Cook County Jail, late 1960s. Nobody is writing the exact date down. What the record shows is as Jeff Fort, the leader of the Black Pea Stones, was locked up and someone in the corrections department decided to put him in a large cell with a crowd of disciples. Fort and the disciples were not allies. They had been in active war since at least 1966.
Everyone in that building knew it. The men in that cell knew exactly what they were supposed to do. The source that documents what happened next calls it legend. That word matters. Let me be real with you upfront. This is not a court document. It comes from community memory, oral tradition, people who were there or heard it from someone who was.
I can’t prove it. What I can tell you is why it ain’t impossible. The Chicago Police Department’s Gang Intelligence Unit was formed in 1967 specifically to target black street organizations on the south side. His documented strategy, documented, not alleged, included raids, false reports, and deliberately spreading gossip between factions to keep men killing each other instead of organizing.
Mayor Daly per a 1988 Chicago magazine account stayed on their asses. So the idea that corrections officers put the leader of the Black Pea Stones in a room full of disciples and waited that fits a pattern that has been independently confirmed. And the legend says a man named Nathaniel Jackson walked through that crowd.
Told every disciple in the cell to leave Jeff Fort alone. Said he knew it was a setup. Said he wasn’t going to let corrections get their way in a world designed to make men like him kill each other. What kind of man does that? That is the question this documentary is built around. Before any of this, Nathaniel Jackson was a teenager in Englewood.
The year was 1958. He was somewhere between 16 and 18 years old. Here is what 1958 in Englewood actually looked like. A highway was being built. The Dan Ryan Expressway construction began in 1958. Ran through the black south side instead of through Bridgeport, the white neighborhood just to the west. The one Richard J.
daily called home. The men who made that rooting decision ran the city. The men who lived in the path of the route didn’t. Families were displaced. Some of them followed the roads south into Englewood. Some of those families had members in the Egyptian Cobras, a southside street outfit already established in Fuller Park and along the Englewood blocks where Blackjack was growing up.
The highway brought more of them. The neighborhood got more contested, not less. By 1960, the neighborhood would be 68.9% black, nearly 98,000 residents. White gangs still held the Northern End. They were not holding it with arguments. There’s a number from 1958 I keep coming back to. African-American youths in Englewood were not permitted to shop at 63rd and Hallstead until that year.
not permitted. The year 1958, the same year Nathaniel Jackson was becoming an Egyptian cobra, the same year construction was carving through Southside communities to spare Bridgeport was also the first year a black teenager from this neighborhood could walk into a store on the second busiest commercial strip in Chicago without being turned away at the door.
That is the physical documented texture of what it meant to come of age in Englewood in 1958. And the Cobras were already fighting. A CPD detective named Frank Papé had worked the Englewood beat in the late 1950s. He described it years later to the Chicago Tribune. He’d encountered the Cobras facing off against a white gang that was enforcing the neighborhood’s racial borders.
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the same way those borders had always been enforced with bodies. There had been a riot in this neighborhood nine years earlier. 194957 in Peoria, 10,000 people assembled after a rumor spread that a house on the block might be sold to a black family. They attacked black and Jewish residents. Mayor Canelli kept it out of the press on purpose.
Nathaniel Jackson was roughly 10 years old at the time. He would have been around 16 when the cobras first started holding their ground. The Englewood Egyptian Cobras in 1958 were organized around specific blocks 63rd to 75th east of H Hallstead 55th to 59th from Normal Avenue to the Dan Ryan. The founding group that year included a teenager named Bobby Longreet and Bobby’s older brother, Leverne, and a young man from the same streets who would be remembered decades later as Blackjack. He was an original member.
He was in the room from the beginning. By 1959, they had a name. Here is the moment that matters. By 1963, the teenager from Englewood was one of the men who sat down in a basement at 66th in Egleston and helped structure what would become one of the most powerful street organizations in the history of this city.
He had been in the room since 1958, an organizer who had earned the right to be at that table. Chicago gang history. The most detailed archive of Southside Street history that exists describes him plainly as a key player in organizing the disciples. But first 1959, the Englewood Egyptian Cobras broke away that year to form something new.
They needed a name. Bobby Long Street, one of the founding members, one of the teenagers in that same original group as Blackjack, flipped through a Bible, landed on a word, the Disciples. That’s how organizations name themselves when they’re building something with nothing. You flip through a book until something sounds right.
In 1960, a leader named Charlie Atkins renamed them the Devil’s Disciples to sound more threatening. That name had already made the Indiana newspapers by July of 1960 the earliest documented press mention of the organization. Atkins left not long after, but the name and the structure held. By 1963, Leverne Longreet, Bobby’s older brother, one of the men who had been present since the Cobra days in Englewood, cleared out the basement of his family home at 66th in Egleston and called a meeting.
He wasn’t just reorganizing. He was formalizing a federation of disciple factions, a disciple nation. This was the moment of consolidation. The thing that had been a street organization became something with the structure with symbols with territory agreed upon rather than fought over.
The pitchfork, that image you have seen tattooed on bodies across this country and beyond, Leverne Long Street created it in that room. His brother Leonard created the six-point star. Two brothers in a basement in Englewood invented the most reproduced symbols of one of the most significant street organizations in American history. Those symbols exist today on hundreds of thousands of people.
Nathaniel Blackjack Jackson was present at that meeting. He was part of what was built that day. David Barksdale came into the disciples the same year. He was born May 24th, 1947 in Salace, Mississippi. Moved to Chicago around 1957, ended up in juvenile detention. Came out in 1963 and found the disciples.
He was 16. He joined and began rising immediately. By 1965, David Barksdale was king of all the Disciples and the Disciples Nation. He had remade the organization in two years from a teenager with no prior standing in it. He was charismatic, fearless, and the men around him could feel it. When Barksdale was at the height of his power, replacing the men who didn’t measure up, building an operation that would reshape the entire southside, Blackjack was still there, still with him.
The historian who documented this writes it directly. When Barksdale became King Blackjack, would become increasingly respected in the streets as a refined leader that would become King Blackjack. Barksdale made a lot of men in those years. He also removed a lot of men. The men who stayed close to him in 1965 were the men he chose to keep.
Blackjack not only survived, he was elevated. Not by Barksdale. The title king was given by the people by the streets through accumulated reputation over years of being in the room and being trusted. That is a different kind of elevation entirely within the disciples organization. Blackjack also held the formal title of dawn, a rank that meant his faction would be referred to as boss disciples, an organizational designation.
But the title that mattered, the one that outlasted every organizational document was king. King Blackjack. In a world with no courts, no certificates, no institution to confer rank, what does king actually mean? It means the men who had been in this world for years looked at you and decided your word was worth something.
That your judgment could be trusted when the stakes were real. that when you said stop people stopped. You cannot purchase that authority. You cannot appoint someone to it from above. The people give it or they don’t. None of it went through any official channel. The streets gave that title and the streets kept it.
And the thing about authority given by people rather than institutions is this an institution can always take its title back. the people who already decided they can’t undecide. In 1966, he left. In 1966, when Nathaniel Jackson was somewhere in his mid20s, he did something that most people who reach his level don’t do. He left.
He went to 59th Street and May Street in Englewood and started something new while he was still standing tall. his own group, his own name, his own terms. The Disciples were the largest and most organized street federation he would ever be part of, and he stepped away from them at the height of his standing within it. I’ve been sitting with that decision for a long time.
The public record doesn’t say what the specific moment was, the conversation, the morning, whatever made him decide. What it says is that he was close to Barksdale respected widely and that a man in that position walking away from the main organization was not the expected move. In a world where power is measured by accumulation, where more territory and more members and more reach is the only direction anyone moves, he walked away from the largest structure he had ever been part of and built something smaller, something he could hold in his hands. whatever it
cost him to leave and it had to cost something. When you’ve spent your adult life building something alongside people who trusted you and the streets have given you a title no institution will ever recognize walking away means leaving people behind. It means choosing a smaller room when a larger one is still open.
He paid that and went to 59th and May. The name he chose for his new group was Manhattan Bostononian pimps. Before you let that name do the wrong work on you, here is what it actually meant from the inside. Boss brothers of superior status. Pimp pursuing intelligent mental progress. Bostononian, a way of living, living as a boss. Every word in the name was a statement about self-defin, about claiming a kind of excellence that the world around them had been actively denying for decades.
Through highways, through shopping restrictions, through white gangs, enforcing racial borders on blocks these men had grown up on. Brothers of superior status in 1966 in Englewood. That is a deliberate act. His entire life, the world had told him where he couldn’t walk, what he couldn’t enter, whose war he was supposed to fight.
Naming your own organization on your own terms with your own meaning in that context, that isn’t ambition. That is the answer. The organization grew fast. From 59th in May, it spread south to 65th Street. Quickly popular through the late 1960s. They allied closely with the Falcon Disciples and together they fought the Latin Kings, the Emerald Knights, the Village Sharks, the Latin Souls Gang Wars over territory in Northern Englewood.
Blackjack’s group was not peaceful, but it was his built on his terms, structured around a name he chose. And then there is the part of the name nobody can explain. Manhattan. The researcher who has spent years compiling the most detailed account available of the boss pimps’s history writes it plainly.
I do not know what the Manhattan part of the name means. The designation was seldom mentioned or tagged even by members. It fell away quickly from active use. There’s no street named Manhattan near 59th and may no documented person by that name in the founding records. No explanation in any archive or oral history. The word appears in the name of the organization and goes no further.
The man who named it is gone. That word went with him. Here is a street organization that still exists 60 years after he founded it. And the name contains a word nobody alive can explain what Blackjack intended when he chose that name. What the specific logic of the departure was in 1966. What he was building toward.
None of it is documented. None of it survived him in a form we can read. What survived is the thing he built. By the end of the 1960s, the boss pimps had claimed new corners were fighting their own wars and had expanded to 59th and Morgan. October 6th, 1970, 56th Street and Sangaman outside OW Holmes Elementary School.
A shooting. Two groups, four gangs, one man killed, one man shot in the spine. The Emerald Knights and the Latin Souls on one side, the Falcon Disciples and the Boss Pimp Disciples on the other. The Chicago Tribune published it the same day, October 6th, 1970. But here is what the Tribune actually printed.
They named the Emerald Knights and the Falcon Disciples and omitted the Boss Pimps and the Latin Souls entirely. Two of the four gangs involved in a shooting at an elementary school were simply absent from the official account. The history was being written incomplete from the start and the incompleteness was not random. It was structural.
The same selective eraser that runs through every chapter of this story. The Falcon disciple who was killed was named Joseph Nuome. He went by Tuba. He lived at 57th and Morgan. That is everything the record gives us about him. A nickname, a street and intersection, a death outside of school where children were still learning to read.
There’s no obbituary in any archive. No follow-up article. One paragraph in the Tribune and then the record closes. A boss pimp named James Bonds was shot in the spine. He survived. James Bonds. The name sounds like a fictional spy. Invincible, immune to consequence. On the morning of October 6th, 1970, James Bonds was a real person shot in the spine on a sidewalk in Englewood outside a school. He survived.
After that morning, he disappears from every public record. Whether the spinal injury left him paralyzed, whether he ever walked again, whether he is alive today, the record closes on October 6th, 1970 and does not reopen for him. The boss pimps were involved in a shooting outside an elementary school.
The leader of the boss pimps is also the man who, according to legend, walked through a crowd of disciples in a Cook County jail cell and stopped them from killing Jeff Fort because he recognized a dirty play. Both those things are true and I’m not going to clean that up for you. the same city that displaced his community with a highway that denied his peers the right to shop at 63rd and Hallstead that formed a unit specifically designed to keep men like him killing each other.
That city is also the one where a man named Joseph Nuome bled out on a sidewalk and was described in one paragraph and forgotten. And then in 1974, the king died. David Barksdale died on September 2nd, 1974. He was 27 years old. He had taken a fractured street organization in a basement in Englewood, rebuilt it into the most powerful federation of its kind on the southside, made men and broke men, and reshaped the geography of an entire city’s underground.
And he did all of that before he was old enough to rent a car. He had been shot four years earlier. June 7th, 1970 at a bar at 848 West 69th Street near 69th and Peoria in Englewood. According to the most detailed account, a Black Pestone member known as Suitcase Charlie accidentally dropped his rifle at discharged and the round hit Barksdale.
Barksdale lived four more years with catastrophic kidney damage. The wound never left him. He died of kidney failure. He was 27. The organization continued new leadership. Same Southside Reach. In the late 1970s, the Folk Nation Alliance began to take shape. The Boss pimps affiliated around 1979. So now Blackjack’s organization, the thing he had built on his own terms at 59th and May that had fought its own wars across northern Englewood for more than a decade, was part of something much larger than what he’d started.
Affiliated, connected, part of a coalition that stretched across the south side. In 1981, the Folk Alliance drew lines on the streets. The Disciples were fracturing in two directions. On one side, the black gangster disciples, on the other, the black disciples. Every faction in the folk alliance was being told to choose. Pick aside.
The pressure was not abstract. It was territorial. It was financial. It was physical. The organizations on either side of that line had resources numbers. And the ability to make the choice of staying independent feel like a very bad decision. Every major disciple faction in Chicago picked a side. The pressure to do so was enormous.
The logic of self-preservation pointed one direction. Join the larger organization. Accept the structure. Keep the protection. Lose the independence. That is what most groups did. The boss pimps said no. They stayed in Folk Nation, the broader alliance, but refused absorption by either the Black Gangster Disciples or the Black Disciples.
The researcher who documented this wrote it plainly. The Bostononian pimps elected to not go with either group and this is where their independence began. Not over drug wars like the myths say. Not over drug wars like the myths say. The myths about street organizations say this is all about territory and drugs and money.
That every decision is economic. Every split is about corners. Every war starts over a product dispute. Their independence began with a choice about identity, about who they were and who they refused to become. In 1981, when the entire Folk Alliance was drawing lines and telling everyone to get in formation, the Boss pimps chose to remain what they were.
That year, the name Bostononian pimps formally became boss pimps. The B O SS acronym was given a new meaning. Brothers of the Strong Struggle. Blackjack was still alive when this happened. The last record of him dates to around 1985, which puts him in the room for this moment. I don’t know if he was the one in that room who said no or if that call was even his to make, but the organization he built the thing he had spent 15 years constructing from a handful of men at 59th and May chose independence when every institutional
force in its world was pointing toward absorption. in a jail cell years earlier. He had stopped his own men from killing Jeff Fort, not because he was peaceful, but because he recognized a setup. In 1966, he had walked away from the largest organization he would ever be part of rather than let it define what he became.
In 1981, the organization he built made the same move. the same move recognizing a setup refusing to be used three times across two decades in different rooms. I don’t know what was going through his head in that jail cell or when he walked away from the disciples or in whatever room the 1981 refusal got made, but the pattern is there.
You cannot fake a pattern. The thing he built knew how to say no. I think that was on purpose. By 1985, the disciples were fracturing again. The formal separation came that year. The gangster disciples split from the black gangster disciples. Every faction in the broader folk world had to decide which side they were on.
Here is what the primary researcher writes about blackjack at this moment. Jack Black was still around at this time, but I don’t know how much he was involved in this transition. the most detailed archival account of the boss pimp’s history, years of documentation, and at the most significant organizational moment of the mid 1980s. That is all it can say.
He was present. He was receding. Some boss pimps went with the gangster disciples. The younger generation started calling themselves boss pimps, gangster disciples. Older members held the original name Boss Pimp Disciples. The organization was splitting along a generational fault line the way all organizations eventually do, regardless of what they were built around.
By 1988, the Boss pimps had moved south into Jeffrey Manor and built an alliance with the Gangster Disciples. In December 1993, a boss pimp named Fred Duke died. Right after his funeral, the alliance with the gangster disciples ended for good. After that, the betrayal of Nathaniel Blackjack Jackson goes cold entirely. He was still around in 1985.
The record says that he may have been present for everything that followed. Everything after 1985 is Shadow, the man who was at the founding of the disciples in 1959 in the basement at 66 and Egleston in 1963 who built his own organization at 59th. In May, at some point, the record simply stops mentioning him by name. He died.
The record never says exactly when. Nathaniel Jackson died. Nobody wrote down when, not casually, carefully, and there is no orbituary, no death record, no public date anywhere I could find. The man who helped found the disciples in 1959, who was present at the disciples nation in 1963, who earned the title king, and then walked away to build something of his own at 59th. And may he died.
And the world that keeps official records decided not to notice. The boss pimps still exist. 60 years after he founded them at an Englewood corner, they remain active in parts of Calamett Heights, particularly around 93rd Street and in Southshore. and Jeffrey Manor, though their presence in older sections like Burnside has significantly declined or closed entirely since the the 2010s, the thing he built outlasted him by decades, and it’s still out there carrying the name he chose, including the one word nobody can explain. The most recent
detailed archival reference to Nathaniel Jackson places him somewhere in the mid 1980s, present, but fading. After that, nothing. He simply receds. Except for one thing. In 2023, somewhere on Facebook, someone posted a tribute. The late and great Blackjack, King Blackjack, Nathaniel Jackson, Chai Town legend.
And in the comments, one person wrote, “Rip Pops Jackson.” That is the obituary. someone who called him pops, writing it on a phone on a platform that did not exist when he was building his organization. The title King was given by people who were there. No institution gave it. No newspaper confirmed it. No court recognized it. The men who were in Englewood who watched him build the disciples from the ground up, who watched him walk away and build something smaller, and his own who watched his organization refused to be absorbed when every organizational force
said, “Absorb those men gave him that title because they decided he had earned it.” He stopped the killing in a jail cell. At least that’s the legend. And I already laid out why that legend holds. He walked away from the largest organization he would ever be part of. He built something that knew how to say no.
And then he died quietly somewhere after 1985. And the city that had been working against men like him since before he was old enough to hold his ground. That city didn’t write it down. The man whose real power was knowing when to stop stopped. And the city moved on. The boss pimps didn’t.
