Hoodlums, rebels, and vice lords: Street gangs, youth subcultures, and race in Chicago, 1919--1968.

Abstract

This dissertation places youth gangs and the subcultural terrains they inhabited at the center of four intersecting stories that have characterized the political and social history of the twentieth-century urban North: the development of ethnic identities and racialized worldviews among immigrants and their native-born children in the interwar period; the making of a broader white identity among working-class ethnics resisting racial integration from the 1940s through the 1960s; the parallel emergence of racial militancy and civil rights mobilization among African Americans; and, the formation of ethnic and racial attitudes within communities of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in response to both white hostility and the black drive for empowerment in the postwar era. Focusing on the key involvement of Irish athletic clubs in the 1919 Race Riot, epidemics of so-called juvenile terrorism against blacks in the mid 1940s and late 1950s, and youth involvement in white supremacist opposition to civil rights activism in the 1960s, I demonstrate that teens and young men played leading roles in defending neighborhood boundaries, articulating community identities, and, ultimately, in making the first and second ghettos. These actions, however, constituted but one side of a dialectical process evolving within youth subcultural spaces encompassing parks, schools, dance halls, and street corners. Racially charged gang violence also elicited powerful responses on the other side of the color line, as youths in African American, Mexican, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods took to rituals predicated on asserting racial and ethnic bonds and policing neighborhood boundaries. By the late 1950s, these tendencies had led to the formation of fighting-gang subcultures within which youths mobilized in impressive numbers to defend their turfs and their senses of honor---notions deeply entangled with their community identities. I argue that these fighting-gang subcultures served as conduits into the political sphere for youths on both sides of the color line, for they served to locate and magnify racial injustices in the field of everyday life, demonstrate the efficacy of direct action, as well as to enact group identities that formed the bases for grassroots collective actions in both movements against racial injustices and the white backlash against them.