' gang - the Sharks and Jets of `West Side Story' with one centralized leader and the guarding of turf. But this image doesn't really correspond to very much of anything, even in New York City.

"Police use this to deny there are gangs . They set up a straw man, like the Sharks and the Jets, and then they compare their own gangs and they don't measur e up, so they're not gangs ," Miller said.