Former Vice Lords Chiefs Now Going a Round for the Kids
It was along this stretch of 16th Street on the city’s West Side that the Vice Lords first took root in the early 1960s. Swept up in the civil rights movement, the Vice Lords morphed into a semi-legitimate community organization.
According to research by Andrew Papachristos, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the Vice Lords received nearly a quarter of a million dollars in public and private funds in the late 1960s.
The Vice Lords really embodied actual social institutions,” Papachristos said. “They did a lot of the things they were supposed to do.”
But it didn’t last. And the experience and money may have provided the gang with the foundation on which it built a massive criminal enterprise.
It was the violent and drug-peddling Vice Lords that Brown and Fitzpatrick grew up in.
It was the violent and drug-peddling Vice Lords that Brown and Fitzpatrick grew up in.
They don’t equate the work they’re doing now to the gang’s decades-old attempt to be a positive force in Lawndale. But others in the neighborhood do.
“What they’re doing now is like what the Vice Lords were trying to do 40 years ago,” said Edwin Muldrow, who, with his father, runs a pharmacy on 16th Street next door to where the Vice Lords had their headquarters in the 1960s. “I think it’s great. If it’s not Derek and Chevez, who’s it going to be? I don’t see anybody else doing it. I feel like it’s our duty as a community to get behind them.”
The Rev. Robin Hood, a longtime activist and founder of Clergy Committed to Community, said Fitzpatrick used to try to recruit his son into the gang. Hood regularly called the police on Fitzpatrick.
But when Hood heard about the boxing program Fitzpatrick and Brown started, he saw the potential the two had to be leaders.
“These were the two who could bring it all together,” Hood said. “They had the power in the neighborhood, the respect. People would listen to them.”
But when Hood heard about the boxing program Fitzpatrick and Brown started, he saw the potential the two had to be leaders.
“These were the two who could bring it all together,” Hood said. “They had the power in the neighborhood, the respect. People would listen to them.”
With guidance from Hood and help from another established group — Mothers Opposed to Violence Everywhere, which purchased the boxing equipment Brown and Fitzpatrick use — the two men have begun drawing disparate organizations and individuals in the community under one umbrella. They’re now working to find jobs for ex-offenders, gather signatures on petitions for community improvements and convince the men who once worked under them in the gang to join their nascent organization, Brothers and Sisters of the Formerly Incarcerated.
