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Origins
The Black Spades arose out of the Savage Seven because of the increasing number of members.
In the 1970s the various gangs had their own music. They walked ("bopped") around with ablasting their favorite hits. The Black Spades were also participants in the Hoe Avenue peace meeting.
Decline of gangs and the rise of Hip Hop culture
New York street gang activity peaked in 1973, and then began to decline. Reasons for this decline included violence with other gangs, drug use, and members leaving simply because the gangs became too large.
Times were also changing, and block dance parties and clubs were becoming more popular. The beginnings of Hip hop culture began to form in these dance venues, and as gang members and former gang members started getting involved in more Hip Hop activities, involvement in the gangs declined.
Kool DJ Herc, an early Hip Hop music pioneer, credits gangs like the Black Spades with getting the Hip Hop scene started. "It started coming together as far as the gangs terrorizing a lot of known discoteques back in the days. I had respect from some of the gang members because they used to go to school with me. There were the Savage Skulls, Glory Stompers, Blue Diamonds, Black Cats and Black Spades.
The Black Spades later became the Zulu Nation in the late 1970s, and then the Universal Zulu Nation, in the 1980s.
New York was a hip hop head’s dream come true; Big Daddy Kane headlined at Brooklyn’s second annual Hip Hop Festival, a huge free graffiti retrospective was on display in Harlem, and up in the Boogie Down, Afrika Bambaataa was finally inducted into the Bronx Walk of Fame. As one of hip hop’s pioneers, Bam probably had a lot to be proud of that day. The induction ceremony, which took place on 161st Street and the Grand Concourse, was one of the last events of Bronx Week, a borough-wide celebration of the Bronx’s economic achievements and cultural contributions, both of which Bambaataa could honestly say he’d contributed to. For a guy who remains pretty active even today, it must’ve been humbling to return to his roots, if only for an afternoon. But unbeknownst to Bambaataa, another little piece of the history that he was part of was scheduled to take place just a subway ride away.
Down on 142nd Street in Mott Haven Houses, an equally significant event was supposed to be going down: the first annual Black Spades Memorial Day Cookout. The memorial, which had been in the works for nearly seven years, was meant to be an opportunity to celebrate and remember a community of people that might otherwise have been forgotten. On top of that, Grandmaster Flash and Kool Herc, two DJs who have been credited with essentially giving birth to hip hop, were scheduled to appear and perform alongside Rockin’ Rob and Chuck City at this event. Unfortunately, thunderstorms swept across the city, and the event was cancelled. The inclement weather, which affected turnout at the other events but didn’t result in their cancellation, was both incredibly unfortunate and grimly appropriate at the same time.
“You can’t separate the history without diminishing the history,” Jamel White explains to me. It is June 28, and White (known to his friends as Campy) and I have been talking about growing up in the South Bronx in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s. Campy, who stands about 5’8,” has the build of someone who, in his younger days, was probably built like a freight train (he used to box), which stands in odd relief to his bright eyes and easy smile. He is sitting on the hood of his car, and to his right, his friend Comanche, a tall and broad-shouldered man who looks much younger than any 50-something should, faces me. In their teens, Campy and Comanche both became members of the Black Spades, arguably the biggest street gang in the South Bronx during the early ‘70’s. Campy was the Ambassador of the 17th Division of the Black Spades; Comanche served as the Division’s original War Counselor.
“Right over there was the clubhouse,” Campy explains, pointing to a spot situated somewhere in the middle of a handball court. The three of us are on 135th Street, looking out at basketball courts and a courtyard. Everything is very clean and new-looking, a sharp contrast to the scene Campy and Comanche have been trying to paint for the last hour.
Campy’s eyes shine with old memories as he tells me about that “clubhouse,” an abandoned building that overlooked a public pool and an expanse of burnt out, similarly abandoned buildings.
In many ways, the Black Spades’ reputation as a violent street organization (“We stayed in the news a lot,” Campy admits) has a lot to do with where hip hop began. When Ronald Reagan visited the Bronx in the 1980's, he likened it to Dresden after it had been bombed into oblivion during World War II. As S.H. Fernando points out in his book “The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture, and Attitudes of Hip Hop,” longtime residents of the borough frequently referred to the borough as Vietnam, a sobering moniker that, at the time, was basically tantamount to calling the Bronx Hell on Earth. 
Though the Spades’ infamy has had more staying power than anything else, Campy and Comanche are members of a group that has left fingerprints all over New York’s cultural history. At one time, the gang, which originally got started in Soundview projects, boasted 196 divisions that extended as far south as the Carolinas and as far west as Indiana. The character Cyrus from the movie The Warriors, the “Lord Byron of the City,” was based on one of their members, a Spade named Benji. Their notoriety was so far-reaching that a film crew sought out some of their members to shoot a rumble scene for The Education of Sonny Carson (“That was real blood, by the way,” Comanche says knowingly), but easily their most famous former member is Kevin Donovan, also known as Afrika Bambaataa.
Bam came out of the 10th division, near Bronx River, and while most hip hop historians make passing references to the Black Spades when talking about Bam’s beginnings, they are often reduced to a footnote, or as a tidy segue into the Zulu Nation, the organization Bambaataa founded in the mid-70's. The carefree, almost liberating spirit that permeates hip hop’s first tapes and singles owes a lot to funk, soul, and disco that it was based on, but a sizable debt is also owed to the Black Spades, who created safe zones in neighborhoods where outsiders would have thought that to be impossible. The Black Spades provided security at almost every party that Bam rocked when he was gaining a cult following. Places like 18 Park, T-Connection, Black Door, Autobahn, as well as countless high school gyms and playgrounds were only as safe as their security details, and the Black Spades made sure that the parties they policed for future legends like Grandmaster Flash and Bam could remain places where the only concern was having a good time.
Campy insists that the source of the Spades’ strength was not brutality or ruthlessness. “What really galvanized us,” he explains, “was our rules and regulations. Before we were men,” he continues, “we were Spades.”
“That’s what turned you into a man,” Comanche adds.
Chief among these regulations was that the Spades were to respect the territory they occupied. “You don’t prey on your community,” Comanche tells me. “No matter how bad people want talk about us, it was safe for people, older people, to walk around in here.” Even in the face of all the adversity and struggle they lived with from day to day, the Spades made a point of nurturing and protecting the neighborhoods they controlled. They even made a few attempts to call borough-wide truces between their rivals. The Spades’ rules and regulations, combined with belief in one another, somehow made life in the Bronx livable for Campy and his friends.
“I was always scared,” Campy admits, looking off into the distance. “But with them, you couldn’t be scared. They wouldn’t allow you to be scared.”
As the years rolled by though, there were inevitably trying times. Campy, like many of his comrades, served a prison sentence. Some of his closest friends were murdered by rival gangs, while others passed away from natural causes. But rather than let the pain of those experiences drive the Spades out of his life, Campy allowed them to remain an important part of it. In periodic conversations with other Spades, he meditated on what kind of value his past experiences held for himself and others. Then, seven years ago, while attending a funeral for Disco King Mario, an important DJ and one of the founding members of the Black Spades, Campy decided that sum of those experiences was something that deserved to be remembered. And so he began to plan.
On the afternoon of June 30th, about a half block north of 142nd Street on Willis Avenue, the muted thump of a drum track coming out of speakers can be heard emanating from Mott Haven Houses. If you’re any further away, the general hum of street traffic and life in the South Bronx makes it impossible to tell that anything could be going on in there, which is very metaphorically appropriate: the real story of what the Black Spades meant to the people who lived in the South Bronx is something that’s impossible to know unless you happened to be right there with them.
Just inside Mott Haven’s gates, between basketball courts and a playground is a courtyard filled with former Spades, some of whom haven’t seen one another in decades. Some are there to pay respect to those who have passed away. Some are there to party and have a good time. But most of all, everyone is there to remember, to celebrate not only how they grew up together, but the fact that so much of what they lived through can stand as an example to those that have come after them.
To each Black Spade, there are memories of different things. For some of them, it’s about the music and culture that the Spades allowed to grow. While listening to the deliriously upbeat mix of ‘70’s funk, soul, and disco that comes pouring out of the party’s speakers, I talk with the original president of the 18th division, Tiny, who provided security at dozens of shows. When I ask him about those days, he smiles. “Grandmaster Flash has never been robbed,” he says proudly. Considering that Tiny's talking about an era when someone as respected as Kool DJ Herc got stabbed at one of his own parties, that says a lot. Meanwhile, to his right, a Baby Spade (a term used to refer to the second generation of Black Spades) named Brother Larry tells me about what it meant to be at those shows.
“I was a DJ, DJing, watching Grandmaster Flash jammin’ 18 Park – Tiny and all these brothers was my big brothers,” he says, one arm around Tiny’s shoulder. “I was a young brother lookin’ up to these people cuz they was like the protection of the neighborhood; these are the people that we had to keep our neighborhood together.”
Despite recent suggestions that the Bronx has finally been revitalized, the people in attendance today know that life is often still very difficult for its residents. The Black Spades’ efforts to keep their corners of the Bronx together were how they survived, but they see many of the same challenges in place. Yet instead of bitterness or disillusionment, there is a hopefulness and energy in most everyone here that makes their outlook hopeful.
“It’s all good,” says Debra, a woman who, Campy informs me, was one of the first female Black Spades. “To me, it’s all good. We survived, so things are going to be okay.” Debra, who brought her children to the event, tells me that being in the Black Spades was more than simply having a large network of friends: “We were like a family,” she says, gazing at the crowd in the middle of the courtyard. “It was family. It still is.”
That sense of family obligation means just as much to the Black Spades now as it did then. More than anything, the people here feel an obligation to look out for the current generation just as much as they looked out for one another. “If we don’t teach the young people, they’re gonna be subjected to all kinds of dumb shit,” says Easy Al, a former DJ and current host of a local television show about hip hop culture in his community. As he sees it, there are still a lot of lessons to be learnt from the music and philosophy that served as hip hop’s first underpinnings. “Everybody’s not on the gangster thing,” Al assures me. Still, in a neighborhood that’s been aggressively saturated with modern rap marketing and its negative attitudes, there’s a lot of work to be done. “Right now it’s a lost art,” he continues, “but we gon’ bring it back.?
“Someone said I had a strike against me when I was born, but I never believed that. And that makes me free from all the preconceptions of this world,” he tells me. To Al and a lot of the other people in attendance, the struggle of living in a world still full of prejudice is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. To him, the vibe and mindset of hip hop’s beginnings can still be resonant to today’s youth. “If you show love, you’ll get it back,” Al says knowingly.
“We’re all gods and queens,” says Justice, a leader of the Bomb Squad, a subdivision of the 18th division. Back in the 80’s, he was known as Nookiey, but age has made him a wiser man, and his changed perspective warranted a change in name. These days, he remembers how big a role all the women in his community played in surviving those times. “Our girls were down, man,” he tells me, looking at his friends Angie and Jelly with a mixture of love and reverence that is hard to find between anyone these days. “When we got roughed up or messed up, or when things got rough, they took us home and took care of us.”
Being reunited after all these years seems to have put a spring back into many old legs. A few guys bust out old break dancing moves that they’d never forget, DJ’s get to dust off and play records that are older than their kids, and MC’s spit verses about ladies and hip hop pioneers that sound fresh today. If you ignore the average age of the attendees, the vibe and sound of this afternoon matches what any recent student of hip hop would have expected a Bronx block party to be like. From behind the decks, Rockin’ Rob surveys the scene before saying to me, “It’s great to see everybody out here. They deserve this.”
At about ten minutes to seven, there are nearly a hundred people packed into Mott Haven’s courtyard. On either side of them, in the basketball courts and playgrounds, crowds of kids from the neighborhood mill around, wondering why the DJ’s are spinning Chic and Ernie and the Top Notes instead of Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Wayne.
“Black Spades Memorial Day, baby!” Easy Al booms into a mic. “Keep your head high, and we’ll see you next year!” As the instrumental that Al was talking over gets turned down, Campy finally takes the mic. In the courtyard, surrounded by friends, family, and the Bronx’s next generation, the Black Spades seem to instinctively cluster together as Campy reads from a list of members that are no longer around. But as the afternoon’s events have shown, those that died are still with us, and they will always be a part of the Bronx and its history.
“Black Spades don’t die,” Campy says. “We multiply.”
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