Steven R. Cureton Black Vanguards and Black Gangsters

Annotation

Black Vanguards and Black Gangsters: From Seeds of Discontent to a Declaration of War examines the extent to which black gangsterism is a product of civil rights gains, community transition, black flight, social activism, and failed grassroots social movement groups. Unfortunately, the voice of the ghetto was politically tempered, silenced, ignored, and at times rebuked by a black leadership that seemed to be preoccupied with a middle-class integrationist agenda. As a result, a once strong sense of universal brotherhood became fractured and the mood of the oppressed shifted to confusion only to be tempered by relentless frustration, out of which emerged black gangs.