Can't Stop Won't Stop (Young Adult Edition): A Hip-Hop History

In the 1960s, “half of the white residents left the Bronx” (4) because a highway was built directly through the middle of it decades prior. Robert Moses, the planner who made this decision, had no regard for the sixty thousand people who lived there. Their homes and businesses were bulldozed, and slumlords in the area forced out tenants and burned their own apartment buildings for insurance money. What was left was destruction and emptiness. Employment dropped dramatically, and youth unemployment skyrocketed to 60%. It was under these conditions of no work that hip-hop culture began to develop.

As Afro-Caribbean, Latinx, and African American people began moving into neighborhoods previously occupied by Jewish, Italian, and Irish families, the white youth who remained began forming gangs to hold their position there. In response, brown and Black youth formed their own gangs, “first in self-defense, then sometimes for power, sometimes for kicks” (4). Estimates started at one hundred gangs that formed. Youth who were displaced or neglected after the destruction of the Bronx found refuge in gangs, and two of the largest and most feared were the Ghetto Brothers and the Savage Skulls, who were both Puerto Rican. Racial, class, and ethnic segregation became prominent in the Bronx again.