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Bastards of the Party is a 2006 documentary film produced by Antoine Fuqua and directed by former Bloods gang-member Cle Sloan. The film explores the creation of two of Los Angeles’s most notorious gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, from the perspective of the Los Angeles community. The film also denounces gang violence and tries to present meaningful solutions from former gang-members to stop this problem.
The documentary appeared at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and at the 2006 Hollywood Black Film Festival. The television premiere aired on February 6th, 2007 on HBO.
During a term in jail, Cle Sloan picked up a book titled, City of Quartz by Mike Davis. While reading the book, Sloan found his neighborhood of Athens Park on a map depicting LAPD gang hot spots of 1972. The account in Davis' book fueled Sloan to ask questions of how the gangs got started, only to receive speculation and more questions from his fellow gang-members. Sloan decided to research the subject himself.
The title of the movie, Bastards of the Party comes from a passage in City of Quartz that reads: "The Crips and the Bloods are the bastard offspring of the political parties of the 1960s. Most of the gangs were born out of the demise of those parties. Out of the ashes of the Black Panther Party came the Crips and the Bloods and the other gangs."
Content
Bastards of the Party begins to explore the history of African-American gangs in Los Angeles all the way back to the black migration from the south in order to escape racial discrimination. The first black gangs in the 1940s formed to combat racial discrimination, the LAPD (led by police chief William H. Parker), and the white gangs that terrorized the black community.
With the "white flight" in the early 1960s, tension grew amongst the black gangs as they started to turn on each other until the Los Angeles riots of 1965. This was the beginning of radical black community politics and the spread of the Black Panthers, led in LA by Bunchy Carter. They were soon followed by the rise of the US Organization, led by Ron Karenga. These two parties butted heads often in a competition for members but it wasn't until COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Programs) and the FBI got involved that the two parties fell apart.
In the 1970s the movement and the people began to change. There was a larger push towards individuality and freedom and less of a push towards self sacrifice. This attitude is illustrated in the movie Superfly, where the main character is out for himself. In this atmosphere, Raymond Washington created the concept of a gang of the new generation of youth that went from "the cradle to the grave" and was joined by Stanley "Tookie" Williams and Jamel Barnes in the formation of the Crips. Tupac Shakur's song, "So Many Tears", is played at the end portion of the documentary.
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