Having been a Cook County prosecutor before serving in the U.S. This book reveals a powerful strategy for building our nation’s most under-resourced communities.Ī Nation Of Lords is more than just another book about gangs and the inner city - it’s an insider’s view of suffering, survival and short-lived triumph. It provides a penetrating insight into the minds of people who are growing up and living in urban America, and it shows how our government has missed opportunities to empower them to meet the challenges they face. Wiggins, Peace Corps Deputy DirectorĬo-author, "A Towering Task," founding document of Peace Corps TransCentury Founder and PresidentĮveryone interested in decreasing the racial and economic tensions which divide our country must read A Nation Of Lords immediately. It happened all through the performance of one guy. I don't know of any comparable situation in America that was as tough. I cannot imagine a tougher assignment for a white male. Can you imagine? It's almost unbelievable that somebody could move in and gain the confidence of a black criminal gang who did murder in the course of their work. Of a high performance unit of a couple thousand over time, he was considered to be #1. I would place Dawley's performance at the top. Several thousand people have passed through TransCentury.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development The voices in A Nation Of Lords need to be heard, and Dawley’s incredible adventure in the Sixties should inspire all of us in the Nineties to increase our efforts to help the youth of America. David Dawley’s work as a community organizer is testimony to the power of individual commitment, and the success of the Vice Lords demonstrates that neighborhoods can be revitalized and lives can be saved when people of all ages have a stake in their community. And when it comes, he will have to use this book for valuable first-hand accounts.Ī Nation Of Lords is an important contribution to understanding survival on the most dangerous streets in America - a book that provides dramatic insight into the problems facing young people living in cities throughout America. The time may come when an objective historian will look at the phenomena of anarchy in the nation's cities which hired powerful gangs like the Lords and Stones. Charles reformatory are hilariously horrible), Dawley has, despite his liberal apologia, exposed the true horror of the black dilemma. In the bravado and self-explanation of these young toughs, in the failure of the system and the system's imposition of order that mocks itself (the ins and outs of St. This narrative about an anarchic jungle of concrete, fled by whites and order if not the law, is an excellent one of the young black urban experience of today. not a pretty book and the unrelenting toughness of it and of the way of the Lords sometimes sickens. He lets his story run through gang wars, prison brutality and daily violence with a matter-of-fact air and an economy of language (street language) that, at times, reaches poetry. Dawley has written an authentic street-talk history in the first person of the Lords' blood-stained history.ĭavid Dawley has written a breathless, street-tough unsentimental (for the most part) history of the Conservative Vice Lords of Chicago's West Side.
David Dawley, a young, white New Englander, came to Lawndale.and incredibly bridging the black-white abyss, became, "the only white Vice Lord," for two years in 1969. The Lords relentlessly and remorselessly terrorized the black residents of Lawndale with their senseless mayhem, murder, and gang warfare organized along military lines.
This savagely moving book is the autobiography of a violent black street gang that in its 1960's heyday had perhaps 10,000 members in at least 26 branches on the West Side of Chicago.
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