T. Rodgers is widely known as the founder of the West Coast chapter of the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation Bloods gang after he moved to Los Angeles from Chicago as a young man. In a recent episode of “Myths Exposed,” Rodgers debunks many of the assumptions surrounding life in the streets by detailing how his childhood did not match up with the typical American story.
“I lived on the second floor of a tenement building. There were no chimneys, ho ho ho,” T. Rodgers. says, referring to Santa Claus. “The only hoes that I knew was down on 42nd Street.”
He explains that his desire to be a Cub Scout because his older brother was a Boy Scout is part of what initiated his actions to create his own group.
“They let me in. I had the uniform and I was dressed and all the girls, they love a man in uniform,” he says of joining the national organization that prides itself on teaching boys leadership and responsibility. “I was getting my badges and they threw up gang signs and made me pledge and courted me in. They had a thing called the belt line and if you did something wrong, they would send you through this belt line and I still have a scar where you weren’t supposed get hit with the buckle. They beat my ass with the myths of T. Rodgers, to only find out that the scout master was a pedophile. The myths of T. Rodgers who said, ‘Join our gang as opposed to their gang.'”
Rodgers says that forming the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation, which has its roots in his hometown of Chicago, brought him the support that he was seeking, but didn’t find, through the Cub Scouts.
“I wound up embraced and cased and loved by the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation,” he says. “The myths of T. Rodgers. That was the introduction into my survival. The myths of T. Rodgers. At the time, it was not a gang. It was an organization. It was an organized nation.”
The West Coast transplant says that, even though the Black P. Stone Nation became one of the largest and most recognized Blood organizations in the United States, he does not want to be defined as a gang leader because he sees himself as so much more than that.
“The myths of T. Rodgers will not say on my tombstone, ‘Here lies T. Rodgers, the leader and founder of the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation on the West Coast,'” he says. “There’s much more to me than just that. I am a father. I am a grandfather. Family first.”
He further debunks the myths surrounding gang life and his own legacy by addressing the popular term “OG.”
“I am what is called through African tradition a griot,” he says, referring to a name for traveling artists and historians, “so when is addressed by OG, the myths of T. Rodgers, one is addressed by the term, OG, it doesn’t mean ‘Original Gangster.’ There’s only three things in a gang, out of my mouth and quote me if you will, cowards, kids and homosexuals. I never was in a gang, never.”