Showing posts with label El Rukns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label El Rukns. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

'Left of Black': Episode #34 featuring David J. Leonard and Natalie Y. Moore



Left of Black #34
w/ David J. Leonard and Natalie Y. Moore
May 16, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by Washington State University Professor David J. Leonard, co-editor of Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African-Americans in Contemporary Sports.  Later he is joined by Chicago Public Radio reporter Natalie Y. Moore, who is also the co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of An American Gang.

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>David J. Leonard is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.  His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press).

>Natalie Y. Moore is a reporter for Chicago Public Radio’s South Side bureau. Prior to joining the Chicago Public Radio staff in May 2007, Natalie was a city hall reporter for the Detroit News. As a freelance journalist, Natalie’s work has been published in Essence, Black Enterprise, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. She is co-author of the book Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation (Cleis Press, 2006) and The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of An American Gang. She is an adjunct instructor at Columbia College Chicago and is the former program chair for the Association for Women Journalists.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Muammar Qaddafi's Chicago Connection



How the feds used the Libyan dictator to bring down the infamous El Rukns gang from the city's South Side.

Muammar Qaddafi's Chicago Connection
by Natalie Y. Moore

From keeping crack cocaine off Chicago's streets in the mid-1980s to becoming the first Americans convicted of domestic terrorism, the El Rukns have had one of the most fascinating gang stories with global reach.

They sold synthetic heroin. They prayed in a mosque. They held community meetings. They got arrested for murder. In the 1970s and '80s, the El Rukns teetered among contradictions. Leader Jeff Fort, aka Chief Malik, sat on a throne at the South Side headquarters. Law enforcement and federal prosecutors zealously pursued them.

But their real legacy is a federal conviction that tied them to Muammar Qaddafi. Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. government indicted members of the El Rukns for plotting domestic terrorist acts on behalf of Libya for $2.5 million.

Lance Williams and I explore the domestic terrorism trial in our new book, The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang. Our purpose is to tell a story that looks at the social and political underpinnings of the notorious street organization.

Read the Full Essay the theRoot.com