The Black Panther Party was not a gang. They grew out of a young black intelligentsia on college campuses.
I had left the James Gang, left Cleveland, and gone to Colorado because Bill Szymczyk was there, and so were a whole bunch of other people I knew.
A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.
In Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world, we have 1,100 gangs and 120,000 gang members so it is a daunting, complex social dilemma.
We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang.
Me wanting a gang member to have a different life would never be the same as that gang member wanting to have one.
The main thing is we never dissolved our Gang Starr contract. We are still signed to each other. We never disbanded the group. If Guru really wanted to super-dead it he would have said, 'Yo, I want out.' And I still would have tried to convince him to stay. We are still Gang Starr.
When I started coming to the U.S., they were offering me only the typical stereotypical roles: the druggard, the criminal, the gang member, or in the best-case scenario, the gardener or the cook. I was fed up with all these roles that were always the same. And I promised I would try to change the image of Latinos in Hollywood.
With 'Family and Loyalty,' I didn't already have an idea for that video. So I called Fab Five Freddy. I wanted to get a director that I didn't have to explain Gang Starr to and he was with it.
I remember the first time I saw the 'Sugarhill Gang' on Soul Train. I was 11 or 12. I was like, 'What's going on? How did those guys get on national TV?' And then, when I was a little older, a rapper from the neighborhood got a record deal. I was shocked.
Businesses have come and gone at Homeboy Industries. We have had starts and stops, but anything worth doing is worth failing at. We started Homeboy Plumbing. That didn't go so well. Who knew? People didn't want gang members in their homes. I just didn't see that coming.
Even gang members imagine a future that doesn't include gangs.
Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'
You can't reason with gang violence: you can't talk to it, sit it at the table, and negotiate with it.
I want the violence among young people in this country to stop - particularly gang violence.
I grew up in Los Angeles when the racial tensions between blacks and Mexicans were very high. Gang violence was very prevalent.
We need to get serious about combating gang violence on Long Island, and the entire nation.
I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.
God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.
You have, in America, you have gang signs. Well, 5,000 years ago, there was thing called a mudra, which is your sitting position when you do yoga or you're meditating or you're praying or whatever. And there's not a lot of them that are named after gods and goddesses, but the middle-finger is specifically named the Matangi mudra.
