A South Bronx street was renamed on Friday in honor of a gang leader and peacemaker, whose death a half-century ago is widely credited with sparking a period of relative calm, and even paving the way for the birth of the hip-hop movement that would soon flourish.
The “Cornell ‘Black Benjie’ Benjamin Way'' street sign now marks the intersection of East 165th Street and Rogers Place. That’s where the 25-year-old was beaten to death in December 1971, while trying to break up a gang fight that started in a nearby schoolyard.
After his death, fears of a bloody wave of vengeance failed to materialize. Instead, his crew the Ghetto Brothers convened a historic meeting that culminated in the Hoe Avenue Peace Treaty. Those who lived through the era said it helped quell street violence at a time when it was rampant.
“When Black Benjie became a peace counselor, that was like a real beam of light … a ray of hope in a darkness,” said Lloyd Murphy, 64, a former member of another gang from that era, the Ebony Dukes. He attended the renaming ceremony, joined by several hundred others. “As young people growing up, we just basically were waiting our turn to die.”
Street renaming ceremony in the South Bronx honoring Cornell "Black Benjie" Benjamin.
Murphy, who goes by the nickname “Topaz,” described Benjamin as a revered figure in the borough – an older member of the mostly teenage gang scene and an official peacemaker who broke up gang brawls in surrounding communities. Documentaries found online include testimonial after testimonial crediting Benjamin with the positive changes – some derailed years later by drug wars – following his death.
The relative peace after the treaty gave rise to safer streets and made it easier for rival gang members to travel between communities, longtime neighborhood residents said. That gave rise to a growing block and house party culture – conditions that made space for the collaboration and creativity that gave rise to the nascent hip-hop movement, which this year marks its 50th anniversary.
Angelique Lenox, a niece of Cornell "Black Benjie" Benjamin, embraces Lorinne Padilla, former "first lady" of the Savage Skulls street gang, at a street renaming ceremony in the South Bronx on Friday honoring Benjamin, a gang leader and peacemaker who died breaking up a fight in 1971.
Rarely mentioned in hip-hop’s origin story are the peacemakers who helped chart the rise of the genre and subculture, said Bronx Community Charter School social worker Bonnie Massey, who launched the street renaming campaign years ago with a group of eighth graders at the school.
“All of the challenges of the Bronx are very well known, very well documented. You hear the Bronx, you hear the Burning Bronx, right?” Massey said in an interview. “But you don't hear this other part of the story, which is that it was young Blacks and Puerto Ricans, other Latinos in the Bronx that made change in the Bronx that came together … And the truce held for at least a decade.”
She added: “People who are here now have a right to that legacy.”
Eddie Jamison signs tribute poster at a street renaming ceremony Friday in the South Bronx honoring Cornell "Black Benjie" Benjamin, a gang leader and peacemaker killed breaking up a fight in 1971.
The streets that claimed Benjamin’s life are starkly different from present-day New York. There were 1,823 murders in the city in 1971. The annual death toll would routinely eclipse 2,000 through much of the 1980s and mid-1990s, reaching a historic high of 2,605 in 1990, according to FBI statistics. The city recorded some 433 murders in 2022.
In the wake of Benjamin’s death, his mother called upon local gangs to remain peaceful, and the Ghetto Brothers brought together some 20 gangs at a local boy’s club to hash out a truce, the so-called Hoe Avenue Peace Treaty.
Hundreds turned out for a street renaming ceremony Friday in the South Bronx honoring Cornell "Black Benjie" Benjamin, a gang leader and peacemaker killed in 1971 while trying to break up a fight.
Among the treaty agreements was a rule that gang members could move freely across neighborhoods and wear their gang colors without being attacked by rivals. That provision proved crucial to the massive hip-hop parties held in locales across the borough in the 1970s, said Mark Naison, a professor of history and African American studies at Fordham University who has collected oral histories for the Bronx African American History Project .
“No police, no social workers, no teachers, and you have a party with a thousand people from 9 p.m. to 3 in the morning, where kids come from all over the Bronx and nobody gets shot in 1975,” Naison said.
“Could that have happened without the gang truce? I don't think so,” Naison said.
