When Lance Williams talks to elementary and high school students about the Black P Stone Nation, a street gang later known as El Rukns, he conveys a history lesson and a personal story that often has youths listening with rapt attention.
“You can hear a pin drop because most of them have family members affiliated with different gangs,” said Williams, 48, an associate professor in Northeastern Illinois University’s Center for Inner City Studies.
Williams is the co-author of the new book “The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of an American Gang,” which he wrote with WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore. He said that because street gangs are often glorified or demonized, his goal in writing the book was to offer a more nuanced perspective.
It’s also a unique one.
Williams’ father was a former gang member who in the 1960s was hired to counsel gang members to get them to resolve conflicts in less violent ways. And when Williams’ father worked, he brought his 8-year-old son along.
“He worked with the Del Vikings, a smaller but tenacious organization that used to be in Stateway Gardens (housing complex) and the Stones, which were in Woodlawn,” said Williams, who grew up in the Bronzeville neighborhood and later in suburban Harvey.
“Most of the large organizations are confederacies of smaller ones that come together, and my father knew that. I would listen as he encouraged them to back down (from violence), but allowed them to save face. They respected him.”
Although he was 6 in 1968 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Williams said he was struck by how the Stones helped keep the peace in Woodlawn and the gangs on the West Side were unable to do so.
“When the riots and looting broke out on the West Side, my father had to go talk to the guys in the various organizations,” he said. “I remember the National Guard and police being out and the stores burning.
“But once we came back to Woodlawn, there was no looting or burning. The Stones were out patrolling the community.”
The difference was that the Black P Stone Nation, at least initially, had viewed itself as having a role in the civil rights movement, he said, since it emerged as a small group of impressionable 14- and 15-year-olds in the late 1950s.
“By 1966, when Dr. King came to Chicago for a big anti-poverty rally at Soldier Field, the stadium was packed, and the Stones showed up in mass numbers and circled the top part of the stadium making their presence known,” he said. “The crowd was a little intimidated so the (civil rights) activists brought them down to the stage.”
That gave the Black P Stone Nation a certain degree of credibility, he said, that many of the more established gangs across the city didn’t have. The Black P Stone Nation would later find a better fit, however, with the “by any means necessary” approach of the Black Power movement. (The gang also would be inspired by the Islamic teachings of the Moorish Science Temple of America and change its name to El Rukns.)
“But they were still involved in criminal activity from an organizational level that was decided by a small group of people — and you absolutely can’t glorify that,” Williams said of the group whose leader and other members were convicted of plotting terrorist acts with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi
“At lot of the guys who were Stones weren’t privy to any of that because the group was a criminal enterprise and the goal was to make money and share the wealth with as few people as possible.”
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Williams told me that he’s often asked why he didn’t become a gang member. The answer isn’t that his father’s work deterred him, he says. A lot of guys joined gangs not to commit crimes but to be part of the crowd.
When he was an adolescent, between 1974 and 1979, gangbanging was dying out. But by the 1980s, he said, gangs began to re-emerge thanks to the introduction of crack cocaine into poorer neighborhoods and the glamorization of gangs in rap music.
Williams went to college, intending to be a doctor. But he flunked out of medical school and returned to Chicago as the country was in a national conversation about ways to save troubled young black males.
“I figured since I was one who had made it, I needed to make a contribution,” he said. “I began to do my father’s work.”
For 12 years he worked in several Chicago public schools that had gang problems. Teachers sent young men who were disruptive to him. He mentored them 24/7.
“Most of the guys who run into trouble were pushed out of school and have behavioral problems,” he said. “They’re tracked into special ed classes and yet on the street they can be highly sophisticated.”
He once had a class of about nine leaders of rival gangs, he said. The class mushroomed as the students began to tell their peers that he was teaching them about the history and the founding principles of their gangs.
“All they knew was the criminal activity,” Williams said. “I had to do it in a way that didn’t glorify gangbangers, but they appreciated realizing that there were many similarities because the leaders came up with the principles in jail, using the same information.”
Although he’s now a professor with a doctorate in public health — as well as a husband and father — Williams says he maintains ties with some of the guys, some of whom left their gangs.
“Everybody needs to know their history,” he said. “It tells them who they are and maybe who they can be.”