# Raymond Washington: The Genesis of a Street Dynasty

## The Making of a Legend

To understand the architecture of an empire, one must first examine the foundation upon which it was built. Raymond Lee Washington did not emerge from the void as a fully formed gangster or warrior. Rather, he was crafted—shaped by the crucible of mid-century Los Angeles, molded by systemic forces beyond his control, and tempered by the streets that became his proving ground. The story of Raymond Washington is ultimately a story about place, timing, family, and the inexorable power of environment to forge human destiny.

Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s was not the glamorous city of cinema and starlight that dominated the American imagination. For the Black residents who called it home, particularly those concentrated in neighborhoods like Watts and South Central, it was a carefully constructed cage—gilded with the promise of California opportunity, but built with the bars of racial segregation and economic deprivation. This was the world into which Raymond would be born, and this was the world that would birth the Crips.

## A Texas Girl Comes to California

Violet Samuel arrived in Los Angeles during the great migration, part of a massive wave of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South in search of something better. She was one of nine children from Texas, young and hopeful at twenty-three years old when she gave birth to Raymond Lee Washington on Friday, August 14th, 1953, at LA County General Hospital. Raymond was her fourth child, joining three older brothers—Ronald, Joe, and Reggie—who had preceded him into a world that was becoming increasingly hostile even as it promised prosperity.

The Washington household was not intact in the traditional sense. Raymond's father and Violet never married, and the relationship dissolved early in the boy's life. Later, Violet would marry L.V. Barton in 1964, a union that produced one more child—Derard Barton—before dissolving four years later. The household that raised Raymond Washington was matriarchal, working-class, and scrappy. These were people who understood struggle as a fundamental condition of existence, not as an aberration.

Violet first settled in Watts, on Firth Boulevard, before eventually relocating to 76th Street, nestled between Wattsworth and Central Avenue. This neighborhood—not quite Watts, not quite Compton, but existing in the liminal space between them—became Raymond's crucible. It was a place of tight-knit community and abject neglect, where neighbors looked out for one another's children but where institutional resources were virtually nonexistent.

## The Geography of Segregation

When Violet Samuel came to California seeking opportunity, she encountered not a promised land but a carefully engineered system of racial apartheid that rivaled anything legally codified in the Deep South. The difference was subtle but significant: California's segregation was accomplished through real estate covenants, loan discrimination, and police enforcement rather than explicit Jim Crow statutes. The effect, however, was identical.

By the early 1950s, when Violet arrived, Black Los Angeles had already been cordoned off into specific neighborhoods. The suburbs—the places where post-war prosperity was being concentrated through government-backed mortgages and infrastructure investment—were explicitly closed to Black families. Real estate agents and developers enforced these boundaries with startling violence. In neighborhoods bordering Compton and Watts, white residents didn't merely discourage Black settlement; they bombed homes, firebombed houses, burned crosses, and made their communities into hostile territories where Black families who dared move too close were met with terrorism.

The neighborhoods where Raymond grew up—Watts and South Central—had once been thriving, respectable communities. But by the time the great migration brought thousands of people like Violet Samuel, the economic foundation had been systematically dismantled. Jobs that once sustained working-class families began disappearing. Public resources that might have served the growing population were redirected elsewhere. Schools were underfunded, hospitals understaffed, police presence oppressive, and legitimate economic opportunity nonexistent.

It was, as one observer would later note, like John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"—but with a specifically racial component, and without the literary attention that might have transformed suffering into cultural awareness. It was real life, unmediated and unrecognized by those in power. Los Angeles was a pressure cooker, and no one who wielded authority seemed particularly concerned about what happened when the lid finally blew.

## The Washington Boys

Raymond grew up surrounded by brothers and the street culture of South Central. There was an easy masculinity to the Washington household—the kind forged through physical proximity, limited resources, and an understanding that survival required toughness and wit. The brothers ran the blocks together, hopped fences, played street ball directly in front of their house, and engaged in the casual athletics and games that marked childhood in the hood.

Their mornings often led them to 78th and McKinley, where the Black Panther Party operated a free breakfast program for neighborhood children. This wasn't charity in the traditional sense; it was political organizing. The Panthers understood that hungry children couldn't concentrate on dreams of liberation, and they backed their ideology with concrete action. The breakfast program was revolutionary precisely because it was practical. For Raymond and his brothers, growing up in this context meant absorbing a particular vision of Black pride and self-determination from an early age—the idea that Black people had the right and the responsibility to control their own communities and determine their own futures.

The Washington brothers were wild in the way that energetic young men confined to limited spaces tend to be. Derard, the youngest, would later remember Raymond with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Once, when Raymond was recovering from a motorcycle accident with his arm in a cast, he found endless entertainment in tormenting his baby brother. When Derard ran to tattle, Raymond caught him with a single swing of that casted arm, sending the boy flying back into the bathtub. Another incident involved Derard taking matters into his own hands—grabbing a BB gun and shooting Raymond in the buttocks as he scaled a fence. As Derard would later recall with a laugh, "I was small, man. It was the only way I could defend myself."

These weren't mere pranks or sibling roughhousing. They were protocols of toughness, lessons about standing your ground and maintaining dignity in the face of disrespect. The Washington brothers had a particular test of manhood that they refined over time: they would stand face-to-face and take turns throwing punches directly to the chest with as much force as possible. There was a specific code—no flinching, no tapping out, no retreat. You either stood your ground or you folded. In this way, the streets raised the Washington boys, teaching them lessons about physical courage and mental fortitude that would shape their entire lives.

## Divergent Paths

As the Washington brothers matured into young men, their lives began to diverge in ways that reflected both individual talent and the limited options available to young Black men in 1960s America. Reggie, the middle brother, possessed an authentic musical gift. He could really play—genuinely talented in ways that suggested he might have pursued music professionally under different circumstances. Instead, he went into construction work with his fiancée's family, building a solid, respectable life that remained successful into adulthood.

Three of the four brothers chose military service, though this choice came during the most unpopular war in American history. Ronald and Derard voluntarily enlisted in the Army, while Joe was drafted into the Marines. It's important to understand the context of their decision. In the 1960s, military service was not the honored calling it would later become in American mythology. Veterans returning from Vietnam weren't thanked for their service by grateful civilians. Instead, they were spat upon, called baby killers, and treated as pariahs. The war was deeply unpopular, particularly in Black communities that understood it as a war fought by poor and working-class kids against a people of color half a world away. Signing up during the Vietnam era essentially guaranteed deployment to a combat zone. For young Black men without economic resources or educational privilege, it was often the only option available beyond the streets.

Yet all three Washington brothers made that choice. This tells us something important about the family—they were not nihilists or rebels without a cause. They were trying to do the right thing, to build legitimate lives, to escape the gravity of the streets. Not all of them would succeed.

## The Woman Who Raised Them

Violet Samuel, the woman at the center of this family story, carried within her the complicated legacy of Southern-born African Americans seeking better lives in California. She worked as a single mother, supported her four sons (and later her youngest child with Barton), and tried to maintain some semblance of stability in a neighborhood designed to deny it.

Years later, Violet would speak about Raymond with genuine affection and pride. She remembered him as a naturally talented athlete and a fundamentally happy child. She laughed about his irrational fear of dentists—a minor phobia that seemed endearing in the context of her memories. But her laughter would turn serious when she recalled other moments, darker moments when police would appear at her door, when they would come to take Raymond away, just as they had before.

As a single mother in South Central Los Angeles, Violet felt the particular sting of law enforcement attention. She was being singled out, she believed—targeted not for anything she had done wrong, but for existing as a Black woman raising boys in a community that the police treated as enemy territory. It was a common experience among women like her, though at the time there was no vocabulary to describe the systemic nature of that targeting, no framework for understanding it as anything other than individual unfortunate circumstance.

The police came to the Washington house with regularity, and each time they came, they took Raymond. These were the early brushes with the system, the initial contacts that would set the trajectory of his life in motion.

This was the foundation. This was the world that would produce Raymond Washington—not the demon or folk hero of later legend, but a young man shaped by love, by struggle, by the particular humiliations and challenges of being Black and poor in America's second city. Everything that came after would grow from these roots.

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*To be continued...*