If you ask ten different people on a street corner in South Central who started the Crips, you might get ten different answers. Some will say it was a neighborhood watch gone wrong. Others claim it was a political movement inspired by the Black Panthers. But if you look at the actual police records and the oral histories from the guys who were there in the late sixties, one name stands above the rest: Raymond Washington.
He wasn't some shadowy mastermind. He was a fifteen-year-old kid.
Raymond Washington was a student at Fremont High School. He was known for being a "knuckle-head" in the most literal sense—he loved to fight. He didn't use guns. Honestly, back then, the culture was about hands. He wanted to protect his turf from other neighborhood groups like the Gladiators and the Slausons. By 1969, he had pulled together a group of friends and called them the Baby Locs. This eventually morphed into the Crips.
It’s easy to look at the gang landscape today and see a massive, international criminal enterprise. But in 1969? It was just a bunch of teenagers in leather jackets trying to be the toughest guys on the block.
The Partnership With Stanley Tookie Williams
You can't talk about who was the founder of the Crips without talking about the East Side/West Side divide. While Raymond was running things around 78th Street, another kid named Stanley "Tookie" Williams was making a name for himself on the West Side.
Tookie was different. He was into bodybuilding. He was massive.
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In 1971, Raymond approached Tookie. They met at a park—essentially a summit between two teenage warlords. They decided to merge their groups to create something bigger. This wasn't a corporate merger; it was an agreement to dominate the streets of Los Angeles. They called the combined group the Crips.
Where did the name come from? There are a lot of myths. Some say it stands for "Community Resources for Independent People." That’s almost certainly a later invention to make the gang sound more political. The most likely story, backed by veteran members like Jimel Barnes, is that it came from "Cribs," because they were so young. People started mispronouncing it, or because of the canes some members carried as a fashion statement (mimicking pimps), it evolved into "Crips."
Why the Crips Exploded So Fast
The timing was everything. The Black Panther Party was being dismantled by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. The leadership that held the community together was gone. There was a vacuum.
Raymond Washington didn't have a manifesto. He had charisma. He recruited kids who felt abandoned. The Crips grew from a single neighborhood group into a franchise. If you lived in a certain area and wanted protection, you became a Crip. It was viral before the internet existed.
By 1972, the gang was already out of Raymond's control. He wanted it to be about fist-fighting and neighborhood pride. But the younger kids were starting to use sawed-off shotguns. The violence was escalating. The original vision—if you can even call it that—was being swallowed by the sheer size of the organization.
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The Tragic End of the Founder
By the late seventies, Raymond Washington was an outsider in his own creation. He had spent some time in prison, and when he came out, the Crips had changed. They were more violent. They were starting to look toward the drug trade. Raymond supposedly hated the direction things were going. He still wanted to settle disputes with his fists.
On August 9, 1979, Raymond was shot and killed.
He was standing on the corner of 64th and San Pedro. A car pulled up. Someone called him over. He walked to the window, likely recognizing the person inside, and was blasted with a sawed-off shotgun. He was only 25 years old. To this day, the murder is technically unsolved, though most people on the street believe it was an inside job—someone from a rival Crip set or someone within his own circle who thought he was "too old school."
Misconceptions About the Early Days
People often confuse the Crips with the Bloods in terms of how they started. The Bloods didn't just appear; they formed as a defensive reaction to Crip aggression. When people ask who was the founder of the Crips, they often overlook the fact that the gang spent more time fighting other Crips than they did fighting anyone else.
- The Leather Jacket Myth: The "Crip" look started with Maxon leather jackets, not blue bandanas. The blue bandana came later, supposedly after a member named Buddha was killed and his friends wore blue in his honor.
- The Political Goal: Unlike the Panthers, Raymond never had a 10-point plan for social change. He was a street fighter.
- The "Crip Walk": This wasn't a dance in 1969. It was a way of "signing" your name on the ground during or after a confrontation.
Tookie Williams eventually ended up on death row and became a Nobel Peace Prize nominee for his anti-gang books. He tried to distance himself from the violence. But Raymond never got that chance. He died a street legend, leaving behind a legacy that has claimed thousands of lives.
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What This Means for History Today
Understanding the origin of the Crips isn't about glorifying the violence. It's about seeing how a lack of resources, the collapse of political movements, and a few charismatic teenagers can change the face of a city forever. Raymond Washington wasn't a kingpin. He was a kid who knew how to fight and wanted to belong to something.
If you're researching this for a project or just trying to understand the roots of LA culture, look into the work of Leon Bing or Alex Alonso. They’ve done the heavy lifting, interviewing the original members who are still alive.
Next Steps for Researching Street History:
To get a true sense of the era, look up the documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America. It features actual founding members talking about the transition from social clubs to street gangs. Also, search for archives of the Los Angeles Sentinel from the early 1970s; the way the local press covered "The Crips" in those first few years shows exactly how the city was caught off guard by the group's rapid expansion. Understanding the sociological "push" factors—like the loss of manufacturing jobs in South Central—provides the necessary context for why Raymond Washington's group became so attractive to the youth of 1969.
The story of the Crips is a story of Los Angeles itself: complicated, violent, and deeply rooted in a desire for identity in a world that often ignores it.