Startled public officials first heard about these gangs some months ago after incidents at Banneker High. An 18-year-old colored boy was held for the grand jury on a charge of robbing a 15-year-old Banneker schoolboy of a wrist watch on the school playground. He threatened to whip the younger boy if he talked. School officials were awakened to the fact that all the schools in the city had this problem. According to the assistant superintendent of schools G. C. Wilkenson, “the gangs are made up of boys who aren’t in school and who aren’t working—mostly from 16 to 21 years old.”
Officials try to minimize the situation, but there is a wave of terror in every public elementary and high school. Young Negro gangsters lurk about the schools, sell reefers, molest girls, and commit mayhem on children who won’t pony up. Boys and girls thus forced to pay tribute are told to steal from their parents or do a little shoplifting if they have no other means of procuring the extortion money. Youngsters are put on heroin and morphine by the youthful gangsters, and soon enter a life of serious crime.
Other yokers use a tactic borrowed from the dacoits, a murderous religious gang of India, throwing a cord over the victim’s head from behind and garroting him.
Some of these colored juvenile mobs have been in existence for 15 or 20 years. When boys and girls outgrow them and become adult criminals on their own, they are replaced by new children on the way up. Among the older and better-organized kid mobs are the Fastest Runners, the Forty Thieves, the Purple Cross Gang and the Protective Association.
The Fastest Runners is composed of younger boys who fight with switch-blade knives. When they grow up they graduate into adult gangs. All these organizations have female auxiliaries, membership in which requires the young colored girls to solicit on the streets and turn the proceeds over to the boys. Girls as young as 11 participate and at 12 are “debs,” with full standing.
Among offenses which are practically Negro monopolies in Washington are the following:
Numbers and policy slips. Almost all numbers sellers, even in white neighborhoods and in government office buildings, are colored men and women. In other cities Sicilians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos and Mexicans get in on this activity, but there are no sizeable groups of such in Washington. The modus operandi of numbers selling will be described in the chapter on gambling.
Sale of reefers. Almost all marijuana retailers are colored, which also is unique to Washington.
Theft and conversion of government checks at the lower level. The men, because so many are janitors and elevator boys, have entree to apartment buildings and tenement houses and access to mail-boxes. These thieves strike at the middle or at the end of the month, when checks are sent out by the Treasury for G.I. remunerations, Social Security benefits, pensions, army subsistence and similar regular allotments. Those who do the manual stealing seldom attempt to cash the checks, which are turned over to fences, often white, including storekeepers and sometimes bankers.