Black Spades

• 1. Introduction

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  The Black Spades began not as a cautionary tale but as an act of self-defense. In 1968, in the Bronxdale Houses of the Soundview section of the Bronx, a group of young people organized to push back against racism and bigotry spreading through their neighborhood. Their first president, David Brockington, was a member of the Nation of Islam. Their guiding texts came from Malcolm X, the Five-Percent Nation, and the Black Panthers. They policed their own streets against heroin dealers who were tightening a grip on the community.

  What happened next would split into two stories running in parallel. One story ends with violence and dissolution. The other ends on a stage, behind turntables, in the founding of an art form that would reshape music worldwide. Both stories start here, in the Bronxdale Houses, with a gang that was also, briefly, something else entirely.

• 2. Founding Principles

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  Junior High School 123 on Morrison Avenue in Soundview was where the Black Spades officially formed. The name came first, despite a rumor that they had originally called themselves the Savage Seven. From the beginning they were the Black Spades.

  David Brockington drew the organization's principles from several overlapping traditions. The Five-Percent Nation shaped their sense of identity. The Nation of Islam gave Brockington his personal framework. The Black Panthers and the Weather Underground Organization added a political edge. The result was a teenage street organization with explicit ideological roots, not simply a territorial crew.

  Their reach in the early period covered several of the Bronx's most stressed neighborhoods: Soundview, Clason Point, Parkchester, Castle Hill, and Throgs Neck. The 1st division made it their specific task to protect the Bronxdale Houses from the crime wave and drug trade that were dismantling the community around them. A women's division also formed, rooted in Clason Point housing and Junior High School I.S. 131, extending the organization beyond a single gender or a single block.

• 3. Hip Hop's Unlikely Cradle

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  Disco King Mario lived in the Bronxdale Houses and was both a leader and an original member of the Black Spades. He was also a prominent DJ, and those who track the origins of hip hop count him among the art form's founding fathers.

  Afrika Bambaataa came up through the organization's ranks, starting in the Young Spade 1st division 1st chapter before moving to the Bronx River Houses Black Spades 10th Division. On the 12th of November 1977, he left the gang world behind to found the Universal Zulu Nation, taking several members with him.

  DJ Kool Herc, one of hip hop's earliest pioneers, placed the Black Spades directly at the origin of the scene. In his own words: "It started coming together as far as the gangs terrorizing a lot of known discotheques back in the days. I had respect from some of the gang members because they used to go to school with me. There were the Savage Skulls, Glory Stompers, Blue Diamonds, Black Cats and Black Spades." The gang's spread to nearby housing projects, including Monroe Houses, Soundview Houses, and Bronx River Houses, carried that subculture with it, pulling music into the lives of members as the organization grew.

• 4. Fracture and Spread

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  By the early 1970s, the growth that once looked like strength had become a liability. Numbers climbed and focus dissolved. Younger members, known as the Young Spades and Baby Spades, turned violent. Divisions across the Bronx operated without central control.

  David Brockington, watching the organization he had built drift from everything he intended, stepped down as 1st division president. A figure known as Monk took over as supreme president, and under that leadership the Black Spades became a straightforward street gang rather than the community organization Brockington had envisioned.

  The Spades were also present at the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, a gathering that marked the era's attempts to calm gang conflict across the Bronx. By the late 1980s the gang had moved well beyond its Bronx origins, taking root in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. It also reached New Rochelle in New York State and extended into Massachusetts and Connecticut. The membership composition shifted during this expansion. Latino and white members became more common than they had been in the earlier, predominantly African-American years. Through the late 1990s the organization maintained a strong following, but around that period many younger members moved their allegiance to the Bloods.

• 5. Reinvention

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  In 2019 the Black Spades registered a comeback, with new members joining and the organization rebranding as TBS New Direction. The new direction was literal: anti-violence initiatives and food distribution for people facing food insecurity replaced territorial control as the group's stated purpose.

  In early 2022, a resurgence appeared in the River Park Towers housing complex in the West Bronx. This incarnation described itself as a neighborhood self-policing unit. Its planned activities included homeless food drives and after-school programs at CIS 229, returning to a version of the protective function that David Brockington had tried to build in Soundview more than five decades earlier.