A major exception was in December 1972, just as Cripmania was first sweeping Southside schools in an epidemic of gang shootings and street fights. The Human Relations Conference, against the advice of the police, gave a platform to sixty Black gang leaders to present their grievances. To the astonishment of officials present, the ‘mad dogs’ outlined an eloquent and coherent set of demands: jobs, housing, better schools, recreation facilities and community control of local institutions. It was a bravura demonstration that gang youth, however trapped in their own delusionary spirals of vendetta and self-destruction, clearly understood that they were the children of deferred dreams and defeated equality. Moreover as ‘hard-core’ Black and Chicano gang leaders have always affirmed, in the handful of other instances over the last eighteen years when they have been allowed to speak, decent jobs are the price for negotiating a humane end to drug-dealing and gang violence.