Big Chief and Little Chief

"Take off your hat, nigga."

Normally, Jeff Fort didn't yield to authority. Especially not to the white teachers at Hyde Park High School. They constantly harassed the teenager. When white teachers commanded him to take off his hat, Fort would retort, "Jeff Fort ain't gonna obey."

But the student and his crew did listen to Timuel Black, one of the few black teachers at the high school in the early 1960s. "We were like their daddies," Black says. "They respected us." So when Black stopped Fort in the hallway and ordered him to take off his hat, Fort respectfully removed the cap from his bush-top head.

Fort, the Blackstone Rangers and future P Stone Nation leader, didn't quite fit in this milieu on the South Side of Chicago. Hyde Park High School was an elite place for University of Chicago professors to send their children. Black said the school, located at 62nd and Stony Island, engaged in conspicuous tracking of its white and black students. The administration appeased white parents by creating so-called elite tracks for their students. And white troublemakers stayed in school while any infraction got black kids the boot.

Fort would've been considered a troublemaker. A fearless tough guy, Fort told the jokes but didn't like any turned on him. He was a short, slender teen who carried himself as if he had the physique of a professional bodybuilder. And while the lore around Fort is that he's illiterate and never made it past fourth grade, Black contends that "he could not read at the level he should have been reading, but he could read." And though "he was not by any means a scholar," the pupil had other gifts, leadership qualities that were intangible, difficult to describe. Black said the charisma often ascribed to Fort was obvious in his adolescence. He was not just another rough boy from the neighborhood with low grades.

When Black approached Fort to ask, "Hey, boy, you want to stay in school?" Fort replied, "Yeah, but they are always picking on us."

Fort's hostility and alienation were shared by the peers he organized. Fort — and by extension the Blackstone Rangers — were shaped by the racial struggles in the neighborhood and the burden that came with being a part of the second wave of Southern blacks moving to Chicago. Hyde Park High School is actually in the Woodlawn neighborhood, which is just south of the Hyde Park neighborhood, home to the University of Chicago. The Green Line elevated train runs along 63rd Street, the main drag in Woodlawn, which today is lined with thickly weeded lots and boarded-up buildings, the vestiges of urban blight.

Jeff Fort not fitting in at Hyde Park High School or in Woodlawn had as much to do with black folks as it did with whites. His mother, Annie Fort, had traded Aberdeen, Mississippi, for Chicago in 1956. In addition to this move, several other social, fiscal, and racial policies — official and unofficial — created the unique set of circumstances that led Fort to the gang lifestyle.

The Fort family moved to Chicago during the city's second wave of black migration. After living briefly in an area of the city known as the Black Belt, the family relocated to Woodlawn. The other future Blackstone Ranger leader, Eugene "Bull" Hairston, and his family moved in around the same time. But the Hairstons weren't from the South; they moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago's "low end," and then to Woodlawn. Like many black families in the late 1950s, the Hairston family got pushed out of a historically black area and relocated to East Woodlawn because their community had to make room for the construction of new public housing.

Families such as the Forts and the Hairstons differed from other families who came to Chicago during the first wave of migration. Black migration to Chicago was distinctly divided into two waves. The first wave, often referred to as the Great Migration, occurred during and right after World War I. African Americans from urban communities down South were met by friends or relatives at the train station on 12th Street when they arrived in Chicago. They moved into an area of the city dubbed the Black Belt, a group of neighborhoods bounded by 16th Street on the north, 39th Street on the south, State Street on the east, and LaSalle Street, running along the Rock Island Railroad tracks, on the west. Their economic and political power grew; the neighborhood's blues and jazz music matured. Black businesses thrived, and black residents voted in this pocket of the South Side. They seamlessly eased into the urban way of life and helped build up the city's black middle class. The black population of Chicago increased by 148.5 percent between 1910 and 1920.

The second wave was a bit different, less sophisticated. Rural Southern blacks were pushed off the land when technological advances after World War II allowed machines to pick cotton faster than people could. In fact, Annie Fort, Jeff's mother, had been a cotton picker. These black Southerners had been deprived of educational opportunities, kept from voting, and subjected to the Ku Klux Klan. They moved to Chicago seeking a better, Northern way of life. The Chicago Defender, the city's nationally read black newspaper, encouraged blacks to come to the Promised Land. Once there, they lived in rickety kitchenettes — tiny, cut-up apartments that stacked families on top of one another. Other families moved into newly constructed public housing high-rises that Mayor Richard J. Daley had built to help contain the black population. Public assistance policies didn't encourage men to live in public housing, and therefore mothers ended up raising their children solo.

Some second-wave migrants, like Jeff Fort and his family, felt alienated from the first-wave migrants. "These newcomers had no experience or relationships. They were rural and they were poor and they lived in these cramped-up quarters. Their neighbors were more fortunate, and they didn't have anything to do with them. The young ones began to crowd together; this is the emergence of gangs," Timuel Black says.

The Community

To further understand the forces that led to the formation of the Blackstone Rangers, one must not only understand the tension surrounding the various groups of black migrants but also examine the structure of the neighborhood. And that requires understanding the racial dynamics and segregation in Chicago, and to a lesser extent in Woodlawn itself.

Restrictive racial covenants helped keep Chicago's neighborhoods white from 1916 until 1948. Covenants included language that prohibited blacks from buying or using properties in white areas. If covenants didn't work, some whites resorted to violence. Blacks didn't start moving to Woodlawn in earnest until the mid-twentieth century.

Woodlawn's first residents in the 1850s...