Among the principal Negro gangs are the Sabres, the Socialists, the Chancellors, the Buccaneers, the Copians, the Barons and the Slicksters.
Their activities now range from fighting each other for the pure love of bloodshed (called "rumbles") to highway robbery. Often fights are faked so that in the confusion and the crowd a quick job of larceny is inconspicuous.
The Chancellors, a strict organization with rank and titles, according to age, strength, bravado and accomplishments, is typical. The groups run progressively up from Tiny Tims to Midgets to Juniors to Seniors. Each class takes orders from the one above and all are as strictly ruled and disciplined as were the Czar's Cossacks, by their war counsellors, known as "bigs."
Not the least of their power is in their auxiliaries, girls ranging from 12 years up, who start as Sub-debs and graduate to become Debs. They are usually the mistresses of the Seniors. Their roles are important before, during and after acts of violence.
By police regulations, only females may search females. The Debs and Sub-debs are usually from 50 to 500 feet behind the warriors. They carry the weapons. Should there be a sudden police charge, the girls evaporate in all directions and the men are found unarmed. But the moment the first fist flies, they rush in and slip the took to the Chancellors. Very often they join in the fight with them and punch, bite and stab, and are quite as vicious as the males.
The weapons, featuring the switch-blade spring knife which is the Harlem standby, also run to first-rate shooting arms and homemade guns which are converted from lengths of tubing. Billies, sword-canes and ice-picks are standard equipment. The harmless-looking souvenir toy bats sold at the ball parks, which can crack a skull at a single swipe, are regularly employed.
Developed from self-defense against the whites, the lust for battle and pillage has become a menace to the respectable Negroes. No colored gangster will stoop to work. Once he belongs, he must make his living with his fists and weapons or he must have a woman support him. Harlem is probably the only community on earth where the women earn more money than do the men. Thousands of them are employed as servants and others do well plying less savory trades. It is regarded as manly and superior for a man to be kept, and to prove his masculinity he is expected occasionally to beat his woman to show her who is master.
The younger thugs, who have not reached that lofty estate, but who must not attempt to be Alger boys, bluntly live by robbery. In some sections a Negro boy or girl not belonging to a powerful gang scarcely dares leave home with a nickel. In addition to being despoiled, they are frequently manhandled.
As a result, many Negro families have sent their children to New Jersey and Long Island and even back south of the Mason and Dixon Line because of the intolerable abuses from their own race.