Backdrop to Hip Hop
Chapter 1
Backdrop to Hip Hop: The Story of the South Bronx Disaster
The South Bronx…was the death trap. The most ugliest place on the face of the earth was the South Bronx. –Benjy Melendez, founder of the Ghetto Brothers
The Bronx, where I grew up, has even become an international code word for our epoch’s accumulated urban nightmares: drugs, gangs, arson, murder, terror, thousands of buildings abandoned, neighborhoods transformed into garbage- and brick-strewn wilderness. –Marshall Berman, ca. 1978
Patterns of Paragraphs Based on Ruin –Rakim
Like any culture, hip hop persuades its participants to adopt its style and attitude in every aspect from language to fashion to dance to even how one walks. Upon entering hip hop culture (or dare I say the hip hop way of life), those not born into the culture and traditions of hip hop learn early on that they must draft any number of unwritten rules. From street dress codes, to physical posturings, to the adaptation of a uniquely enunciated vocabulary, and, of course, an aggressive and competitive world view, hip hop culture is, in some ways, a way of life. It has often (correctly) been said that hip hop started in the South Bronx. Although this statement is true on the face of it, it’s incomplete. A more accurate statement is that hip hop started in the streets of the South Bronx. It is that very detail — “the streets” — that gives us the most appropriate insight into the origins of hip hop and, subsequently, the longevity of it. However, for most, the story of how the ubiquitous South Bronx “streets” were created is unknown. In fact, the narrative of poverty, crime, and violence in the South Bronx is often either taken for granted or worse, over simplified. Still, the cause and reality of the backdrop to hip hop is far more sinister than one might imagine.
The principles, ideas, approaches, and traditions of hip hop culture are not manufactured components of a conglomerate enterprise or the trickle down characteristics of an elite society. The hip hop ethos has its own backdrop, a backdrop that is the result of a combination of many fascinating, inhumane, and tragic factors. The backdrop of hip hop has been described before in different texts by various scolars and historians. However, I should point out that much of what this backdrop is comprised of has yet to really reach the consciousness of those who are squarely outside of the upper echelon of academia. Therefore, in this chapter, I illuminate the backdrop, and the little-known backstory, of hip hop, not only for those who might not otherwise be privy to it, but also for those who may not be aware of the fundamental mitigating circumstances behind hip hop’s origins. Also, I believe that in order for one to more accurately understand the “soul” and fundamental life force of hip hop culture and rap (its chief musical expression), it’s important to first grasp some understanding of the backdrop of hip hop.
Spectacular Ruin
At the end of the 1973 blaxploitation movie classic Black Caesar , Tommy Gibbs, the film’s protagonist, limps out of the subway into the post-industrial South Bronx. The Harlem gangster, who having just escaped an assassination attempt, sees the place of his youth as perhaps a temporary hideaway and safe haven. But when he returns to the Bronx he finds that it has been burnt out and abandoned. As he struggles to draw meaning from the hill of rubble and stones that lie where the entrance to his boyhood home used to be, he is met by a small gang of teens, who swarm on him like a pack of vultures. They beat him and take his belongings, then leave him for dead. At this point, the camera pulls back to reveal a neighborhood of ruins...and the movie ends.
If you lived in the South Bronx in the 1970s, this scene from Black Caesar would not have shocked you, you would have recognized it all too well. The abandoned, post-war-like world that was so accurately depicted in the movie would have been eerily familiar to you. But to the average resident of the South Bronx (then and now) and the average hip hop/rap fan, the causes of the dreadful South Bronx Disaster are little known. To truly understand the conditions of the South Bronx in the 1970s, and to really have a complete grasp of the origins of hip hop culture and rap music, you must first look at how the South Bronx of “ill repute” was actually created.
Robert Moses’s People Removal
In the late 1930s and 1940s, cities across the United States enacted “urban renewal policies” and began to create redevelopment programs. These early projects, which were said to be for the “greater good” of the community, were generally focused on slum clearance and were implemented by local public housing authorities, which were responsible for both clearing slums and building new affordable housing. In some ways, urban renewal programs can be seen as an outgrowth of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the massive legislative agenda which sought to help the United States recover from the Great Depression that had began with the stock market crash of 1929. The most notable and prominent example of urban renewal (that was ostensibly for the greater good) took place in New York City between the 1930s and 1970s, under the direction of one man, Robert Moses.
Robert Moses, who was not an elected official but an unelected bureaucrat with immense political power and connections, gained his power through his reputation for getting large construction projects done. In fact, he had gained so much power over the years that the many elected officials whom he was supposedly accountable to instead became dependent on him. But if his power made him one of the largest political figures in New York City, then his take on modernism and urban renewal certainly made him one of the most controversial figures as well.
Robert Moses harbored an astonishingly insensitive modernist view of public structures and the public itself. Many of his most impressive and notable public projects strongly suggest that he consistently favored automobile traffic over human and community needs. Moreover, Moses was obsessed with building new projects, “I’m just going to keep on building. You do the best you can to stop it,” he quipped when pressed in the 1950s about his brand and pace of building in and around New York City. Throughout the latter part of his career, Moses’s public works were so immense and rampant that they displaced hundreds of thousands of New York City residents, and destroyed thousands of traditional neighborhoods along the way.
Robert Moses’s controversial career in public life stretched from the early 1920s to the late 1960s. But if it could be said that Moses’s earlier public works (prior to 1950) were distinguished by design and beauty, then it must be said that his projects of the 1950s and 60s were distinguished by brutality and insensitivity. To be fair, in the late 1930s and 1940s, other cities across the United States enacted urban renewal policies and began to create redevelopment programs.
However, the concept, objective, and directive of Moses’s Urban Renewal was not entirely in line with that of the rest of the country at that time. Through the programs of his “special agency,” the Committee on Slum Clearance, Moses masterminded innumerable construction projects that consistently displaced families, disorganized communities, and, ultimately, devastated the lives of many New Yorkers. For this chapter’s purpose, it’s Moses’s New York City projects of the 1950s and 1960s that are of major importance. It was some of these projects — specifically, the Cross Bronx Expressway — that collectively shattered the South Bronx, and set in motion the disastrous conditions from which hip hop emerged.
For more than 30 years, beginning in the 1930s and ending in the late 1960s, Robert Moses oversaw a magnitude of immensely complex building projects that were seemingly designed to make Manhattan Island an easy commute for rich and upper middle-class whites, who had begun moving to New York suburbs and upstate during the late 1940s. There was the West Side Highway, an ambitious project (as were all of Moses’s projects) that saw expressway miles stretch from the lower West Side of Manhattan all the way upstate into Westchester. There was the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, which ran from the edge of Long Island and connected to Manhattan via the Battery Tunnel, another one of Moses’s creations. There was the Tri Boro Bridge project, a true triumph of modernism that connected the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan through a complex web of highways, parkways, and bridges. There were innumerable parks and housing developments, and then there was the Cross Bronx Expressway, a colossal expressway which carved a hole right through the center of the Bronx. Each one of the aforementioned projects did their part in displacing millions of New York City residents, and disrupting neighborhoods and communities throughout Manhattan and the outerboroughs. But of all Moses’s famed construction projects, none played a bigger role in the devastation and destruction of the South Bronx than the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Construction on the Cross Bronx Expressway began in 1953. To make room for the immense and unprecedented expressway, more than a dozen solid, settled, and densely populated neighborhoods were literally blasted and bulldozed, forcing an estimated 60,000 working- and lower middle-class people — mostly Jews, but many Italians, blacks, and Irish as well — out of their homes, effectively destroying solid and settled neighborhoods that had stood for 30 years. Construction for the Cross Bronx Expressway ended in the early 1960s. But this ending was only the very beginning of the ruin and devastation that the Bronx would be forced to endure.
As more than one hundred thousand whites abruptly fled the Bronx during the late 1950s and early 1960s, in what is commonly known as the “white flight from the Bronx,” the apartments they left behind (some literally overnight) were crammed with impoverished blacks and Latinos, who had been relocated under the auspices of urban renewal and the Welfare Department. This wholesale move-in spread panic among many whites who had stayed in the Bronx, and it accelerated their flight to the suburbs of Long Island and upstate New York. It’s further worth noting that tens of thousands of blacks and Latinos had already been displaced before by Robert Moses’s “slum clearance” programs — programs that were really nothing more than public cover for some of Moses’s immense and overawing construction projects. In fact, nearly all of Moses’s construction projects hurt poor non-whites the most. I note this not to imply that Moses was a racist or that he did not like black or Latino people; on the contrary, evidence suggests that Moses’s wasn’t particularly fond of people in general, particularly those he deemed as being “in the way” of his building. Instead, I want to draw attention to the fact that nearly all of Moses’s immense (often over reaching) construction projects inevitably hurt and devastated poor non-whites disproportionately more than any other group in New York.
Robert Moses’s slum clearance programs ended in 1965, but again, by then, the South Bronx had literally been gutted and blasted by the Cross Bronx Expressway. And as the apartments that previously housed those whites (who took flight) were emptied out, they were reloaded with poor blacks and Latinos (most of which who were evicted and displaced from long settled neighborhoods in Greenwich Village and the West Side of Manhattan, again due to a number of Moses’s vast projects), this white flight accelerated. And the landlords wasted no time in raising the rents on their new “problem” tenants.
Housing Disruption
By the time Robert Moses’s slum clearance programs had ended, and after his power and influence had waned completely in 1970, housing overcrowding and social disruption had just begun its path to epidemic proportions. Between 1970 and 1980, more than 1.3 million white people had left New York. But there were a total of two million people who were uprooted, with more than 600,000 poor blacks and Latinos being shuttled into the South Bronx, which by then was an area large enough to perhaps house little less than half that number.
Before Moses’s reign was all over, he had effectively utilized TITLE I and TITLE III of the HOUSING ACT OF 1949 to finance the construction of non-residential public works as well as every Public Housing project in New York City. Essentially, Title I enabled the worst of the so-called urban renewal. It required a local public authority to choose the development sites in conformity to a “master plan,” get approval from the local government for site plans and site preparation plans (including relocation), condemn the property, and provide the one-third local contribution. The local authority, which was controlled by Robert Moses, would then clear the site, relocate the tenants, and auction the site to private developers. Finally, all Title I and Title III projects could be coordinated under one city master plan, which of course, was developed by Moses. In actuality, however, Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 didn’t merely provide Moses with two-thirds of the funding, it provided federal financing of more than 90% for his slum clearance programs — Moses’s reputation for getting the federal government to pay for his projects (and ruin) was well-renown. So, in effect, Robert Moses was also successful in getting the federal government to pay for his modern vision of New York.
But if Robert Moses’s vision of New York was purchased for almost nothing, the price paid by its poor non-white residents was tragically expensive. Many of Moses’s slum clearance programs really worked as a “poor removal” program for middle- and upper-class housing. In the book A Plague On Your Houses , the seminal study on New York City’s fire epidemic, Deborah and Rodrick Wallace report that one regular feature of Moses’s slum clearance programs inevitably “resulted in a vastly disproportionate targeting of communities of color for relocation.” Many minority-heavy slums were destroyed and replaced with more expensive housing or non-residential public works that were not accommodating to the original inhabitants.
Another alarming feature of Moses’s slum clearance programs was its reliance on re-housing residents in public-housing projects that concentrated distraught families and individuals into smaller spaces — where they would soon be deemed “problems.” Hundreds of thousands poor and working-class blacks and Latinos were uprooted and shuffled into public housing and ugly tenements all over New York City, with the vast majority of the residents being relocated to the South Bronx, where housing shortages were already severe. By 1970, there would be a new epidemic that would further accelerate the housing shortage in the South Bronx in a much more devastating way. It was an epidemic that would eventually establish the South Bronx as America’s number one urban disaster area.
Fire Epidemic: The Bronx Is Burning
The South Bronx lay in ruins, and the fires there were becoming larger, eroding away what was left after the epidemic crest had blitzed a high proportion of the housing. The New York City burnout disaster greatly exceeds this Indian disaster by any measure: time frame, involved population, involved area, number of deaths, number of disease cases, and number of lives derailed. —Deborah and Rodrick Wallace
As a result of Robert Moses’s slum clearance programs, large numbers of people were crammed into woefully inadequate housing supplies throughout New York City. But it was in the South Bronx were this theme took an even more sinister and tragic turn. Between 1969 and 1978, the population density in the South Bronx reached disastrous proportions. In its Master Plan for New York City in 1969, the New York City Department of Planning described the South Bronx as an area where most of the housing was grim, crowded tenements, where the majority of residents were black and Puerto Rican. But Robert Moses had been only one contributing factor to the housing disruption and destruction in the South Bronx, the other culprit was fire.
The South Bronx fire epidemic was one of the worst urban disasters in American history. Certainly, Moses’s slum clearance program was so good at disrupting housing and displacing communities that it created an even bigger housing problem for poor non-whites (blacks and Latinos) as well as other destitute and torn communities throughout New York City. And hundreds of thousands of housing units were lost in those areas where poor non-whites had been relocated to because of Moses’s modernism and slum clearance program. But this paled in comparison to what the fires did to housing in the South Bronx. Many families were burnt out of there homes sometimes three and four times. In fact, the fires of the South Bronx literally created an entirely new refugee class that trumped the movements of its predecessors, who themselves were the refugees of Moses’s slum clearance programs. These conditions led to a dangerously high level of housing density, which in turn made non-burnt-out housing structures susceptible to the surrounding fire wave. Indeed, throughout the South Bronx in the 1970s, seemingly whatever could burn did burn, leaving blocks upon blocks of charred and abandoned building shells. Sometimes an individual block would be destroyed in only a few months; a neighborhood would be destroyed in 6-12 months, leaving communities torn within an urban landscape that resembled the aftermath of a city bombed and blasted by war.
“The South Bronx was a real disaster,” recalls Benjy “Yellow Benjy” Melendez, social activist and founder and former member of the 1970s street gang, Ghetto Brothers. “The burning buildings was widespread. Fires were happening everywhere, and you had to be on alert all the time. It was a big problem! I mean, the South Bronx looked like World War II, like Germany after World War II. When you walked down the street — especially around Freeman, Tiffany, and Fox — and you looked up, the only thing you saw was a beautiful moon on a summer night. Nothing but empty shells of empty buildings. If you didn’t know, you’d think the Bronx was a war-torn area. That’s what it looked like, like a bunch of tanks just blasted buildings up.”
What Caused the Fires in the Bronx? The Arson Stigma of Poor Non-Whites
The fires in the South Bronx leading up to 1969 could be described as the inevitable result of dangerously high levels of population density. “Large numbers of people per square mile mean that large numbers of people are crammed into housing, with more cooking, more smoking, more trash generation, more use of electricity are going on per unit area. When high population density also results in a high proportion of the housing units being extremely overcrowded, the maintenance and services of the buildings require greater effort and resources to keep fire hazards to a minimum.” This is not to say that overcrowded poor non-whites are naturally prone to make fire hazards (though in the following section, you will see that this was suggested by the Rand Corporation and Roger Starr), but rather to show that given the set of the previously described mitigating housing conditions and circumstances, the greater potential for fire hazards in the South Bronx was a reality. But if the fires in the South Bronx between 1965 and 1969 were perhaps the inevitable result of the mitigating housing conditions and circumstances that were created by Robert Moses’s slum clearance programs, then the burnout that charred the South Bronx throughout the 1970s was the result of something far more lethal.
In 1969, the New York City/Rand Institute Fire Project conducted a study of and compiled data on fire alarms and fires in New York City. At best, the findings of the Rand Corporation Fire Project (which were heavily biased and clearly racially motivated), were negligent, incomplete, one-sided, and woefully inaccurate. At worst, the Rand findings were racist, intellectually narrow, and intentionally misguided and misleading. For one thing, the Rand Fire Project centered most of its attention on the contrast of racial composition of highincidence and low-incidence areas. Next, Rand attributed nearly every fire in the South Bronx to arson. (Subsequent analysis of the data did not back this up. Of the fires in buildings, only a very small portion were arson and that portion was not higher than the rate of proven arson found in wealthier neighborhoods.) While the Rand Institute paid major attention to the neighborhoods that were “heavily Negro and Puerto Rican and mostly poor,” it curiously avoided addressing several key factors that helped to create the fire epidemic in the South Bronx. For instance, it did not address the concentrated reductions in fire service (fire house closings and defunct fire alarm boxes) that were disproportionately carried out by the city in non-white and impoverished areas, most notably in the South Bronx and the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Also, it did not account for, or even acknowledge, landlord (slumlord) and business-owner arson. And it did not account for the fact that many of the fires in the Bronx weren’t even arson at all, but rather the expected result of devastatingly poor housing conditions, community disruption, and an overall reduction in public safety resources in the South Bronx. Furthermore, the Rand Fire Project not only labeled nearly all fires in the South Bronx as arson, it also, in effect, laid the blame of this arson on poor non-whites — i.e. blacks and Puerto Ricans.
The unfortunate truth about the Rand data is that most major political figures in New York City knew that the fire service reductions between 1969 and 1976 further devastated poor neighborhoods (which had already been vastly disrupted by Robert Moses’s slum clearance programs), and helped destroy huge numbers of housing units much more rapidly than Moses ever could. Yet rebuilding and/ or repairing these disastrously torn communities was not the response of New York City policy makers. Instead, the response was something even more sinister and inhumane: benign neglect and planned shrinkage.
Benign Neglect & Planned Shrinkage The 1-2 Punch that Knocked Out the South Bronx
Not an arsonist at first glance, Daniel Patrick Moynihan burned down poor neighborhoods in cities across the country as surely as if he had doused them in kerosene and put a match to them. —Deborah and Rodrick Wallace
If Robert Moses’s slum clearance programs set the stage for a collapse of the South Bronx, then the benign neglect policy — inspired by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s now-infamous memorandum to President Richard Nixon — opened the show with a number that inevitably assured the destruction of the South Bronx. In January, 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Urban Affairs Advisor within the Nixon Administration, wrote and sent a memo on race relations to President Nixon. Drawing on national census and employment data, as well as data on fire alarms and fires in New York City forwarded to him from the 1969 New York City/Rand Fire Project, Moynihan’s memo advised that the nation might “benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’”
The now-infamous “benign neglect” memo, which was printed in its entirety in the New York Times in March, 1970, was itself highly controversial and absurd. The memo portrayed poor blacks (specifically black males) in urban America as “socially pathological,” “antisocial,” and racist — even going as far as to blame these blacks, in part, for shaping white radical attitudes. What’s more revealing about this portrayal of poor non-whites (blacks in particular) is Moynihan’s underlying thesis that they were unredeemable and a “threat” to the “socially stable elements of the black population.”
But there were two other features of the memo that were even more alarming, and, subsequently, damaging to the people of the South Bronx. First, there’s Moynihan’s thesis on fires in New York City. Using the flawed Rand data, Moynihan asserted that the great majority of the fires in New York City were arson, and that poor black slum dwellers were the blame:
In New York, for example, between 1956 and 1969 the over-all fire alarm rate more than tripled, from 69,000 to 240,000. These alarms are concentrated in slum neighborhoods, primarily black…Many of these fires are the result of population density. But a great many are more or less deliberately set…Fires are in fact a “leading indicator” of social pathology for a neighborhood. They come first. Crime, and the rest, follows. The psychiatric interpretation of fire-settings is complex, but it relates to the types of personalities which slums produce.
The second damaging feature of the memo can be found in Moynihan’s onesentence suggestion to Nixon on how to solve his administration’s “ineptness” for appropriately handling relations with the black population:
The time may have come when the issue [sic] of race could benefit from a period of “benign neglect.”
Hardly a direct national call for the abandonment of urban (black/Puerto Rican) neighborhoods; nevertheless, New York City officials took the “benign neglect” tagline, combined it with all of Moynihan’s damaging assessments of poor non-whites, and used it to formulate and justify a new, more dastardly urban policy: “planned shrinkage.”
When Roger Starr first articulated his theory of planned shrinkage in his book Urban Choices: the City and Its Critics (1966), one might have known, given the political and racial climate of the time, that he and his book would eventually influence New York City policy makers. As the Executive Director of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council of New York (1959), Starr’s directive should have been to facilitate the mandate of the Council, which was to “educate New Yorkers about the housing problems, and to lead city and state governments to programs for the alleviation of some of the accumulated housing miseries” of New York City. However, planned shrinkage, the program that Starr lead city officials to, was not only ill-conceived, it was better equipped for extending rather than alleviating some of the accumulated housing miseries. Moreover, it could not have been designed with any other intention, except to kill off New York City’s poor non-white neighborhoods, in particular, its poorest and biggest eyesore: the South Bronx.
Planned shrinkage (the de facto name for the New York City’s war on the poor), was what ecologists Deborah and Roderick Wallace called “the New York City expression of Moynihan’s benign neglect.” More sinister and inhumane than Moynihan’s benign neglect might have ever intended to be, planned shrinkage was truly an all out frontal assault on the poor. The policy (program) dictated the direct withdrawal of essential services from so-called “sick” neighborhoods, which were all poor and non-white, and seen as unable to survive or undeserving of survival and, therefore, unworthy of the level and quality of services afforded to white middle- and upper middle-class neighborhoods. The range of services that planned shrinkage snatched from the South Bronx and other poor non-white New York City neighborhoods left no doubt about the real intention and scope of the policy. To Starr and other elites, the notion of community did not exist in these poor neighborhoods, therefore, there were drastic reductions in everything from libraries and public transportation service to social and health services and, most alarmingly — but fitting to the task at hand — fire service. It was the withdrawal of fire service that “left burned out communities defenseless and insecure and churned out wounded spirits as surely as the Viet-Nam War did.” It should be noted that as all of these services were “freed up” from the “sick” neighborhoods, they were routinely shuttled into the ones deemed to be “healthy,” which were all middle- to upper-class and mostly white.
Equally destructive of poor neighborhoods like the South Bronx was Roger Starr’s use of the notion of non-community in poor neighborhoods as the intellectual basis for the massive demolition of housing for the poor. And rather than repair or rebuild the damaged housing within these neighborhoods, Starr urged instead to let the land “lie vacant” until a new use, such as industry, could arise. Thus, in the final analysis, if benign neglect was the call for the intentional abandonment of urban poor non-white (particularly black) neighborhoods, then planned shrinkage was the devastating blow used to outright kill them off.
The Aftermath and Foreseen Fallout
Community Destruction
Prior to the fire epidemic, which was the direct result of New York’s war on the poor, which itself was made up of Robert Moses’s slum clearance program and the benign neglect and planned shrinkage policies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Roger Starr, respectively, poor and lower middle-class non-white neighborhoods were stable. Communities in very poor and lower middle-class areas rely on social and mutual-aid networks in ways different from the American majority. Families and individuals depend on their communities for necessary resources, emotional support, and news and information in direct proportion to their poverty, lack of education, cultural sensibility, and ethnic difference from the American majority. Moreover, within the communities of the poor, social networks form through intergenerational links, and may or may not be familial. In fact, in poor communities, the extension of kin relations to non-kin is expected, because it helps allow for the creation of mutual-aid networks — networks that fundamentally reserve strategies of survival. Yet anyway you look at it, New York’s war on the poor destroyed these communities and their vital networks, and made survival within them harder than ever for its residents. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the South Bronx.
By 1975, the South Bronx was the most devastated urban landscape in the United States. According to Demographia, the three community districts that comprise the core of the South Bronx had fallen 57 percent in population from 383,000 in 1970 to 166,000 in 1980, which has to rival the greatest short term population loss in any urban setting with the possible exception of war’s devastation. Furthermore, until around 1990, almost no housing replaced the 1970s destruction that was created by planned shrinkage. But by then, hundreds of thousands of units had already been burnt out or abandoned. The war on the poor had consequences which the previously planned and mitigated slum clearance did not: Deterioration in public health, deterioration in public safety, and serious decline in the life expectancy of both elderly and young blacks citywide. The slum clearance programs that proceeded the benign neglect and planned shrinkage policies and the fire epidemic of the 1970s were of such a magnitude that they constituted a disaster, a truly calamitous event, that caused widespread destruction and great loss of life, damage, hardship, and “a situation of massive collective stress.”
During the 1970s, the South Bronx was transformed into an isolated war zone. Out of any other area in New York City, its neighborhoods had suffered the most intense social destabilization and destruction of community. As the burnout, and the city policies that gave rise to it, rapidly continued to scuttle their neighborhoods, the black and Latino populations were increasingly fragmented and left for dead. And as the firewave reached an epidemic level, and housing shortages rose to dangerously high proportions, and as unemployment rose, residents were repeatedly burned out and/or evicted and relocated into city-owned tenements that were worse slums than the ones from which they came. Because families could not move far enough from the fangs of decay and ruin, they were sometimes burned out (and/or evicted) two or three times in a few years. At at the same time that people in the community were being assaulted by this, the community institutions — churches, political clubs, social clubs, stores, and small factories, which normally would have buffered the outfall of displacement — weakened dramatically.
Though the burnout ebbed around 1977, after 1978, housing overcrowding rose again. All of the families who were able to move out did so, soaking up what little housing availability that existed in and around New York City, which forced the majority of South Bronx residents to double and triple up inside already cramped housing. And when there was a call for federal funding for housing construction efforts for the poor in 1978, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who at that time was a U.S. Senator), opposed it, stating that: “People in the South Bronx don’t want housing or they wouldn’t burn it down. It’s fairly clear that housing is not the problem in the South Bronx.”
The combined factors that led to the disaster in the South Bronx destroyed the community immeasurably, but perhaps the areas in which the aftermath of the devastation manifested itself the most was along the lines of unemployment, crime, and the social health of the youth. It has been well-known that stable communities do a better job of maintaining law and order within their community than the police. Such was the case in the South Bronx, that is, until the disaster hit.
One can only imagine the various emotional and mental effects caused by the wild swings of widespread housing disruption. Unfortunately, the unemployment side-effect takes little imagination. Even before the citywide slum clearance programs uprooted hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino residents from solid and stable communities (communities wherein a majority of these residents worked) and relocated them to decaying slum areas in the South Bronx, the unemployment level in the South Bronx certainly wasn’t admirable. But after the disaster, the unemployment level skyrocketed. Throw in the dual deathknolls for the poor that the policies of benign neglect and planned shrinkage were, and the result was ever-expanding incomless periods for many of the South Bronx residents during the disaster period.
For certain, these long stretches of incomeless periods added to the strain of an already distressed family nucleus. Many families in the South Bronx were split up and permanently scarred. Fathers vanished, sometimes voluntarily because of the anguish and humiliation the disaster placed upon them; other times they were removed “involuntarily” due to prison stints, drug usage, and/ or violence — all significant by-products of the South Bronx disaster. The departure of many fathers was particularly hard because it left single mothers to struggle alone as the single bread-winner. It also meant that grandmothers, aunts, and other family members (including extended family) had to help pick up the weight and take in those too young to provide for themselves, straining an already distressed housing situation even further.
The Social Health of a Disconnected Youth: Fragmentation, the Code of the Streets, Survival, and the Rise of South Bronx Street Gangs
In the South Bronx today, death is an ironic but frequent event among the youth of this community. And the fist of irony is clinched within the knowledge that death — violent death — is often most heavy here among the poor, who seem to have so little to lose. Here, perhaps because of its frequency, sorrow is never born of any sense of form. To live in this community today may be to share in an inhuman existence. One must learn, from implausible models, the speciality of survival. One must be…relentless in the pursuit of this survival…with hands to steal and legs to run, eyes that view life and death, which unless one is stronger than the strong, crush whatever human sensibilities left remaining. One might ask how does one learn the specialities which separate man from what we consider the lower animals. On these streets, the youth of the South Bronx is molded and educated in the rules of the survival game… In this neighborhood one is lucky, only if one learns the wisdom of the street, early. Here, to be lucky is to stay alive! –Tony Batten, Ain’t Gonna Eat My Mind , 1971
Before the South Bronx Disaster, parents in stable communities were able to rely on the extended networks and relationships within the community to reinforce the socialization of their young. But now, with parents struggling to survive and these networks and relationships weakened — if not outright destroyed — a great number of children emptied out of broken homes into the streets, where there was little to no adult supervision or responsible mentorship. For the overwhelming majority of young blacks and Latinos in the South Bronx, the peer groups that they found and created in the streets, not the traditional familial nucleus, became their chief support system.
Because of the South Bronx Disaster, these fragmented groups were exiled far outside of the mainstream, and as such, they where forced to establish new modes and structures for living that were predicated upon daily survival. And with little to no economic opportunity and weakened community social networks, the youth of the South Bronx (and other similarly hard-hit areas) were left without a structure to responsibly nourish them and their time. Thus, the youth — who like all South Bronx residents at the time — became the target of destruction; and they were highly susceptible to the kind of contagious, destructive/self-destructive behavior that runs through the streets. Over time, the “behavioral codes” transmitted between groups and coalesced into a more aggressive street code (i.e. “code of the streets”), which inevitably informed the youth on how to act and survive in the streets.
In order for each group to distinguish themselves (and in order to simply survive), each group had to out-do the other. Aggressive competition became one of the norms of the street, and each group found that not only did their representation of the street code have to be solid, they had to be even more daring and anti-social than the next group. In this context, all anti-social behavior was amped up, because in the competition for distinction, groups became bolder, more riskier, more brazen, and, subsequently, more violent. Eventually, for the majority of the youth in the South Bronx, it was street gangs (and then later crews) that would become their new family. And for many, it was street gangs that would also serve to formulate their primary social and information structures, and, in many cases, their chief means of survival.
The slum clearance programs, the city’s ill-fated benign neglect and planned shrinkage policies, and the burnout collectively helped to usher in a new and rather severe New York City street gang culture. As it probably should have been expected, the street gang culture of 1970s New York City was much more extensive and alarming than that of the 1950s. For starters, during the 1970s, the sheer number of gangs and gang members and affiliates throughout all of New York City dwarfed that of the 1950s. In 1971, there were more than 50 gangs, with total membership in the South Bronx exceeding 60,000 members, by far the most street gang activity in New York City. Next, the gangs, which in many cases grew from childhood friendships on neighborhood blocks and disbanded social clubs, were much more aggressive and brazen. And while the street gangs of the 1970s permeated throughout the five boroughs of New York City, it was quite extensive and more deafening in the South Bronx and Brooklyn. It is further worth noting that all of the top three pioneers of hip hop — DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bamabaata — at one point during this era either belonged to or had an affiliation with one of the major street gangs of the South Bronx. In fact, Afrika Bamabaata was at one time a well-known member of the Black Spades, one of the biggest, most infamous and influential street gangs in the South Bronx and Harlem.
Segregation
The aftermath of the slum clearance programs, the benign neglect and planned shrinkage policies, the burnout (which had been set in motion by the aforementioned programs and policies), the community destruction of the South Bronx, and the high level of street-gang activity in the South Bronx, tells many stories.
There’s the tragic story of housing disruption and destruction, wherein the impoverished or lower middle-class neighborhoods in New York City are made up almost entirely of black and/or Latino families, with the bulk of the city’s public housing projects mirroring this tragic ratio even more disproportionately. By 1990, the number of extremely overcrowded housing units had reached about double the epidemic 1970 number.
There’s the story of crime and especially crime disproportion as it relates to incarceration. Since 1980, over 75% of the prisoners within New York’s upstate facilities have come from only seven New York City neighborhoods — three of sections are located in the heart of the South Bronx; and 85% of the prisoners are Black or Latino. As the number of employment opportunities rapidly declined, and as the housing crisis intensified, and the family nucleus broke down and the gang era erupted, the level of crime ballooned. As should have been expected, there was a dramatic increase in every type of crime associated with poverty. The number of burglaries and armed robberies went up; the drug trade (specifically heroin) spiked out of control, as the disaster worsened and drug usage/abuse became a means of escape for the poor minority, both young and old. Ecologists Deborah and Roderick Wallace insist that planned shrinkage “seems to have enabled drugs to be flooded all over the South Bronx, Upper Manhattan, the Lower East Side and East Village, the poverty corridor and transitional neighborhoods of Brooklyn, and the immigrant neighborhoods of Queens. Even Staten Island did not escape; it grew a drug problem on its north shore which received the spillover of refugees from Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.” Finally, the murder rate skyrocketed, no doubt due to the result of violent robberies, street gang wars and other street gang activity, drug usage and distribution, and heightened, war-like induced stress.
But of all of the stories that the aftermath of the South Bronx disaster tells, it’s the story of segregation that, here, for the purposes of this discussion, the hip hop/rap and beatmaking traditions, warrants special attention. The increased level of community segregation played a pivotal role in the origins of hip hop culture. Prior to the disaster, the South Bronx was fairly integrated with a healthy mix of Jewish, Irish, Italian, Black, and Latino residents. But after the disaster, the South Bronx was mashed up and torn into such an isolated area that it rivaled the level of segregation found in rural Jim Crow South.
For all of its diversity, New York City has in fact been made up of deeply segregated populations, particularly in the outer boroughs like the Bronx and Brooklyn. And as we have seen, the particular brand of segregation in New York City wasn’t brought on by some obscure, radical sense of racism or white supremacist ideology. No. The class and racial segregation of New York City was caused, first and foremost, by a war on the poor that was waged by New York City’s elite class. The slum clearance programs and public policies of benign neglect and planned shrinkage, which were orchestrated and enacted at the behest of city officials Robert Moses, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Roger Starr, created a New York City disaster that was most devastating in the South Bronx.
In the minor, these policies legally intensified already separate and unequal social and economic spheres throughout New York City. In the major, these policies created a fire epidemic and a disaster in the South Bronx that resembled a post-war bombing. And as this disaster and its effects became more apparent throughout the 1970s and 1990s, there was no real effort to rescue those who had essentially been left for dead in a segregated oasis of vast ruin.
The Black and Latino people of the South Bronx (and other similarly hit areas throughout New York City, especially the Brownsville and East New York sections of Brooklyn), were forced into segregation and further discriminated against. The youth of the South Bronx understood very well that the “greater” society had caused the South Bronx disaster; they that the South Bronx was under siege. Perhaps they didn’t know the intellectual directive, that the twin polices of benign neglect and planned shrinkage were an attempt to kill off and quarantine New York City’s poor non-whites, especially those in the South Bronx. And maybe they didn’t know that the reductions in fire houses, health care and transportation services in the South and West Bronx were a prescribed death sentence for the Americans living there. But they knew something much more practical: They knew that the South Bronx was attacked and left for dead. They knew that the dominant culture had rejected them; so they further disconnected themselves from it , rejecting and turning mainstream (elite-class dominated) society, philosophy, and culture into a rival mode of living.
Things They Took from the Disaster
The South Bronx Disaster created a cemetery of hope that was bordered by despair, destruction, fire, drugs, violence, and tragic death. But even in a land where the damned were intentionally oppressed and abandoned (in the form of “benign neglect”), then outright attacked and left for dead (in the form of “planned shrinkage),” the resilient pulse of humanity never completely extinguished. It was this left-over pulse, this “beat,” that a large band of young Black and Puerto Rican adults from the South Bronx rallied around. And in this process of coming together around that beat, they formulated a new outlook on life. It was an outlook on life that was dynamically infamous. It incorporated the pain of neglect, the spirit of vengeance, the essence of street-knowledge, and the pure focus of survival. It moved to a new rhythm, rhyme, and reason. And it turned style, attitude, and the quest for respect into a powerful force. In time, this new cultural movement became known as hip hop.