The visiting room at the Dixon Correctional Center looks like a high school cafeteria. On a weekday in late December, prisoners are sitting around circular tables with their families, chatting, eating hamburgers, dealing cards. Kids are playing video games in the corner or buying candy from the inmate-run commissary. A bearded inmate in denim who seems no different than any other walks in, yet everyone somehow notices his arrival. He walks over to one table, where a skinny, elderly black inmate sits with his guests. “This is Larry Hoover,” the inmate says.
He says his gang days are over, and Growth and Development is a political organization. His life and education in prison, he says, have given him a new conception of power. “It’s a natural state of evolvement,” he says. “Everything’s changed. As you mature, you change. Your priorities change, your perspectives change. The difference between a gang and an organization is the principles and the goals that they apply. If you live by morals and principles, then the Gangster Disciples, or Growth and Development, ain’t no different than the Elks or Masons or some other organization. It’s principles that you live by, and it takes time to move from one stage to another. But you peer toward that stage. Every ethnic group, they start out with these street gangs, but as they mature they turn into something far more legitimate and something that could be a credit to the community. And that’s all it is, it’s an evolvement. You go from one stage to another.”
But Hoover didn’t gain absolute control of the GDs until he was behind bars. On February 26, 1973, he and a GD named Andrew Howard murdered William Young, who had been named at a meeting as one of three persons who allegedly stole drugs and money from the GDs. Howard and Hoover were each sentenced to prison for 150 to 200 years. Another young man, Joshua Shaw, who testified at a preliminary hearing that he saw Howard abduct Young, was murdered before Howard and Hoover were tried. Neither was charged in Shaw’s death, but the state’s attorney’s office has continued to cite it in opposing parole. Likewise the apparent murder of a “John Tucker”–who actually is still alive and could be produced, Hoover’s attorney insisted at the 1993 parole hearing.
Hoover claims he’s several steps removed from his days as a Gangster Disciple leader, and that he and the “old guys” can lead young blacks toward political power. “We have the same social conditions and life experience,” he says. “Most black males now come through the prison system. That’s what binds us. Guys who come from the background I come from are in a unique position to help the black males. We have to listen to them to try and turn around the cycle. We can galvanize the sleeping giant in the black community. Street gang members don’t trust the system, don’t use the system, because they believe it can’t work for them. By them not taking advantage of the system, things are going to keep on going in the direction that they’re going in. But if somebody leads them, wants to bring them in and show them that they can get involved and they can impact and they can make some changes, then they’ll listen. At least you’ll get their attention.”
The balance of the manifesto outlines what Hoover calls the ” Six Universal Laws of Existence” and the “Six Principles of Growth & Development: Love, Life, Loyalty, Knowledge, Wisdom and Understanding.” Of love, he writes: “LOVE is now used (more often than not) as an emotion controlled by our individual feelings, wants, and desires; instead of as the 1st Principle necessary to our survival. Why is this so? Perhaps because we find it easier to continue living in the same manner which we are familiar with, such as: Drugs, pimping, prostitution, gangbanging, extortion, etc., etc., etc. Or, could it be that we are out to get ‘TURNED ON’ instead of ‘PLUGGING IN???’ If we continue to allow our neighborhood conditions to keep our ability to LOVE blocked by negative thoughts and attitudes, then we are standing in the way of our success.”
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Hoover suggests that he and his followers “guide our lives not only by the futuristic implications of our Leadership’s vision, but also by the mistakes of other organizations such as TWO, P.U.S.H., BLACK PANTHERS, etc., which have happened to live before us. Most importantly, we cannot afford to blindly accept cash, favors, or support from the powers-that-be; through WISDOM, we can clearly see the ulterior motives of such support.” And he sketches a political program that includes a universal ban on guns, the legalization of drugs, an economic development program “such as the sale of positive products and services which are in great demand by our communities,” and, most importantly, aggressive participation in the political process.
More than anything, Hoover’s “Blueprint” calls for a complete transformation of the street gang structure that gave him his original power base. Sitting in a private room in the Dixon Correctional Center’s visiting hall, separated from the other inmates by glass, he talks about how that’s going to happen. “It’s been laid on the shoulders of public figures in the organizations,” he says, “because the organizations out there nowadays, they look to their leadership. They got more respect for their leadership than they got for their mothers and fathers, than for their preachers, than for Operation PUSH, the NAACP. To get out of the state they’re in, they are going to have to work within the system. They got to become part of the system, they can get something by putting people in that really have their positions at heart. You gotta fight for yourself, you gotta make some noise. You don’t make some noise, then nothing’s gonna change. It’s going to be business as usual. You need to have a movement, because you don’t have a black movement nowadays. They [young people] have nothing to point to. They have no Martin Luther Kings or Malcolm Xs.”
