Elgin James

Elgin James is a filmmaker, musician and a former member of Friends Stand United (FSU), a Boston, Massachusetts area group in the early 1990s. FSU has been classified by several law enforcement agencies as a gang.

After a short time in orphanages and foster homes, James (who is of mixed race) was raised by civil rights activists on a rural farm in the Northeast. With a crop of marijuana in the backyard and alcohol and drug abuse in the house, James formed strong anti-drinking and anti-drug beliefs which later led him to be a pivotal figure in the 1990s militant straight edge movement within the punk subculture. He had also become a vegetarian at age 11 after watching the animals he raised on the farm slaughtered.

James had discovered punk rock through an older foster brother and attended concerts by seminal hardcore punk bands Black Flag, Agnostic Front and Millions of Dead Cops. He was arrested for the first time at age 12, and by 14 he ended up in juvenile hall. There he rejected the pacifist beliefs of his parents (who had marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Riders movement), and began studying the writings of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, fusing them with aggressive punk ideals.

James left juvenile hall, and inspired by civil rights attorneys William Kunstler and Morris Dees, left for Antioch College at age 17 to study pre-law. During a break in his first semester, he was involved in a gang fight and beaten in the back of the head with a baseball bat, which left him with left hemispheric brain damage. He could not speak or move the right side of his body. After intensive physical and speech therapy he eventually recovered his speech and motor skills, but he ended up homeless, living on the streets and in squats across the country. Eventually he settled in Boston, Massachusetts.

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