Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang Page A

guys were wearing black berets and red stars,” says Suarez. “Everybody had grown their hair real long. They looked more militant.”
    In some ways, the Ghetto Brothers had begun to resemble a
lumpenteen
version of the Young Lords Party. They criticized the quality of health care at the Lincoln Hospital, a place they called the “Butcher Shop,” questioned why youths had no jobs or recreation available to them, and decried heavy-handed policing. They forced slumlords to allow them in to clean the tenements, and set up a free-breakfast program and free-clothing drive. They became security for prominent Puerto Rican nationalists. They referred to themselves as “the people’s army.” By the summer of 1971, Melendez had come up with another name that described their new activities: The South Bronx Defensive Unit. He told Charlie, “Let’s stop this gang stuff and form an organization for peace.”
    A charismatic twenty-five-year old, half-African-American, half–Puerto Rican exjunkie named Cornell Benjamin had come into the fold. Known as “Black Benjie,” he became the third staff leader of the Ghetto Brothers. Most gangs had “warlords,” whose chief duties involved stockpiling the arsenal, training the members in fighting skills and military techniques, and negotiating times and places for rumbles. But at Melendez’s suggestion, Black Benjie became Peace Counselor.
    If there was a gang that could bring peace to the Bronx, perhaps it would be the Ghetto Brothers.
The Teachers
    After three years of gang proliferation, Dwyer Junior High had become the central flashpoint for the Bronx gangs. Located at Stebbins Avenue near 165th, the school was at the center of a number of turfs, and its halls were crowded with rival gangbangers. In March, a boy at Dwyer harassed a Savage Nomad sister. She called on Suarez and Savage Nomad president Ben Buxton to back her up. It became an event. Hundreds gathered to see the perpetrator beat down, then they followed as the gangs marched triumphantly through the schoolyard.
    From a safe distance teacher Manny Dominguez watched, awestruck. He was convinced that the gang leaders were the most promising young people inthe area. They weren’t sheep like the rest of the students; they were rebels with sharpened, anti-authoritarian reflexes, rappers possessed of mother-wit, renegades to whom the future should belong. With school principal Morton Weinberger’s consent, Dominguez began meeting with the gangs.
    Dominguez’s wife, Rita Fecher, had separately gone down to the Ghetto Brothers clubhouse to demand that they leave her students alone. As they talked, Fecher became interested in their lives. Realizing no one was going to tell their stories, she picked up a Super 8 camera and began filming interviews with the teen leaders, which would be gathered years later for Fecher’s and Henry Chalfant’s classic Bronx gang documentary,
Flyin’ Cut Sleeves
.
    In these frames, Fecher captured the vitality and tragedy of the emerging gangs. Here was Melendez and the Ghetto Brothers band on a tar-beach rooftop, wailing out Grand Funk Railroad’s epic of paranoia and disease, “I’m Your Captain”: “Everybody listen to me and return me my ship, I’m your captain I’m your captain though I’m feeling mighty sick”; a teenaged Blackie Mercado under a straw hat, a relaxed, dimpled grin on his face, talking about uniting Blacks and Puerto Ricans for the purpose of attacking a rival gang—”They wanted to make it a racial problem, so we made it an
un
-racial problem”; Ben Buxton in the street proudly bragging about the murders he had committed, then later, behind closed doors, thoughtfully analyzing legal aspects of his upcoming gun-charge sentencing (his verdict: he’d be gone for a long time); and most tellingly, a group of angry Puerto Rican girls confronting Buxton and