The Blackstone Rangers;: A reporter's account of time spent with the street gang on Chicago's South Side,

"Nowhere in the history of this country has there been a group of young black men like us, organized with the kind of discipline we have, the kind of organization. Because that's what we are: an organization. We ain't no gang." Thus, Joel Hampton, the older brother of Freddy Hampton, described the largest ghetto street gang in the United States, the Blackstone Rangers. From a nine-member street gang founded in 1959, then called the Blackstone Raiders, the Blackstone Rangers had grown in nine years to a membership of over 4500, and had come to control the entire South Side of Chicago. In 1968 a young reporter from a major magazine met Joel Hampton in Resurrection City. In a Washington, D.C. bar, Hampton wrote the reporter a safe-conduct on a napkin, and two weeks later the reporter took it out to Chicago and went down to the South Side. This book records what he saw and heard. The colorful, brash, strong and moving personalities of the Stone leaders themselves. But, more important, it documents how the organization came to attain its immense size and powerful influence among young black people of Chicago.