Chapter Two - The Kinds of Street-Gang Autobiography

Summary

There are, according to my count, 32 book- length street- gang autobiographies, and many other, briefer, autobiographical narratives have been published in books about street gangs. There is wide variety here. The first, by the pseudonymous Stanley (no. 63), was published in 1930. Colton Simpson's Inside the Crips (no. 61), Michael Scott's Lords of Lawndale: My Life in a White Chicago Street Gang (no. 58) and Terrell Wright's Home of the Body Bags (no. 70) were published in 2005. A significant number of 1960s and 1970s gangbangers and ex- gangbangers joined the Black Panther Party, and so there are several street- gang autobiographies in Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21 (no. 36). Shakur's Monster (no. 60) is the best- known street- gang autobiography. It was written by an imprisoned L.A. Crip. Shakur tells us that Stanley “Tookie” Williams was his biggest hero. Williams was one of the founders of the Crips, and he too was an autobiographer. In the course of his long stay on San Quentin's death row— before his 2005 execution— Williams wrote Redemption: From Original Gangster to Nobel Prize Nominee (no. 68), and he co- wrote a whole series of autobiographical children's books (no. 66).

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when Tookie Williams was establishing his rep in South Central L.A., Luis Rodriguez was active in a Chicano gang not many blocks away. After leaving the gang, he wrote Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (no. 54). Claude Brown (no. 37) remembers Harlem in the late 1940s and 1950s. Geoffrey Canada (no. 39) remembers the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. Canada says little about gangs per se, but he is wonderfully perceptive about the ways in which boys learn the attitudes and skills characteristic of gangbangers. Patrick Donadio was a member of an Italian street gang in the Hungry Hill section of Schenectady, New York. By the time he began work on Touch Me If You Dare! (no. 44), he was an Assembly of God pastor in Eagle River, Alaska. Mona Ruiz, once a member of a Santa Ana girl gang, had worked for some years as a member of the Santa Ana, California, police force before collaborating with Geoff Boucher on Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz (no. 55).