Johnson City Senior High School (aka Johnson Shitty), is a school that pretends to be the skinny kid at fat Camp. This school has more drug users than honor students. The school with poor test performances, terrible standardized test scores, has completely given up on academics. Instead of improving the knowledge of the students, they have decided to focus on music and music only. In fact, this school revolves around music. In times of great academic need, the school consistently spends more taxpayer money on musical instruments than on text books. The teachers are confused and senile and the counselors are mean and heartless.

If you have hopes of going to a good university, you can stop dreaming. Majority of the graduates go low performance Community Colleges. Even if you are the lucky one, and get into college, don’t think you’ll be ready. Johnson Shitty will not prepare you for college. Once in college, you will realize that the AP classes taught you “how to not sleep” instead of “how to learn.” If you didn’t take AP classes, you might as well drop out, it’s not like you’re going to do anything with your life, especially since you are the comical “Johnson City Graduate.” Please, do yourself a favor, and beg your parents to move.

The inner-city Birmingham of the early Eighties was a tough place for a young black man to grow up. Racial tension exploded in vicious race riots in 1981 and again in 1985. The West Midlands police were regularly accused of over-zealous and heavy-handed behaviour, particularly when it came to the random stop-searching of black youths. There was also an ever-present threat from the far right.

It was in this climate that some of the city’s young men began to band together for self-protection. Meeting up in a fast-food restaurant in the Lozells district, the loose-knit group planned to carry out vigilante patrols to protect the community and fight the injustices being overlooked.

One of the founders of this fledgling organisation was fork-lift truck driver Arthur ‘Super D’ Ellis. A good-looking man with the gift of the gab, he had fathered two sons—Nathaniel and Marcus—by the age of 19. His relationship with their mother had ended and by the time Arthur began hanging around with what had been dubbed the Johnson Crew he had moved on to pastures new. His relationship with a pretty girl named Beverley Thomas would also come to an end, but not before she had given him three more children—twins, Charlene and Sophie, and a son, Michael.

As the Johnson Crew grew, so the threat from the far right began to recede. And with unemployment in inner-city Birmingham running at 20 per cent, moving into crime became a way to make a living.

The gang members were very close-knit...