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Decoding a gang compliment card
“The Simon City Royals are calling out their enemy, the Kilbourn Park Gaylords,” Johnson says.
“Kosciuszko ‘Koz’ Park in Logan Square is where this branch of the Simon City Royals was located.”
“The Royals are also enemies of the Latin Kings, so the crown is upside down. ‘K K’ stands for ‘King killer.’”
“Cyco was a member of the Koz Park branch of the Simon City Royals who was killed by the Gaylords.”
“The Royals’ cross is splitting in half the smaller cross that’s the symbol of the Gaylords. The G and L are upside down as a dis.
“The rabbit with the bent ear was a Simon City Royals symbol. The one on the left is throwing up a middle finger with its right hand, like ‘fuck you,’ and throwing down— disrespecting—the Latin Kings symbol with its left hand.”
“More shit talking. A knock against the Lawndale Altgeld Gaylords—Spy being a member of the Gaylords the Simon City Royals killed.”
“The banner reads SPY ROTS, which is an obvious putdown of a member of the Gaylords killed by the Royals.”
“The cross with the three points at the top is a common Simon City Royals symbol.”
“The upside-down symbol of the rival Insane Deuces gang is a sign of disrespect.”
“The rabbit on the right is throwing up the Simon City Royals’ crossed fingers with its left hand, and it’s throwing down the Gaylord sign, which can be seen as the upside-down L formed with the thumb and forefinger of its right hand.” “The pitchfork represents the Simon City Royals’ membership in the Folk Nation.” “The cross with the three points is yet another Simon City Royals symbol, this one in a more simplified form.”
gangs used racist symbology. The Gaylords, for instance, used KKK or white-power symbols. I was a little bit hesitant to put those cards in the book, but I didn’t think it was my role to censor history no matter how fraught. That said, it wasn’t all divided across racial lines. In 1978, Larry Hoover founded Folk Nation, and the People Nation was founded in opposition to that. Each of these gang coalitions had cross-race alliances between gangs. At a certain point the gang and its alliances superseded racial affiliation to some extent. The gangs represented in Thee Almighty & Insane were smaller—neighborhood by neighborhood, but some also had branches in other areas of the city. It wasn’t until the 80s that gangs generally became large business enterprises and grew more concerned with making big profits off the drug market. These days Chicago gangs are once again more fractured due to the crackdown on gang leadership in the 1990s and the demolition of the city’s public housing projects. In another point of comparison to the 70s and early 80s, today’s splintered gangs seem again to be more about very block-to-block concerns. Some of the gangs that handed out compliment cards in the 70s and 80s were more like social crews, neighborhood boys who spent a lot of time out in the streets. Back then, there was sometimes a finer line between a club of friends and a gang. In the late 60s and early 70s, the Conservative Vice Lords, which were founded in Chicago, branded themselves as a community uplift organization. The compliment cards speak to the gangs being these social institutions even as they promote gang members’ reputations for violence. The Latin Kings started in Chicago in the 50s as a way to support and defend Latino culture before it evolved into a vast criminal operation. People can look at the cards today and they seem kind of silly—the nicknames of the gang members and the gang names like the Almighty Gaylords. But the 70s and 80s were extremely violent times in Chicago. When the gangs on these cards rep themselves as “GLK”—Gaylord killers—they’re not kidding. People died. One of the other things that’s clear looking at the cards is that beyond promoting their reputations for violence, gangs prized advertising their social elements—how much they party and how good they are with ladies. The Stoned Yarders, for instance, were just a party crew. They weren’t considered a street gang per se. The Party People, on the other hand, originated as a party crew and transitioned into a street gang. So there was definitely a social aspect, because some of the crews had grown out of greaser gangs—a J
MARCH 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19