YOUNG ROCC

William “Young Rocc” Tolbert(The Life of a Misguided Young Man)I was born in Detroit, son of Cynthia and Vic. I grew up a happy little boy with good family all around me. My mother was 16 years old when she had me, and my dad was 18, but they became responsible young adults immediately and prepared a warm and loving home for me and my older sister. My mother or father never got caught up on drugs or alcohol, and can I only remember them arguing one time, so like I said, life at home as a young child was wonderful. Although we lived in the inner city and we didn’t have much money, my sister and I never missed a meal, we were always clean and neat, my father would make us read and study even before I was in kindergarten, we spent a lot of time with my grandparents who were the best grandparents on the planet. My cousins and I were more like sisters and brothers. My childhood was filled with wonderful memories until I turned 5 years old and my dad moved away to Los Angeles. At first I was told that he was out there visiting and would be home soon, and then eventually my mother sat me down and explained to me that her and my father were splitting up and that he wasn’t coming back. That was my first memory of reality and true since of hurt. I was crazy about my father and could not understand how he could move away so far and leave what I thought to be the best family on the planet. My heart was broken, but it didn’t take long for me to push that hurt and pain to the back of my mind and continue to enjoy my childhood. I would visit my father in Los Angeles, but those visits came far and few in between. I was a wonderful student through out elementary school. My sister and I scored 100% on the mandatory state wide test that were given (MEAP testing), and were given special honors as 2 of 50,000 children in the state of Michigan to achieve those type of scores. Once I got to middle school I fell in love with girls and basketball, and hip-hop became my lifestyle 24-7. The grades started to slip once I got to middle school due to me giving girls and my friends more attention than the books, and my mother supporting me and my sister all alone. So although we still had a safe happy home, my mother had to work and go to school, so that allowed more time for me and my sister to do what we wanted to do instead of what we should have been doing. My 9th grade year was a disaster, and I got all F’s and one D on my report card, because I rarely went to school. We lived on 7mile and Braile (which wasn’t and still isn’t one of the better areas in Detroit) where I attended Henry Ford High school that year. My sister was accepted into one of Detroit’s premier high schools for gifted students known as Renaissance High School. My sister would have to walk through our neighborhood and past the hustlers and thugs to get too and from school. Eventually one of them became her boyfriend (good girls love bad boys), and he didn’t have much respect for our household. My mother didn’t have a live in boyfriend or a husband so I was the man of the house at the age of 14. That summer, my father came back into my life and I went to visit him in California. While I was visiting in L.A., my sister’s boyfriend at the time shot up our house because of jealousy, he threw eggs at our home, and broke out windows. When I heard about it, I was furious. Although I was a skinny little 14 year old boy and these guys who were terrorizing my family were between the ages of 18 & 19 at the time, I still had the mind state of coming home and defending my home. When I returned home at the end of the summer everything was calm and normal around my house for about a week or two until one day my sisters boyfriend and his friend (who was dating my cousin) came by my house, stopped in front of the house and demanded that I run in the house to get my sister and my cousin for them. I refused and begin to curse them out and told them to get the f—k away from my house (I was the man of the house doing my duty). They eventually drove away, and when they did I ran in the house to get my mothers gun. I put it in my pocket and sat on my front porch all alone expecting them to return shortly. Well they did return and continued to demand I get my sister and my cousin. I started to approach their car when my mother ran over from our neighbor’s house and grabbed me, and then started to beg these guys to leave us alone. I WAS FURIOUS that mother was begging some young punks to stay away from OUR home. At that very same moment, my cousin went to the car and started to plead with her boyfriend to leave and he slapped her. When he slapped her, I pulled out the pistol and started shooting at his car. I didn’t bother to think that he might have a gun, which he did (and it was much bigger than the gun I had). I started to run in my house but I stopped on my porch because I realized that my mother was still standing in the street, so I turned around to continue shooting, but as soon as I turned around, the car was pulling off with him hanging out of the window shooting at me. I jumped in the bushes and laid still because I didn’t know if I was hit and I didn’t want the bullet to travel in case I was hit, but my family thought that I was lying there dead, so in their panic, they picked me up and rushed me in the house. By the grace of god, I made it out of that situation without a scratch, but I was shook up for a couple of hours. I had never been through anything like that before in my life, but even at the age of 14 I was willing to kill or die to protect my family (and till this day I would kill or die to protect my family). The very next week, in fear of losing me to senseless violence, my mother sent me back to Los Angeles to live with my father and shortly after that, she moved to Belleville Michigan to get my sister away from the drama. The end of my innocent youth, my comfortable secure life with my mother and sister, and me leaving my hometown that I love. When I was on that airplane before it departed from Detroit Metro Airport heading for LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), tears started to pour down my face and I didn’t understand why, because I was excited about moving to L.A., Home of all the best rappers (at the time), Hollywood, sunshine and palm trees. Not to mention that my father was cool as hell. He would give me the keys to the car and let me drive all around L.A. by myself at the age of 14, he took me all over the city, I couldn’t wait to go back, but something inside of me was sad. GOODBYE DETROIT, GOODBYE MAMA, GOODBYE SIS, GOODBYE CHILDHOOD, HELLO SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES.Welcome to California(My L.A. experience)When I moved to California it was the best thing to happen to me since Lasagna, basketball, rap music, and sex (well maybe not sex, but California was the bomb). It was like a big celebration when I returned. My entire family was so excited that I was moving to Cali, and they all treated me like royalty. I lived with my father and my stepmother (she was and still is the best). We lived in South Central Los Angeles on 81st St. and Vermont. Our apartment was like a club. My father would have a get together probably 5 nights a week. At first I loved the excitement, the women that were in and out of the house, and the fact that I was able to drive without a license anytime and anywhere I wanted. It was a since of freedom that I hadn’t felt living with my mother because she was so afraid that I would get hurt or killed (because black men have been dying in astronomical numbers since we arrived here in America), that she was a bit over protective in my opinion. But my father was the exact opposite, he allowed me to explore and venture out more. My father had 3 siblings, my uncle Andre (his older brother and also his best friend), his younger sister (my aunt Pam who became my best friend), and my uncle Greg who is the baby of them all. They would all come over to hang out, as well as a lot of my cousins and friends of the family. The summer was officially over and I attended Hawthorne High School for the 10th grade. California was like a different world to me, I loved it!! It was so different from Detroit. The weather was good all year around (no snow), there were beautiful Latina women all over the place, and there was always something to do. But along with all of those fun things to do, I also got infatuated with the gang lifestyle in Los Angeles. I was already impressed by what I would see on the videos and hear in the music I listened to when I lived in Detroit. And when I saw the movie ‘Colors’ and ‘Boyz n The Hood’ I was really impressed by what I saw. Not to mention that I was a fanatic of everything that the west coast rap scene had to offer (N.W.A, Ice Cube, Eazy E, M.C. Eiht and Compton’s Most Wanted, Low Profile, Kid Frost, etc.). But now I wasn’t watching that on television or hearing it on the radio, I was living smack dead in the middle of it all and I loved it. My older cousin Chris a.k.a. Hoova Moon was from one of L.A.’s most notorious gangs known as the Eight Trey Hoovers, which stands for 83rd street Hoover Gang who were originally a Crip set, but later on broke away from Crips or Bloods and were just about Hoovers. We lived in his hood, so him and his homeboys were always over our house, he would spend the night at our house and I was basically living with Ice Cube but my cousin wasn’t an actor or rapper, he was the real deal right there in the flesh, and he treated me great. He didn’t teach about gangbangin, he actually would try to keep me away from it, but I admired him and everything he was about. When I moved from Detroit I was wearing Guess Jeans, silk shirts, snake skin belts, Jeans with suede on the front of them, (Fila, Adidas, & Nike) tennis shoes, and I even had a couple of pair of Gators and Gucci Loafers that my mothers boyfriend passed down to me. But slowly but surely my attire started to change when I moved to Cali. I started wearing Dickies, white tea shirts, Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, Wallet Bee shoes and whatever else I could wear to look like my new idol Hoova Moon. I started to become a part of my environment, not because I had a hard life or because I was a second or third generation gang member, but because I wanted to be a gangster. My father didn’t do much to change the way I was dressing, actually he never said anything, and we just partied the night away as usual. We had a one bedroom apartment on 81st street, so my bedroom was the living room, and my bed was the couch. I started to get tired of the partying because I was in school, and on school nights, my father still had those wild get togethers. I started to miss having my own bedroom like I had in Detroit. I missed my privacy, the warmth of my mother, the security of the home life that I grew up with, but yet and still I was still in love with California. Even though I started to portray myself as a gangsta, I wasn’t actually a gangbanger because I didn’t have a hood. My cousin Chris would have killed me before he let me join his hood, and none of my friends that attended Hawthorne were gangtas, they all played basketball. That year I actually made the basketball team and I was so excited and proud of that accomplishment. I didn’t get much playing time at first, but I didn’t care because I knew that as long as I was on the team, I had a chance to show what I could do and I would have eventually gotten more playing time. I also knew that if my father had gotten involved I would of excelled (coach’s tend to show favoritism to children who have parents that get involved). So I would invite my father to watch me practice and to come to our games and meet my coach, but he never did. In fact, he and my uncle Greg would tease me because I sat on the bench most of the time. That really hurt and discouraged me, so I quit the team. I always knew that I would be great in something, and I thought basketball was it, but once I realized that I would not receive the proper support, I gave up basketball altogether and started rapping in the 10th grade. I figured, “Okay, dope dealers, rappers, and basketball players made all the money and had all of the girls and respect.” I wasn’t going to start a career selling drugs (at least that’s what I thought at that time in my life), so rapping was my next option. I loved hip-hop, I knew everything about hip-hop, and I had poetry skills so I that was it, I would become one of the best rappers alive and no one would deter me from that. Later that year on New Years day, my family all got together at M&M’s soul food restaurant when it used to be located on Crenshaw Blvd. in Inglewood California. My father, my step-mother, and I were riding with my Uncle Andre and his fiancé who was pregnant with his son Little Andre at the time, and their 3 year old daughter. After we left the restaurant, Andre dropped us off at home on 81st street, and got killed in a car accident 5 minutes later only 2 blocks away on 79th street. I was crushed. I had never lost someone so close to me before and the fact that he just dropped us off at home didn’t help. My entire family was affected tremendously by that loss and we haven’t fully recovered till this day. That was my third heartache. The first being my father leaving us and the second being me leaving my mother and sister. After Andre died my father went through some personal battles and life at home became very stressful and hard to deal with so after the tenth grade I moved back home to live with my mother and sister in Belleville Michigan. I spent my 11th grade year at Belleville High were I met some of my best friends that I hold close to my heart till this day. When I moved back with my mother, I was now looking and talking like a L.A. gang member at school, but I was Cynthia’s son Rock when I was at home. One night while my mother was asleep, I stole her car so that I could go and visit a girl that I was seeing. I was so used to the freedom that I had in L.A. and it was difficult for me to abide by some of my mothers rules which weren’t strict, but they didn’t fit into my program. It was snowing that night and I totaled my mother’s car in the back woods of Canton Michigan. I felt terrible because my mother worked hard and did everything she could for my sister and me. I was still missing my uncle Andre, and I remembered a talk that he had with me about graduating from high school, so at that point in my life, I decided to become a responsible young man, move back to L.A. to take some of the burden off of my mother, and focus on graduating from high school. So after the 11th grade, I moved back to Los Angeles. My grades throughout high school were so poor that it was virtually impossible for me to graduate and walk across the stage with my class. So my plan was to go back to L.A., enroll into as many extra credit programs that I could so that I would graduate on time, and once I graduated I would seriously pursue a career in music. So I enrolled in Washington High in South Central L.A. were I attended summer school, night school and Saturday classes. It was there at Washington High that I met my wife and the other founding father of 781, Hakim ‘Young Hak’ Muhammad. The first semester of the school year I was a focused machine with my eyes on the prize, but by the second semester I started to spend more time with my girlfriend (my wife today) and my new found homeboy Young Hak. I started smoking weed and drinking a lot, and although Young Hak was never a gangbanger, he was respected and accepted by all of the gangsta’s from his hood, so when he introduced me to them, they accepted me and respected me the same. It also helped that I was from out of town and had no affiliations with any other L.A. gangs. I spent countless days at Hak’s house and a lot of my friends at school were gangsta’s or either affiliated like Young Hak, unlike the friends that I had at Hawthorne High who were mostly athletes or cool ass Hispanics. I quickly became very popular at school, became the president of the hip-hop club (What’s up Mr. Bakeer), and was known as the best rapper in the school hands down. At first I would rap about all kinds of things that had to do with everyday life, but my peers would want me to rap more about the streets and gangbanging so I catered to that. Although I lost some of the focus that I had at the beginning of the school year, I still graduated on time with my class. I proudly walked across the stage with a 3.7 grade point average (yeah I know, I was the man). After graduation Young Hak and I really started making moves on our music, but our music by that time had become saturated with gang talk. That summer at my homeboy Lil Japanese’s pager shop, my homeboys Moe and Baby Vulture put me on the set, meaning that I had to fight both of them to officially become part of the hood. That summer I was no longer Rock (Cynthia’s baby from Detroit), I became Rocc from Westside 107th Street Selo Hoover Criminal Gang. I loved it and everything I thought it had to offer. I did things out of my character to prove to myself and others that I was capable of doing it. We shot up houses, popped up at the middle of enemy picnics, turned the city of Hawthorne into a war zone. We were from Hoover but we called ourselves ‘The Wildbunch’. Most youngsters who gangbang are broke, but since I had ties to Detroit and L.A., I started to hustle and make thousands of dollars at the age of 19. Of course that’s petty money, but for a 19 year old I was ballin. I would through after hour party’s that girls would strip at as well as prostitute there selves in the private room. I purchased my first A.K. 47 assault rifle at the age of 20. I thought I was the man. I had a beautiful girlfriend who was pregnant with my first child, I had guns, money, respect (so I thought), the ladies were crazy about me, my big homeboys were the ballers in our hood so we partied hard and had chronic weed, girls, and liquor in access. 781 grew from a 2 member group to a 5 member group, and we were all affiliated with The Hoover Criminal Gang and our music was blowing up in the hood. During all of this, I remained a respectful, funny, charming, intelligent, witty young man in the eyes of my family and friends, but when I got to the hood with my gang brothers, I became a criminal. Things stopped being fun when I started going to funerals of young black men who I called my homeboys who were my age and much younger. I got arrested for gun possession charges so my name was entered in the system as an active gang member so when ever I got pulled over by the LAPD, no matter how respectable or charming I would try to be, they treated me like an active gang member. I started to mature by nature, and through everything I was participating in, I knew that I was doing wrong. A lot of my friends were getting killed or hit with serious time in prison. I started to think, what the f—k are we doing all of this for? We aren’t getting anything out of it, were causing pain to other black families, and were going through some painful shit ourselves, but I was still intoxicated by my lifestyle. One hot day in August, my wife gave birth to my beautiful little girl ‘Emoni Samone’. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, went into labor while visiting her family in Barstow California, which is about 2 to 3 hours away from L.A., so I rushed out there and made it just in time to welcome my princess into this world. My wife lost a lot of blood during labor, so she and Emoni (my daughter) had to stay in Barstow for 4 or 5 days. I drove back to L.A. that day and later that night I went to a party that my homegirls were having. My mind was on my daughter not that party, so I went outside with my partners Young Hak, Shadow, and Zig Zag to smoke a blunt in the car. I had the Poloroid picture that the hospital took of my daughter (her very first picture) in the car with us, staring at it when some guys inside the party ran out shooting. They didn’t see us in the car because I had a dark tent on the windows, it was night time, and we ducked down when we heard the shooting. The guys were actually shooting out with some of our homeboys that were in the party and were using my car as their cover, so we were literally caught up in between the cross fire. I was lying there staring at my daughter’s picture while the gun shots continued to ring out. All I could think about was that I was going to get shot and killed on the very same day that my daughter was born. So I started the car while still lying down and maneuvered us to safety. That incident gave me a lot to think about, but it was a incident that happened almost 2 years later that would make me really consider giving it all up and focusing strictly on my family. I was in a funeral procession on our way to the cemetery when we passed through Rolling 60’s hood. The Rolling 60’s and the Hoovers pretty much hate each other. A member of the Rolling 60’s gang started shooting at all of the cars in the funeral procession. Not just cars with Hoovers in them, but cars with the grandparents and children and men and women who have nothing to do with the Hoover Street Gang beside the fact that the man that was being buried, who happened to be a member of The Hoover Street Gang was also a member of their family, so they were paying their respects. The police was watching the funeral the entire time, from the church and followed us all the way to the cemetery, but they did nothing, so shots came from my vehicle in hopes to stop the member of the 60’s from killing someone. Once we retaliated, that’s when the lame ass LAPD sprung into action, pulled my vehicle over, and charged all 4 occupants of my vehicle (including myself) with attempted murder and set a bail of $1,000,000,000 dollars for each of us. I was petrified although I didn’t show it. I couldn’t imagine spending a stretch in jail and coming home to a 10 year old daughter. My wife who was my girlfriend at the time already told me that if I went to jail for that gangbangin bullshit, she would not wait for me. But fortunately for us, the police didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute us, so the District Attorney rejected the case. When I walked out of the L.A. county jail, the first person I saw standing there was my wife and my 2 and a ½ year old daughter. I was already in love with my wife, but that took it to the next level. She was my woman, and she was holding our future in her arms. After that incident, I stopped hanging in the hood like I used to. I would come around but I wasn’t spending half as much time as I used to spend in the hood. My Aunt Pam who remained my best friend through my entire Los Angeles experience died while giving birth and that really took a lot out of me. I knew that I was becoming my own man, and I was starting to really look at gangbanging for what it was, and that’s a bunch of bullshit! But because of my history, I knew that there would still be people out there who would kill me no matter if I wasn’t active in the gang lifestyle. And I would have hated to be out with my wife and my daughter and someone spotted me, and attacked my family. I also knew that a lot of my peers were still living the same lifestyle, so the best decision I made as a young man was to move me and my family to Detroit were I could concentrate on music and my family. Since then I haven’t been an active gang member, I’ve been an active father and husband. Since then, my wife has given birth to my one and only son. I’ve pressed up 5 cd’s independently, and I’m now working on 6. I’ve been active at my children’s schools, reading once a week and spending time with my daughter’s class so that those young people can see first hand an example of a positive young black man, who still has a cool swagger, but has intelligence and respect to go along with it. I’ve been training my son in basketball and what it takes to be “A Strong Black Man”. I’ve coached my son’s basketball team and given a positive example to the other children on the basketball team, and I try to make children understand that this rap music, these videos, movies, television, sports, etc. are all entertainment, and only gives people a certain aspects of real life. Now I’m not trying to come across as ‘Mr. Perfect’, but I am entailing the story of a changed man. I’m very proud of myself, and I’m glad that I experienced everything that I went through, because these are the things that helped to shape me and build strength and character within myself. I still have a lot more to learn and accomplish, but I truly believe that I’m on the right road, and I challenge all of you misguided youth to join me. I’m not preaching to you, or urging you to start going to church, or to dress and talk a certain way. But I do urge all of you to carry yourselves with respect and treat others with that same respect. I also urge you all to watch your language and the things that you say to one another when your in public places, because there is nothing worse than being somewhere in public using profanity and disrespectful language in front of women, children, & elders. I urge you to pull up your pants sometimes and walk tall and proud. I urge you young women to stop letting young men think that some of this ignorant behavior is acceptable, because most of these young cats out here are behaving a certain way in hopes of impressing girls (I know that good girls like bad boys, but they should also want a man with some common since and some type of plan for his future). And I’ll end things on this note. A lot of young men and rappers are trying to imitate the late great Tupac. They think that by acting ignorant, their living the “Thug life”. But that wasn’t what Tupac was about. Tupac was the voice of those whose voices were not being heard. Tupac was more of a rebel than a thug, because he possessed a strong knowledge base of who he was, the conditions of the world in a whole, the corruption in politics, and the ills of the black community. He was from the hood and had a hood swagger about his self, but in no way did he represent ignorance and genocide. Tupac seemed to be fighting his own conflicts and demons, which we all are fighting, and unfortunately he became a victim of exactly what he was fighting to change. Tupac was on the road to being the closet thing that our ‘YOUTH’ could look upon to as a leader because he wasn’t just preaching about changing, he lived it and understood it, so the youth respected him and would have followed in whatever direction that Tupac went in. But the cancer of gangbanging took him away from us prematurely. So if anything, look at his life as an example of no matter how much money, success, prestige, women, knowledge or status that you have, if you walk side by side with the devil and live in the darkness of negative energy, it will pull you in and eventually destroy you.I hope that you all have gained some insight and strength from this article. Please pass it along to as many people as you can so that they may pass it on, and we can start making some small strides that will eventually lead to leaps within our community. We are losing a lot of our babies, so let’s start being part of the solution. And for my brothers out there who are 25 and older. If you’re still gangbanging and promoting that lifestyle to our young people, you’re worse than the KKK, The Skin Heads, and our President all rolled up into one. You need to start impacting our world in a positive way because your children and grandchildren have to live in this world that your helping to create, and it’ll break your hearts if in 30 or 40 years from now your child follows in your footsteps and your sitting in the front row at one of your babies funeral. And the only person to blame would be the man in the mirror. Can I get a muthafu-kin witness. PEACE & BLESSINGS to you all.WILLIAM “YOUNG ROCC” TOLBERTwww.myspace.com/youngrocc