“We Could Change the World”

THE SCENE: CHICAGO'S WEST SIDE, 1967.DRUGS, LAWLESSNESS AND VIOLENCE RULE THE STREETS.IN STEPS A YOUNG IDEALIST NAMEDDAVID DAWLEY '63, WHO HOPES TO CLEAN UP THEAREA-AND ITS MOST NOTORIOUS GANG.

there is credit due for bringing David Dawley to Chicago and paving his path to the notorious gang known as the Conservative Lords, it belongs to jazz legend John Coltrane.

AS 24-year-old in 1965, Dawley visited his cousin in Chicago. Together the two men toured the city and its many jazz clubs. It was on a Friday night at a club called the Plugged Nickel that Dawley witnessed a Coltrane performance. Dawley was transfixed. He felt the passion of Coltrane's tenor saxophone, and he was energized. "It seared Chicago into my soul," Dawley says, "and I knew I wanted to go back."

He got his chance in 1967. That summer Dawley signed on with the Washington, D.C.-based TransCentury Corp. in an attempt to create social change and make some money along the way. Trans Century hired primarily young adults to go to 11 cities around the country and prepare a report for the President's Council on Youth Opportunity, an evaluation of the attitudes of youth toward federally funded summer programs chaired by then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Dawley, who had been recognized for his outstanding service while working for the Peace Corps in Honduras from 1963 to 1965, drew East St. Louis. But, with Coltrane in mind, he worked a trade for Chicago and headed on his way.

Upon his arrival Dawley found a Chicago largely closed off to the disaffected blacks of the poor West Side. His attempt to reach out to them altered his life forever and profoundly changed the direction of what was then known as the worst gang in Chicago.

The Conservative Vice Lords started in 1958 as a club called the Conservative Lads, a group of seven friends attempting to keep each other safe in Chicago's St. Charles Reformatory under the axiom that there is strength in numbers. The club quickly grew into a much larger and more menacing gang that, by the early 19605, was the unofficial king of Chicago's West Side, controlling the Lawndale area through violence and intimidation. The vast majority of the Lords had spent time in prison, and murders and beatings were as common as the poverty in which they lived.

By 1967 the Vice Lords elders were closing in on 30 and looking to change. Dawley gave them that opportunity. During the next two years the 5-foot-6, 135-pound coxswain from central Massachusetts helped convert the Vice Lords from a street-hustling gang to a community-based organization. He helped the Vice Lords clean up the Lawndale neighborhood, start legitimate businesses and campaign for rights for the poor, black and largely forgotten.

"He showed us that there was a life worth living," says the Rev. William Robinson, who was one of Dawley's bodyguards as a 16- year-old, when he was known as "Little Billy." "He talked to us in such a way that it made it clear he was more concerned about the people than the buildings or a territory. He was trying to show us that there was a better life."

In turn Dawley earned the respect and friendship of the Vice Lords. He moved in with them in Lawndale, became an official member and was protected from harm in even the most dire circumstances.

"You have to go through these layers of trust and experience, which takes time, and I went through those layers," Dawley says. "By the time Martin Luther King was assassinated [in April of 1968] and the West Side went up in flames, I was a Vice Lord. I walked down the middle of the street with a tape recorder and a camera with flames on both sides and trash barrels going through windows."

THE CHICAGO THAT DAWLEY WALKED INTO that summer of 1967 wasn't the same as the one he'd experienced two years earlier with his cousin. The stores were emptied out, the sidewalks littered with broken bottles, and the streets, movie theaters and swimming pools controlled by local gangs.

"It was a war zone," says Mike Coffield '62, a Beta Theta Pi brother and Chicago lawyer whom Dawley recruited to work with the Vice Lords. "The area was not only poverty-stricken but it had broken-down buildings all over it. It was as bad as you could imagine."

To complete his work for TransCentury, Dawley knew he would need the cover and support of the local gangs. So he decided to approach the Vice Lords directly.

"It started with a Peace Corps volunteer who has a certain skepticism of government and government programs," Dawley says. "You want to know what's going on from another perspective, from the people they say they're reaching, the most neglected and the most hard-core. And who are these people? Here they're called Vice Lords, and they really do run the streets, so I want to meet these people and I want to do that myself rather than through some bureaucracy."

Dawley put out word that he wanted to talk with the group and, soon thereafter, heard back from a black street worker with the local YMCA who gave him these instructions: "Go to the Senate Theater on the West Side of Chicago and someone will contact you."

Dawley s reaction to this cryptic message? "I was thinking, 'I guess I'll go,' "he recalls. "I didn't have a second thought. I just headed out there."

Dawley was the only white person in the theater. The event turned out to be a "Black Power" rally mounted to collect food and supplies to send to Mississippi, the center of the black civil rights movement.

About halfway through the rally Dawley was tapped on the shoulder and escorted from the Senate by two members of the Vice Lords, Bobby Gore, the Lords' spokesman and a friend of Dawley's to this day, and Eddie "Pep" Perry, a founder of the Conservative Lads. They told Dawley he could meet the Vice Lords' chief, Alfonso Alford, that following Sunday at the local pool hall.

"Pep said, 'We'll make sure you get out safely,' "Dawley recalls. "I hadn't been thinking about that until then. Of course, he didn't say how I'd get in safely."

Dawley took the train to Lawndale and got to the pool hall with relative ease. At one point he was stopped by four men who asked where he was going. "I told them I was going to meet Alfonso and they parted like the Red Sea," Dawley says. "I thought, Apparently I have the right name.'"

Dawley attributes his success with Alford to good timing and good fortune. First, by the mid-1960s Alford and a number of the other Vice Lords had started considering their prospects. They knew there was no future in being street thugs and wanted to create a positive legacy for the next generation. Second, Dawley offered the Vice Lords a fair wage to help him conduct the survey (the Lords were typically low-balled for any real work they attempted), and he did not make any unrealistic promises about what they could achieve or how the information they gathered would be received by the federal government. Dawley laid out his plan to Alford, who readily accepted the terms. The next day a number of the younger Lords, including Gore, went to work with Dawley canvassing the neighborhood with the survey for TransCentury.

"At first we didn't know if he was an FBI plant or what, and we told him we didn't know if he was for real or not," says Gore, who still lives in Chicago. "And if you're not, you're going to get hurt real bad. You might even get killed. But he took it all with a grain of salt. He groomed us and put us in the know and we started moving on it. We were doing some things we never knew we could do. We had a voice in what was being said and what was being done. We were thinking, 'Rather than being gangbangers, maybe this was the thing to do.' "

Dawley's initial approach gave him credibility with the Vice Lords, but he knew he had to go deeper. So with his agenda set and his protection secured, Dawley went about finding a place to live.

He had taken up temporarily with a group of white friends who lived a few miles from Lawndale. They urged him to take an apartment in central Chicago and commute to the West Side, but Dawley thought differently. In order to do his work the way he wanted, and with assurances from the Vice Lords that he would be kept safe, Dawley took a room at the YMCA in Lawndale and hit the streets.

He devoted his life to them; he had no life other than that," Jean Halberstam, another of Dawley's friends from Chicago, says of his relationship with the Vice Lords. "He wasn't interested in dinner dates or movies. Even in those times when we all thought of ourselves as so politically radical, he had a very focused vision of what he could do. He was going to spend all of his waking hours accomplishing that."

Dawley eventually moved into an apartment in Lawndale on what the Chicago Sun-Times called "the bloodiest corner in Chicago." He says he learned in the Peace Corps that you have to be around to earn the respect and trust of the people you're working with, and that moving to Lawndale was the only way he could accomplish his goals.

"I wouldn't use the word crazy," Gore says of Dawley s move. "It was more of a nervy thing, him being so small. He's a little guy. But he didn't care what happened, he was there to do a job."

Dawley's transition to life in Lawndale wasn't exactly smooth. He routinely witnessed the brand of street justice in which an indiscretion was greeted with a beer bottle to the back of the head, and he learned how the most talented of the violent gang members could whip a straight razor or a jackknife out of their sleeves and cut a man across the face.

Two young girls once doused his apartment door with kerosene and lit Dawley s apartment on fire. Dawley was not inside and no one was hurt. The sisters' brother was warned by the Vice Lords leaders that he would be held responsible for any further action by his sisters against Dawley. There was never another incident. "Everybody in the community knew not to mess with Dave," Robinson says. "They knew that was a fact."

Dawley's most terrifying moment, however, came later in his tenure. He was working into the night at the Conservative Vice Lords Inc. main office with a number of members when "Fast," a Lord whose real name was Percy Williams, suddenly jumped from his seat, pointed a gun at Dawley's head and gave him five minutes to apologize for an unspecified offense.

"I just kept typing," says Dawley, who was filling out a government form at the time, "just putting letters on the page while the other guys in the office tried to reason with him. Finally, I just said, 'Listen, I don't know what I did but I'm very sorry if I offended you.' He took the gun and shot it at the ground near my desk. They were blanks. He wasn't going to kill me, though he could have blinded me."

The most remarkable part of the story, Dawley says, is that while a black former gang member stood ready to shoot him—the only white man in Lawndale—the other black men weren't backing Fast, they were trying to help Dawley.

"We made friends right away. You could see the sincerity in the guy," Gore says. "After a couple of weeks of training us to do the survey we kind of fell in love with him, and he became a part of us."

BY OCTOBER 1967 DAWLEY'S WORK WITH Trans Century was largely complete and he needed to return to Washington, D.C., to file his report. He had already begun working with Alford and Gore on community organizing and urban renewal, and from that CVL Inc.—the legitimate arm of the dissipating Conservative Vice Lords gang—was born.

As Dawley packed up to leave he told Alford, Gore and the others that he'd be back. No one really believed him.

"I didn't think I could walk away without leaving a lot of myself behind," Dawley says. "I couldn't walk away without trying to help them do what nobody else was doing, which was to convert their aspirations into reality. And they had two big things working for them: They had control of the streets in a large urban ghetto and a desire to make some meaningful changes."

Dawley finished his work in Washington in December, borrowed some money, gassed up his Volkswagen Beetle and drove straight from D.C. to the main pool room in Lawndale. He arrived at 2 a.m. "I walked in and told them, 'I'm back,'" Dawley says. "They were shocked."

He stayed for nearly two more years. During that time he helped the Vice Lords apply for and receive a $15,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant, along with a matching grant of $15,000 from a coalition of businesses called Operation Bootstrap (The $30,000 in grants is equivalent to almost $185,000 today.)

He lived alongside the Vice Lords and their families, prepared the Lords to meet with the media and helped transform them from the most notorious gang in Chicago into a virtual fairy tale of civic pride. CVL Inc. opened a business office, an art studio, an Afro- American boutique, a recreation and training center and a restaurant called Teen Town.

They even started a tenants' rights program and served as leaders in a citywide protest that resulted in more jobs in trade unions for blacks. Newspapers from th eChicago Tribune to the Chicago Defender ran accounts of the turnaround. Alford, Gore and Dawley all gained a certain glint of notoriety, and Dawley was named one of "Twenty-seven People Worth Saving" by Esquire in 1968. (He also wrote a 1992 book about his Lawndale Nation of Lords.)

"Dave was a superb Peace Corps volunteer and an outstanding community development guy," says Dick Irish, the primary recruiter at TransCentury and a former director with the Peace Corps. "He really understood the psychology of gangs and how you could channel that organizational skill they had: How they connect with each other for productive ends that are greater than just the gangs' individual prosperity."

Dawley left Lawndale for good in the fall of 1969, leaving behind an infrastructure he thought would prosper. The funding for the Vice Lords' immediate projects had been secured, and none of the groups leaders was in prison.

Sadly, the results of Dawley's work did not endure. In February 1969 Alford suffered a debilitating stroke, creating a leadership vacuum. A year later Gore was jailed for a murder he adamantly maintains, to this day, he did not commit.

The private philanthropy that drove Lawndale's resurgence dried up as concerns shifted from urban renewal to the Vietnam War and, slowly, the Vice Lords fractured, the younger generation growing up with too much temptation and too little guidance. Many of the Lords went to jail and came back increasingly violent, bringing that violence once more to the streets.

By the mid-1970s the area was overrun by drugs and crime, decaying to the point that most of the good works done by the Lords were crushed and forgotten, falling back into the cycle of poverty that Alford, Gore and the others had fought so hard to break.

"I can't describe the hurt and the pain," Gore says. "When I came back to Lawndale after being incarcerated for 11 years I just sat up on the corner and cried. For the younger generation that fast dollar just took over. They never considered that they were killing our people."

Still, both Gore and Dawley refuse to view their venture as a failure. Dawley points out that the work of the Vice Lords created a template for current community organizing and provides a glimmer of hope that a radical transformation truly can be accomplished, if only for a brief period of time. Today he works from his home in Westminster, Massachusetts, as director of strategic relations for Synapticmash.com, which fosters collaboration among school districts, educators, parents and students. He serves on the Colleges Rockefeller Center board and he helped create a Peace Corps internship for Dartmouth students. "Saul Alinsky, a legendary community organizer, said if we're just taking up space, what good are we?" says Dawley.

To his college friends, Dawley's continued commitment is no surprise. "We were told from the time we got [to Dartmouth] that you're going to get this education, and you better get yourself together and give back whateveryou can give back because the education is a privilege, not a right," says Mike Jackson '62, a fraternity brother of Dawley's in Beta Theta Pi. 'And we went for it. We all believed it."

Says Dawley: "If you go back, Lawndale is a soul-less landscape, an urban cemetery to short-lived hope. But with passing time you see that a lot of what we tried were successful strategies and have been tried again—giving people a sense of ownership and hope and respect. We showed, at least for a few minutes, that we could change the world."

Dawley joined forces with gang leader Alfonso Alford (right) to transform their headquarters (far right) into a fledgling business office. "We weren't looking at color," said one Lord. "This guy had become a regular."

As part of a 1968 summer program funded through several grants, the Vice Lords organized a Neighborhood Youth Corps to clean area streets.

E.J. CRAWFORD is a former public information coordinator for the IvyLeague. Now a writer for the United States Tennis Association, he lives inConnecticut.