In the early 1970s, Cornell "Black Benjy" Benjamin was murdered in the streets of the Bronx. Alive, Benjamin had been one of New York's many addicts, before going clean and becoming a drug counselor. Shortly before his death, he had become the official peace envoy of the Ghetto Brothers, a Bronx gang which had been sponsored by the city for their activism. Having already appeared on local TV channel WNET, the surviving members called a meeting at a Bronx youth club on Hoe Avenue, to be broadcast on an episode of "51st State" entitled "Ain't Gonna Eat My Mind"
The meeting itself was supervised by Ted Gross, head of the city's Youth Services Agency, which had been about to hire Benjamin for gang outrreach. Afterwards, a televised debate was held by 51st State journalist Ted Batten, in which the message of "community control" was expounded as the only solution to the United States' racial tensions. This position was in line with the policy agenda of 51st States' underwriter, the immensely wealthy Ford Foundation, under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, recently resigned from his role as National Security Advisor.
Bundy's sudden career change had seen the Foundation direct much of its wealth to pushing its way to the forefront of America's racial question, promoting ethnic separatism for marginalised identities as a way out of the chaos they predicted to result from integration. According to the Foundation's theorists, and their counterparts in the government, racial pride had been crucial to forging a middle class out of the various European immigrants in previous decades, so it was only natural that the same would be true for the new minorities. However, these efforts soon ran up against entrenched opposition, specifically the power structures which had been created by the former inhabitants of America's ghettos.
In the City of New York, from the Bronx to Wall Street, this was Tammany Hall. Having been fought over by waves of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigration, the machine had been around for centuries by the time that civil rights rolled around, with its demands for equality over patronage. As it happened, liberal elites such as John Lindsay, who served as New York's Mayor at the time, had long resented the power of Tammany, typically associated with the city's Catholic population. While it may have epitomised the corruption and racism of big-city machines, Tammany Hall was also strongly committed to the New Deal cornerstones of the welfare state and trade unionism, which were coming under attack from Lindsay and his associates.
A key battleground would be in the Ocean-Hill Brownsville school district in Brooklyn, where a Ford Foundation-sponsored "Community Control" program soon led to a successful walkout by the United Federation of Teachers. The strike of 1968 would not be the last time that decentralisation would be pushed by the considerable resources of the Foundation, which included WNET as one of the means by which it would project its ideology into the minds of the public.
The exact strength of the Ghetto Brothers is unclear. Members have subsequently claimed to have numbered in the thousands, with a presence along the East seaboard. Outside of the media spectacles they took part in however, there is little evidence for their existence. Yet through this exposure, their brand would be made famous, with surviving member Benjamin "Yellow Benjy" Melendez using it as the basis for a musical career as the head of a group named after his old gang.
As various traditions merged to form hip-hop culture in the Bronx, Melendez would be present throughout, and was credited in no small part with influencing the emergence of the genre in the 2015 "Rubble Kings" documentary. Along with Melendez, another veteran of the streets was also interviewed, Lance Taylor, who gained international fame as "Afrika Bambataa" before allegations of sexual abuse against minors rocked his standing as a pioneer of hip-hop. As a youth himself, Bambataa had been the "warlord" of the Black Spades, also based in the Bronx, responsible for enforcing gang unity in the chaos of urban decay. It could have been here that he developed his particular tastes, perhaps with the approval of city authorities, who have yet to prosecute him in a state where the statute of limitations prevents his victims from going after him in civil court.
