Crip Origin or Myth
What is a Crip? Besides it being known as a notorious street gang, what does the word Crip mean? Street gangs are active in every American urban slum, and they all go by names that have some kind of meaning. Even an unusual name like Viceroy has a meaning in the English dictionary. Blood and Gangsta Disciple speak for themselves. But you won’t find the word Crip in any dictionary. How ironic, for a word that’s so widespread and infamously known over so much of the world. It’s reported that Crips are influenced in 43 of America’s states and even stretch across oceans, to South Africa, Canada, Sweden, Germany, South America and France. Like the great following of Al Islam absorbs believers from every race, so too has the Crips. But what is the substance, the cause that draws so much popularity and induction from the word Crip? How did Crip reach and belong to so many faraway regions?
In order to answer these ironic questions, the origin must be excavated by rewinding the clock and placing attention on a place.
Now, before I go any further, let me just say that this is my theory on the sensitive subject, so my words will be objective. Being a Crip myself, I know the taboos and how touchy some are when it comes to this subject matter. But I’m a realist about facts moreso than an opportunist. My words will not be written with slight, or with any other intent from my twenty-seven years of hard truth as a Crip.
I will rewind the clock back forty years, after the assassinations and dwindling of the civil rights agenda, but just before the complete demise of the pro-Black Panther reign. The exact year: 1969. …
It’s reported that the first mention of Crip was in 1969, so says an old man from Richmond. He told me that he’d seen the word in a newspaper, and the article below the word depicted Crips as a vicious street gang that had killed a mother’s child for his leather jacket.
Many Crips will argue the beginning apparatus and the specifics of how it all got started because there are so many sects, in so many places, but most will not dispute the time. I found 1969 plausible, and feeling that the old man had no motive to be dishonest, I did not refute his testimony. This old man was from Richmond, however, on the wrong side of California from where this phenomenon was being born. Besides, for him to have read about it in a newspaper means it had already been active, established. Right?
So, as a curious Crip in search of his true origin, my investigation had to go deeper. …
The incipient stages of Crip were never spoken of for many reasons, mainly because it was not expected to be as popular as it is today.
My father was a pimp during that time of bell-bottom pants, platform shoes, afros and black fists, but he also belonged to an old L.A. street gang called the Gladiators. Bloods and Crips attuned to their history recognize the Gladiators, in the late ’60’s to early ’70’s, as one of the original Bloods in L.A. My father has several tattoos to attest to his association and I still have faint memories of riding in the back seat of his cherry-red 1962 Chevy Impala.
Looking back, perhaps it was my father who sparked my intrigue, not just about Crips, but black gangs in L.A. overall. I was always fascinated about my city’s history when I’d read about it or hear it told. My father certainly had a way of romanticizing it. …
I don’t think my father really knew I was in a gang until I’d been shot at fourteen. To heal and get away from the dangers of my hood – my hood being where my grandparents lived – I was sent to Fontana to live with my father.
My father’s attitude about me being a Crip was only hostile, I believe, because it had gotten me shot. He didn’t know the depth of what a Crip was and how it connected to his own past until he saw my attire one morning when I came out of my room limping in Dickies blue overalls, corduroy house slippers and a heavily creased Ben Davis khaki shirt.
I’ll never forget his evaluating look of amazement before telling me how much I looked like a cross between Farm Boys and Businessmen from back in the day. “Is that where Crips come from?” he asked. But my expression was more like, you tell me!
At that time, I knew very little about Gladiators and Slauson Boys, and I’d never heard of Businessmen and Farm Boys.
My father enlightened me about things that made me wonder if my O.G. homeboys were privy to. Certainly, I knew those in my generation were totally oblivious. If my older homeboys did know, they never edified us young Crips about the pertinence of our history. Now in hindsight, over two decades away from that eye-opening moment with my father, I realize that such carelessness and lack of responsibility is part of the reason why the original meaning of what a Crip stood for has run amok. It is evident that if you ask a Crip today what he or she stands for, or what does a Crip mean, most likely your guess will be better than theirs, just as it was when my father questioned me about it. But to question why Crips faintly hold the baton of its history worthy or important enough to pass on is limiting because, in many other aspects, black families in general have done the same thing. I’ve only attained some answers to the questions I asked over time, but what if I wasn’t persistent in asking at all?
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