St. Louis CofCC Blog

Or maybe Chicago is a northern extension of the Mississippi Delta.

USA Today:

Chicago-based youth street gangs have been a problem in the Mississippi Delta since the 1980s, thanks to family connections between the regions dating back to the Great Migration of the 1940s and 1950s. Recently federal authorities have cracked down on gangs in an attempt to shut down a pipeline that sends guns to the North and drugs back South, says Randall Samborn, an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago.

(snip)

“We are trying to send a message that we don’t want guns from Mississippi in Chicago,” says Samborn.

(snip)

A big reason the gangs seem to flourish in this area is that the Delta is fertile ground. Andrew Papachristos, a sociologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has studied gangs for 15 years, says street gangs evolve over time and become institutionalized in communities, particularly in areas where young men have few other opportunities.

Yet, there are a lot of opportunities in Chicago, but this has not precluded these black gangs from starting there, and thanks to “family connections” to the Mississippi Delta, spreading to the kinfolk there.

One shouldn’t be surprised that drugs and guns get the blame, but not the human beings.  And the Federal, and not the state, government is portrayed as the savior.  The trouble is that, before the Federal government thought it had the solution to everything, the state and local authorities did a very good job of crime suppression.

In 1900, Mississippi was (and still is) the blackest state in the union in terms of percentage of the whole (and recall that the “Great Migration” didn’t happen until mid-century, so it was higher than it is today, perhaps near half), and yet, it had the lowest murder rate of any state in the country.  Now it has the highest murder rate.  Looks like the Feds aren’t doing that well.

As an aside, black gangs in East St. Louis, Ill., reflect those in Chicago, while those in St. Louis reflect Los Angeles black gangs.  The reason that the river makes such a difference is that blacks in East St. Louis who are sent to state prison are obviously sent to Illinois prisons, where they mixed with Chicago’s blacks sent to state prison, and the Chicago gang culture spread to East St. Louis.  A black in East St. Louis is more likely to have contact with a black from Chicago than a black from across the river, for that reason.  In contrast, St. Louis’s blacks adopted L.A.’s gang culture because of certain movies and music.