[Professor Lance Williams traces the stories and conflicts of two
powerful Chicago leaders, David Barksdale and Richard J. Daley, in a
recent book.]
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KING DAVID AND BOSS DALEY  
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Bobby Vanecko
November 17, 2022
South Side Weekly
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_ Professor Lance Williams traces the stories and conflicts of two
powerful Chicago leaders, David Barksdale and Richard J. Daley, in a
recent book. _

David Barksdale and Richard J. Daley., Illustration by Christina
Cano.

 

Gangs exist where poverty exists and that’s been true in Chicago for
more than a 100 years,” tweeted Lakeidra Chavis, a Chicago-based
reporter for the Marshall Project, in January
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Chavis was writing to criticize current Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s
proposal for a new law that would allow the City to sue gangs and
seize the assets of anyone the Chicago Police Department (CPD) alleges
is in a gang, because the law would directly worsen Chicago’s
obscene levels of poverty and precarity that produce the violence in
the city. However, Chavis also made the important point that Chicago
gang history stretches much farther back than many Chicagoans may
realize. 

In a new book _King David and Boss Daley: The Black Disciples, Mayor
Daley and Chicago on the Edge_, coming out in December [2022], author
and Northeastern Illinois University Professor Dr. Lance Williams
traces the life stories of two of Chicago’s most powerful leaders:
Black Disciples “King” David Barksdale and “Boss” Mayor
Richard J. Daley. While Williams notes that the two never met in
person, and many Chicagoans may not think of them together, Barksdale
and Daley were on directly opposing sides of many of the city’s
political battles throughout the 1960’s. Barksdale and Daley were
both leaders of their own powerful organizations: Barksdale had the
Disciples, later the Black Gangster Disciple Nation, while Daley had
the Hamburg Athletic Club, and later the city’s entire Democratic
Machine, including the CPD. 

King David and Boss Daley book cover. Courtesy of Prometheus

As Williams writes in the introduction: “Behind the poverty, crime
and violence, this story is about the struggle for power between two
men of violence, one with a chance and a historical opportunity and
one with a chance and nothing else. In the end, it is a story about
the inevitable conflict between right and wrong. Black and white. And
the Black inner city and City Hall.” 

Through a variety of historical archives, government documents,
first-hand interviews, and personal experience, Williams has created a
masterful document of history that is an essential read for anyone
interested in the city’s past and future. The book contextualizes
the pressing issues that Chicago faces today, from the racialized
structural violence that is the perpetuation of segregated ghettos and
concentrated poverty offset by concentrated wealth, to the
interpersonal violence that manifests in shootings. 

Williams weaves the book’s narrative between the lives of Barksdale
and Daley, but the story in terms of Chicago’s gang history starts
with the Irish and other white ethnic gangs that were formed in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These Irish gangs arose
as a byproduct of the poverty and discrimination that Irish immigrants
originally faced in Bridgeport—“Chicago’s first slum,” as
Williams puts it—until the Irish assimilated into whiteness by
becoming police and politicians, among other establishment, status
quo-maintaining careers. 

In the early to mid 1900’s, these white gangs played an essential
role in Chicago’s machine politics, often using violence or the
threat of violence to turn out or suppress the vote and to reinforce
the city’s racial segregation. Daley was elected president of the
Hamburg Athletic Club in 1924 at twenty-two, and he had been a member
of the group since his early teen years. He was seventeen in 1919,
when the Hamburgs were heavily involved in the deadliest anti-Black
race riot in Chicago’s history, although Williams notes that it was
never confirmed whether Daley himself took part in the violence.
Williams portrays the events that started the race riot in tragic
detail—including the death of Black teenager Eugene Williams at the
whites-only 29th Street Beach, and the police collusion and inaction
that contributed to the chaos that reigned in the city for weeks. 

Chicago’s history with Black street gangs generally started later
into the twentieth century, and those groups were often first created
as a form of protection from attacks by the city’s white gangs and
the police. In fact, some of the city’s racist white gang members
became police officers later in life, as they aged out of the
gang—part of the city’s Democratic Machine and its infamous
patronage politics, a system where city jobs were exchanged for
political support. 

Both the white gangs and the police played, and continue to play, a
key role in reinforcing the city of Chicago’s racial boundaries. To
this day, the city remains one of the most segregated and heavily
policed in the world, with more police per capita than almost any
other city in the world, other than New York City. Yet Mayor Lightfoot
and many City Council representatives, such as 2023 mayoral candidate
and 15th ward Alderman Raymond Lopez, advocate for even more police as
a solution to the city’s violence and the poverty and precarity that
produces it. 

David Barksdale was born to Virginia and Charlie “Rainy”
Barksdale, Jr. on May 24, 1947 in Sallis, Mississippi. The Barksdales
were sharecroppers in Mississippi, and they were not able to afford to
move to Chicago until 1958—three years into Mayor Richard J.
Daley’s first term. The Barksdale family first moved to Bronzeville,
the city’s Black economic and social hub, until large parts of it
were cleared as part of the city’s “urban renewal”—or as
Williams writes, “Negro removal”—which displaced the family to
Englewood, to make way for the new expressway that, like the projects,
was built to segregate Black and white Chicagoans. 

David Barksdale had a very rough and impoverished childhood, and he
was kicked out of his house by his father when he was just fourteen,
as a result of his disobedience. David was known early on in his life
as a great boxer, and he was never afraid to defend himself when
challenged. Barksdale was first sent to the “Audy home,” the
city’s jail for children, at the age of just sixteen. 

As the city’s population of poor Black people grew, so did the
police budget and presence in those neighborhoods, which led to youth
like David being frequently criminalized, harassed and arrested by the
CPD. There was an eightfold increase in Chicago’s Black population
from 1910-1940 during the first Great Migration, and the city’s
white power structure was determined to protect their segregated turf
and wealth. Throughout the middle part of the century, during
Daley’s tenure, Chicago’s Black population grew again from 8.2
percent to 32.7 percent. At the same time, from 1945 to 1970, the
city’s police budget grew 900 percent and the CPD more than doubled
the number of cops on the streets. 

Black youth growing up on the South and West Sides knew not to trust
in or talk to the police, which remains justifiably true to this day.
Williams details the robbery, extortion, harassment, torture,
frame-ups, abuse, racism, shootings, and straight-up murders that
Chicago police perpetrated on the city’s Black communities
throughout the entire period of the book, from before 1919 to around
1972. 

In the early 1960’s, Barksdale started to lead around a group of
youth from his neighborhood called the 65th Street Boys, in order to
protect himself and his friends from racially motivated attacks—such
as the 1957 murder of Black youth Alvin Palmer by white gang member
Joseph Schwartz in Englewood. Chicago police and politicians were
doing nothing substantial to stop these racist murders and assaults,
so Black youth like David had to figure out a way to defend
themselves. 

In 1963, after Barksdale’s time in the Audy home where he
encountered other gangs, he and his friends decided to create a more
structured gang called the Devil’s Disciples. The group did not
become the powerful Black Gangster Disciple Nation until years later,
when they grew and merged with Larry Hoover’s Supreme Gangsters
during the peacemaking that was encouraged by the Black Power
movement. However, in the early days of the Disciples (they quickly
dropped the “Devil” from the name, largely because David didn’t
like it), they proved themselves to be among the best boxers in all of
the South Side. They had to be, in order to defend themselves against
rival Black gangs like the Blackstone Rangers, and white gangs
determined to defend their territory, including the Chicago Police
Department, in Williams’ words. 

The most crucial parts of the book take place in the 1960’s during
the Chicago Freedom Movement with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the
Black Power Movement, and the Illinois Black Panther Party with Fred
Hampton. This is where the conflict between “King David and Boss
Daley” becomes the most pronounced, as both MLK and Hampton
organized and met with Chicago’s Black gangs. 

Williams writes: “Mayor Daley had always been concerned about Black
street gangs. But his concern wasn’t about them killing one another
in their endless gang wars, nor was it about them terrorizing their
communities. The mayor’s biggest concern was that Black street gangs
like the Disciples had now added branches numbering several thousand
and were starting to show signs of political and economic
awareness.” 

Daley’s own youth gang, or “athletic club,” the Hamburgs, had
moved from fighting in the streets to politics and power, as Williams
writes, and now Daley was worried the “young, tough Black males
could be dictating who their Alderman would be if he didn’t stop
them.” Daley felt especially threatened by the Black Panthers, “a
more sophisticated, if smaller group” who were perceived to be even
more dangerous than the gangs, due to their revolutionary politics.
Williams writes, “The Disciples and the Black Panthers had set up a
free food program in the ghetto and had opened a health clinic that
was superior to those of [Daley’s] own health department.” 

Consequently, in 1967, Daley and the CPD leadership created the
“Gang Intelligence Unit” to disrupt the political organizing of
the Disciples, Stones, Panthers, and other like-minded groups.
Daley’s next move was to hold a conference to attack the Black gangs
in the eyes of the voting public. As Williams observes, however,
“the meeting never acknowledged that youth crime was mainly a
product of the evils in society like poverty, discrimination, and
other unrighted wrongs. There was no mention of any of the positive
efforts of these groups, like their attempts to have truces, job
training, civil protest, and the like. They never offered solutions to
help guide young people seeking constructive opportunities. It only
focused on their so-called criminal activities. The mayor and the city
agencies present never discussed its responsibility to aid such
groups.” 

Williams writes that, once Daley had sufficiently demonized the Black
gangs, CPD ramped up their repression—especially when it came to the
Black gangs’ political organizing. Several of the city’s largest
gangs had called truces—such as the Lords, Stones, and Disciples
(LSD) coalition—and they had done so in order to fight their real
enemies in the city’s power structure, instead of fighting
themselves. This was simply unacceptable to the CPD, who fought to sow
discord between the gangs, in order to make it easier to incarcerate
gang members and to justify the CPD’s own exorbitant funding and
demand even more money from the city. As prominent Blackstone Rangers
leader Mickey Cogwell told a reporter from the Atlantic in 1969: 
“the [CPD’s Gang Intelligence Unit]—black men—use the Rangers
and the rivalry between us and the [Disciples] to make their work more
important to the system.” 

When Barksdale and the Disciples started a free breakfast program with
the ultimate goal of ending poverty and hunger in Englewood, and
leading protests against police brutality and
discrimination—alongside their former rivals—Daley and the police
ramped up the repression even further. Williams details the police
attacking and breaking a strike when Barksdale and the LSD coalition
protested against racial discrimination in hiring at city construction
sites. Through subordinates, the Daley administration even denied that
there was such discrimination in hiring, just like they denied the
fact that there was slum housing in the city of Chicago when Martin
Luther King Jr. came to town to protest those very slums.
Homelessness, substandard, overpriced housing, and a lack of building
management services still affects many people on the South and West
sides today. 

However, despite Daley and the police’s demonization of Black gangs,
many people in Chicago’s Black communities knew their real
enemy—and it wasn’t their sons, cousins, nephews, grandsons, and
other family members who the police alleged were associated with
gangs. Even when someone was killed by another person within the
community, blame often fell on city leadership for creating the
conditions that produced the violence, which remains justifiably true
to this day. 

Williams writes about the murder of Katie Stallworth in the Robert
Taylor public housing projects: “The people of the projects knew
that a person murdered Stallworth, but they blamed the ‘white
power’ structure of Chicago, from the mayor’s office to the
elected officials who had seen fit to designate certain areas in which
to concentrate public housing. From the beginning, there was talk of
the projects being the means to contain the Black population. It was
widely known that wherever there is a dense concentration of people in
a limited area filled with smoldering resentment, frustration, and
despair, such crimes such as this and others will continue to
happen.”

When Barksdale and the LSD coalition continued to press on with their
civil rights activism alongside Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers,
the police escalated their repression even further. Even though the
gangs had called truces, their growing left-wing politicization made
them dangerous to the status quo, so the CPD attempted to break up
those truces—despite the fact that they were fostering peace, for a
time. As Professor Toussaint Losier has written elsewhere
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coalition represented an attempt not only to win living wage
employment and broader social transformation but also to work through
each gang’s internal divisions by pursuing a vision that placed
Black Power over gang empowerment.” However, Daley and the rest of
City and police leadership did not want any social transformation
along the lines of what the Black Power movement advocated—similar
to how the current mayor does not want to disrupt the carceral status
quo, especially during election season. 

In 1968, Daley’s protege, Edward Hanrahan, became Cook County
State’s Attorney in order to continue to go after the Black gangs
and the Black Panthers, and he was given his own CPD unit to do so.
Most infamously (yet still not talked about enough in Chicago),
working with the FBI, State’s Attorney Hanrahan’s CPD unit
murdered Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Peoria
chapter founder Mark Clark on December 4, 1969. The same day as this
assassination and subsequent coverup, prominent LSD leader and Black
P. Stone Nation member Leonard Sengali was arrested for a crime that
he did not commit and pressured to testify against fellow LSD members
and other civil rights activists. Bobby Gore, spokesman for the
Conservative Vice Lords and another LSD leader, was similarly arrested
on murder charges despite claiming innocence. Several other LSD
members and Black Panthers were similarly arrested on fabricated and
trumped-up charges and pressured to testify against each other. 

Black Gangster Disciple Nation leader Larry Hoover was later arrested
and sentenced to 100-200 years in prison for murder, contributing to
the fracturing of the Nation into the Black Disciples and the Gangster
Disciples—which was made worse by David Barksdale’s death from
kidney failure in 1974, and still persists to this day. 

By 1972, Mayor Daley, State’s Attorney Hanrahan, and the CPD had
defeated the David Barksdale and Black gangs and Fred Hampton and the
Black Panthers—at least in terms of their ambitions for political
power and civil rights gains, such as the ending of poverty and
segregation in Chicago’s Black communities. The Black gangs still
persisted—as they do today, despite the persistent efforts of the
CPD to eradicate them—but the gangs fell into different rivalries
and factions amidst the decades of worsening violence, poverty,
disinvestment, deindustrialization, gentrification, privatization,
school and mental health facility closings, and continuing police
brutality and mass incarceration, among other factors. 

The “War on Gangs” approach still persists to this day in the city
of Chicago, because it was continued by subsequent mayors such as
Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and now Lori Lightfoot. As Bella Bahhs
has written for the Triibe
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“Today, when violence in Black and brown Chicago neighborhoods is
categorized as ‘gang related,’ it absolves the city officials from
taking responsibility for constructing racial ghettos and designated
pockets of poverty.” Policing and mass incarceration are then
presented as the only possible response to violence, because
structural change—such as actually ending poverty and
segregation—is unthinkable to the people in charge of maintaining
the discriminatory and violent status quo
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These are all the policies that make up the “organized
abandonment” of racial capitalism and the “organized violence”
that it takes to manage capitalism’s inherent racialized inequality,
in the words of abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. These apartheid-like
structures created wars and cycles of violence that are exceedingly
difficult to resolve—especially with the easy availability of guns
in America, the world’s leader in gun manufacturing and arms
dealing, military and police spending, and overall incarceration.
Tragically, these cycles of violence will likely persist as long as
the conditions that produce such violence still govern the City of
Chicago and the country: including entrenched segregation, poverty,
widespread police abuse and incarceration, and widespread availability
of guns. 

Williams has written an essential document of history that explains
how Chicago got to where it is today. Whether you are interested in
political history, gang history, or just the city in general, _King
David and Boss Daley: The Black Disciples, Mayor Daley and Chicago on
the Edge_ is one of the best books out there. While it is a tragic
story filled with lots of death and oppression, it is also a story of
perseverance and ingenuity in the face of seemingly insurmountable
odds, and it deeply resonates today. Black youth and especially Black
“gang members” continue to be the most demonized population in the
City of Chicago, and that fact can be traced directly to the events
portrayed in this book. 

_xxxxxx MODERATOR:_ Listen to an interview by Natalie Moore
with Dr. Lance Williams on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio taped the
morning after the 2023 Chicago Mayoral Run-Off election
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Chicago's history with crime and race. Read about how Brandon Johnson
won and the role of unions, progressives and youth HERE
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and HERE
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HERE
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Learn of a new opera featuring a large diverse cast, many from what
was previously called the Chicago Children's Choir, exploring  the
devastating impact of gun violence on cities and neighborhoods yet,
amazingly, featuring Arnie Duncan, an outspoken support of Paul
Vallas, as a "white savior" HERE
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Several decades of heavy-handed policing and mass incarceration have
proven to be completely unable to eradicate gangs or resolve the
problem of gun violence. As Williams and others have written
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the _Chicago Reporter_, Chicagoans should “reconsider the ‘war on
gangs’ strategy that has been Chicago policy since it was declared
by Richard J. Daley in 1969.” There will only be peace when the
people in charge of the city of Chicago, and the nation, make
transformative structural changes to how the city and country operate;
such as passing the PeaceBook
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ending poverty and segregation, and divesting from the massive
policing, incarceration, and military budgets to facilitate investment
in true community resources like education, housing, healthcare, and
much more—including Reparations for the historical and present harm
caused.

_BOBBY VANECKO is a contributor to the Weekly, and is the
great-grandson of Richard J. Daley. He previously wrote about this
family connection
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_Subscribe to the SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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past ten years, the Weekly has produced original, local reporting
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* chicago
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* crime
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* gangs
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* Racism
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* youth
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* elections
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* unions
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* Police
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