Cle Bone Sloan grew up in Los Angeles’ Athens Park neighborhood, 4 when his father died and 12 when he became a member of Bloods. An inactive member of a notorious gang, Sloan looks back at his town’s gang history and makes a powerful call for change in modern gangster culture through his insightful documentary, “Party Bastards.”
The Party Bastards are named after this passage from Quartz City: Cripples and Bloodys are the bastard descendants of 1960s parties. Most gangs are born out of the decline of these parties. From the ashes of the Black Panther Party rose the Crips and Bloods, among other gangs.
The Party’s Bastard traces the timeline from that migration to the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party and American organizations in the mid-1960s to the formation of gang culture in Los Angeles and around the world today.
The documentary also documents the role of the LAPD and the FBI in the development of gang culture. During his tenure from 1950 to 1966, Chief Robert Parker bolstered the Los Angeles Police Department with racist white Southern recruits. Parker’s racial sympathies set the stage for a tumultuous relationship between the black community and the LAPD that continues to this day.
