Slauson Girl Speaks With Donald Bakeer: How an L.A. Teacher’s Book Crips Inspired the 1992 Hollywood Film South Central

I was trying to make something that would would be a showcase for black male heroes.

I felt that one of the reasons that there was so much murder and chaos back in those days was because black boys had very poor role models.

that the stereotype of Black Nails was, you know, the brutish prisoner, convict, murderer who runs away from his family, who counts his babies like notches on his gun, but refuses to be there for them.

So I wanted to create something that was totally different.

I wanted to make an imagery, because I know that the films are subliminal.

anti-stimulus.

So I set out to write a book to change that paradigm.

It also gave me an opportunity to address those I taught Crips.

I taught Rollin' 60 Crips and Undercover Bloods and Undercover Patriot Gangsters.

And the secret that they held, very few people understood, was that they were closet illiterates.

upside-down letters and misspelling everything.

So I knew I had to teach them to read, but they just didn't read.

They had those sayings like, F mean fine, They would look at that five or six EPS one report card and say, F means five.

And it actually changed the pay system for those who were influenced by that.

And I couldn't get them to change that with Huckleberry Finn, you know, or Tom Sawyer.

So I had to write my own book.

at that time, they would steal it out of every library in South Central, every classroom that had it, you know, because it was about them.

And it gave some significance.

They began to brag about having read a book.

Ickman began writing their own books, you know, and eventually that... tradition of illiteracy, I call it anti-literacy, that was ameliorated.

It was the new The new style was to be able to write rap or poetry.

I also discovered, I was the first one to discover rap as poetry, because there were youngsters walking around with books full of poetry, calling it rap.

And I just raised the status of that, of my poetry.

There was a relationship between violence and literacy.

The more literate you were, the less violent you were.