Reflection on NHD

The reason that I was interested in doing the Black Mafia for my NHD Project was because the Black Mafia was from my neighborhood. My family also knew a lot of the Black Mafia members; it’s surprising though because I couldn’t get anyone that was in the Black Mafia to conduct an interview with me. This was because they were ashamed of what they did and they were scared as well. Before I started doing research I already knew some things about the Black Mafia, all I knew was that they terrorized my neighborhood, and gave no mercy.

The most important resource that I used had to be the book that was written by Sean Patrick Griffin called Black Brothers Inc. Sean Patrick Griffin, a former Philadelphia cop turned academic, reveals how the gang was founded in 1968 by the hulking Sam Christian, who gathered around him a ferocious crew of gunmen. They ruthlessly eliminated rivals and were soon carrying out "hits" for the Black Muslims, who ultimately controlled political and street power in many neighborhoods. Another source that I used was Bet’s American Gangster, a documentary that was done about the Black Mafia. The problems about this topic were that I didn’t have a lot of sources to begin with, but the resources that I did have were used wisely.

The reason that I chose to do a documentary was because I’m very good with computers and I thought it would be kind of fun to create a documentary for the first time. In my past I created exhibits and they didn’t look very good. If I chose to do a paper I would have been to stressed. To create my documentary I used clips from bet’s American Gangster: Black Mafia and used videos from Getty Images. At the time when I was almost done my documentary my entire documentary got deleted, but I didn’t quit I restarted my whole documentary and it came out better than it was before.

This year’s theme was “Conflict and Compromise” and it wasn’t very hard for me to connect my topic to the theme. Philadelphia's 'Black Mafia' was a self-named, finite group of individuals who organized crime in predominantly African-American sections of the city beginning in the late 1960s. The group began as an extortion-centered organization and opted sometime in late 1970 or early 1971 to become, in essence, the extortion arm of the Black Muslims. Several spectacular crimes contributed to its growing reputation for violence. The Black Mafia was changing though especially after its leaders Ronald Harvey and Sam Christian were arrested. On December 31st 1973 the mob decided to celebrate with its very own New Year’s Ball. Soon after this event this organization was giving themselves a new meaning and a new name. so after this adoption of new meaning and new name, they weren’t actually causing the murders they were stopping them.Creating this project was an honor and has went down as one of the greatest projects that I have ever created.