S. Bronx peace birthed hip hop
From the urban wasteland that was the South Bronx in the early ’70s came an unlikely truce among the vicious gangs that ruled the streets — and led to the birth of hip hop culture.
Shan Nicholson wasn’t even born when the Bronx was said to be burning. But in his new documentary, “Rubble Kings,” opening Friday, the 40-year-old filmmaker offers a searing look back at a time when the city seemed a tinderbox ready to explode.
With names like the Ghetto Brothers, Savage Skulls, Black Spades, Grim Reapers and Royal Javelins, the highly organized, mostly Latino and black gangs nearly went to all-out war in 1971 over the senseless murder of a Ghetto Brothers leader.
In what has become part of inner-city lore — and loosely inspired the 1979 cult drama “The Warriors” — bloodshed was averted when the gangs held a historic summit that resulted in a lasting peace. The so-called Hoe Ave. Peace Meeting and its aftermath is the centerpiece of “Rubble Kings,” which Nicholson says was eight years in the making as he scraped together funding that included more than $50,000 from a Kickstarter campaign.
“For me, the main underlying message is empowerment — the gangs made peace without social agencies involved; they did it without the police,” says Nicholson.
“They did it for themselves against all odds. They were expecting war after the death of one of their own, which was the next logical step. But they managed to turn this thing around.”
The peace was brokered by Ghetto Brothers president Benjamin (Yellow Benji) Melendez, then 19.
The Bronx-bred Puerto Rican teen had just seen a good friend and fellow Ghetto Brother known as Black Benjy beaten to death by a rival gang.
Yet Melendez, now 62 and a retired youth counselor, says he decided against seeking vengeance — a remarkable act that avoided turning Bronx streets into a massive rumble as each of the dozens of gangs took sides. “They murdered Black Benjy, and the expected reaction is to go an eye for an eye,” Melendez recalls. “But I looked at this instead as an opportunity to bring the gangs together. At the meeting, everybody vented their anger towards the murder of Black Benjy. But I told them, ‘No more blood, no more murders of our brothers.’ ”
Melendez’s stance “touched me deeply,” says Nicholson, who had heard of the Hoe Ave. meeting while growing up in Long Island City, Queens, and began researching the truth behind the legend for a fictional screenplay that eventually became “Rubble Kings.”
“I had a crew of friends growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, and I lost three or four of my boys to violence.”
His film shows how the peace summit opened the door for hip hop. Among the gangbangers no longer fighting was a South Bronx teen named Kevin Donovan, a member of the Young Spades who would soon be channeling his aggression into making music as the hip-hop pioneer known as Afrika Bambaataa. “The backbone of this film is really the music,” Nicholson says, “and how hip hop culture came out of gang culture.”