An Azusa street gang's campaign against blacks began during a meeting at a local park in 1992

From there the Latino street gang went on the attack. Graffiti with racial epithets began appearing around town, including "Get out N…" sprayed on garage doors of some black residents. Gang members beat up blacks that they found in their territory, telling one man "We hate n… in Azusa. This is Azusa." Over about 15 years, blacks were assaulted, chased and robbed, their property vandalized, in a "crime spree to drive African Americans out of the city of Azusa," said U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte Jr. Authorities have announced that a federal grand jury had indicted 51 people associated with the Azusa 13 gang in terrorizing blacks in the San Gabriel Valley city of more than 48,000. The campaign was partly motivated by racial prejudice. But it also grew from orders by leaders of the Mexican Mafia prison gang to organize Azusa 13's narcotics business by eliminating competition so they could have a monopoly on drug sales. Authorities said that the campaign went beyond drug deals to harassment of black residents because of their race. "We're brainwashed to think that if we let a black family in, then their [gang] cousins are going to come from Compton," said one former Azusa gang member who grew up in the neighborhood. The 24-count indictment is the latest in several prosecutions alleging that Latino gangs in Southern California attacked blacks to get them to move out of neighborhoods the gangs controlled. Many of those incidents occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s in neighborhoods with histories of gang problems. A few years ago, federal prosecutors charged members of a Latino gang with a campaign to push blacks out of the unincorporated Florence-Firestone neighborhood that resulted in 20 homicides over a decade. In the Harbor Gateway district of L.A., a Latino gang was accused of targeting blacks including 14-year-old Cheryl Green, whose death became a rallying point against such attacks. Members of the Avenues, a Latino gang in Highland Park, were convicted of a series of assaults and killings in the early 1990s.