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A Grateful Dead-loving sociology student wormed his way into a Chicago gang -- and then stuck around to write a compelling portrait of life in the projects.
By Laura Miller
Read more: Books, Chicago, Laura Miller, Reviews, Book reviews
Feb. 28, 2008 | When Sudhir Venkatesh first ventured into the Lake Park housing project in Chicago, it was 1989, he was a sociology grad student at the University of Chicago, and he was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a ponytail. A few years later, Henry Cisneros, secretary of housing and urban development for the Clinton administration, would call Chicago's projects "without question, the worst public housing in America today." A Grateful Dead fan prone to speaking in "spiritually laden language, mostly about the power of road trips," Venkatesh made an unlikely candidate for the task that brought him to Lake Park: Asking the residents such penetrating questions as "How does it feel to be black and poor?" What happened after he walked through the doors was even more unlikely. He wound up sticking around for seven more years.
"Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets" is Venkatesh's account of the time he spent hanging out at Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, the largest housing project in the U.S. and home to some 30,000 people (the size, the author notes, of a small city). His Virgil on this journey was a man called J.T., a middle manager of sorts in a gang called the Black Kings, who controlled three buildings at Robert Taylor. The two men, not far apart in age, first met during Venkatesh's fateful visit to Lake Park; J.T. had been detailed there by his superiors with orders to "increase productivity" in the local franchise. He did such a good job that the gang's leadership -- known as "the board of directors" -- sent him over to Robert Taylor, a plum assignment. By then, J.T. had Venkatesh in tow, convinced that the college student was planning to write his biography.J.T. was mistaken about that, as he seldom was about anything else, and Venkatesh refrained from enlightening the gangster until he left for a fellowship at Harvard in 2006. Their long association -- Venkatesh calls J.T. "the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come" -- eventually resulted in a dissertation on the underground economy of the urban poor (which would in turn become a 2006 book titled "Off the Books").
"Gang Leader for a Day" is no doubt much closer to what J.T. expected, although Venkatesh takes care to demonstrate his independence from his former guide. This new book offers an exceptionally intimate, sometimes revelatory view of life in the projects, but it's also the story of an extraordinary relationship, one that Venkatesh puzzles over to this day. "It would be hard to call us friends," he writes in conclusion. "But he was obviously a huge part of my life."
The charismatic J.T. gave Venkatesh entree into much (but not all) of an urban gang's daily activities during the tail end of the crack epidemic of the 1980s. In time, J.T. worked his way into the upper ranks of the Black Kings and managed to insert Venkatesh into several "board" get-togethers, introducing him as the gang's "director of communications," and giving the grad student the chance to marvel at how closely the organization mimicked "the structure of just about any other business in America." As it turned out, Venkatesh was more of a confidant and a sounding board than a spokesman, a representative of mainstream culture that various gang members and project residents could instruct (and lecture) on the nitty-gritty of ghetto life. Venkatesh is by all accounts a gifted listener, and in the Robert Taylor Homes he met a lot of people who welcomed the chance to finally have their say.
"Although there was a great deal of social science literature on gangs," Venkatesh writes of the years when he first went into the projects, "very few researchers had written about the actual business dealings of the gang, and even fewer had first-hand access to a gang's leadership." Eventually, he even managed to secure the account books for J.T.'s franchise. Yet, strangely enough, his professors often pressed him to spend less time with the Black Kings. Venkatesh's advisor, eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson, wanted him to write "the definitive report on everyday life in high-rise housing projects," and another teacher urged him to "try to better understand how women managed households, secured services from the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority], and otherwise help families get by."
For sociologists who sympathize with the urban poor, it probably made more sense to concentrate on the honest citizens just trying to get by under the deplorable conditions in public housing. Sociologists supply the data and theories that policymakers use to design government initiatives, like the welfare reforms or antigang sweeps that went down while Venkatesh was hanging out at Robert Taylor. Anyone who wanted to help the project residents would prefer to keep the focus on women, children and working people who had nothing to do with drugs or violence -- on the theory that the government should be nurturing positive developments, like midnight basketball leagues, and not simply equating the inner city with crime.
But as "Gang Leader for a Day" abundantly demonstrates, it was often impossible to separate necessities like feeding children and getting rid of abusive husbands and boyfriends from the activities of the Black Kings. The gang had wrapped its tendrils around every aspect of life in the Robert Taylor Homes, and Venkatesh discovered more than a few startling examples of strange bedfellows during his time there.
When a gang associate threw a party and left a mess in a common room, when an aspiring model was badly beaten by the man who fancied himself her manager, when the door fell off one family's apartment in the middle of winter, when kids needed school supplies or when someone tried to rip off the neighborhood handyman, the residents of Robert Taylor could turn to two sources for help: the Black Kings and a stout, arthritic, middle-aged woman known as Ms. Bailey.
Venkatesh soon learned that Ms. Bailey, the elected president of the tenants organization, was a "power broker" on a par with J.T. She had many connections at the notoriously corrupt Chicago Housing Authority and could make life easier (or more difficult) for anyone in the building -- including the gang members, who sold drugs in her lobby. As a result, when that common room needed cleaning, Ms. Bailey could demand that the Black Kings send over a few foot soldiers to do the dirty work.
Ms. Bailey also convened informal resident "militias" to deal with emergencies, like the man who beat up the aspiring model. J.T. wasn't happy about that; he preferred that residents view the Black Kings as the go-to source for all their security needs. Still, there wasn't much he could do about it, not without seriously disrupting the smoothly run drug business that was the real source of the Black Kings' power. Ms. Bailey extracted regular donations from the gang, spending the money on after-school parties for kids and other projects. She was formidable. "I do not want to be dealing with her when she's pissed," Venkatesh overheard T-Bone, one of J.T.'s lieutenants, say of Ms. Bailey. "Not me."
