I blanched. By May 1968, the Morroccos had killed three people. They were one of the most violent of 106 street gangs then terrorizing the city, with dozens of kids killed in the mid-1960s.

I was a work-study student from Temple. The late George Robinson, head of Can-Do, a community organization sponsoring the newspaper, told me that I'd be working with the North Central Athletic League, on 17th Street near Fairmount Avenue.

The next day I asked the kids, "Hey, you guys, why didn't you tell me you were a gang?"

Their response: peals of laughter.

Not one to miss a beat, I said, "We'll start a gang newspaper."

Gang life was a microcosm of world politics, with a pecking order, turf boundaries, internal politics, hostile actions and "peaceful" ways to settle disputes.

Ranked by age, size and ability to fight, members were called old heads, runners, juniors, midgets and peewees. Many boys sought refuge in gangs for protection, such as walking to school through rivals' neighborhoods.

Each of the 106 gang "turfs" had specific borders. The Morroccos congregated at the Francisville Playground, but their boundaries were Broad Street to 19th, and from Fairmount Avenue to Girard.

If a gang member wandered onto rival turf, he'd get beaten or possibly killed. But rivals could resolve disputes with "a fair fight" - a fistfight between two members of opposing gangs on neutral ground.

Rarely did gang members have real guns. They made "zip" guns from a piece of wood, a rubber band, a nail and a bullet, and fired them like a slingshot. They could - and did - kill their enemies and sometimes schoolchildren caught in the crossfire.

At Benjamin Franklin High School, on Broad Street near Brandywine, four gangs - the Morroccos, 12th and Poplars, 16th and Wallaces and 20th and Greens - fought to control the halls and stairs, which often determined who could go to school.

With a hot summer ahead, there was a fear that riots could explode along Columbia Avenue, now Cecil B. Moore Avenue, as they had four years earlier. Civic leaders pledged to provide 12,300 summer jobs and 7,000 full-time jobs for the unemployed by June.

Keeping gang members busy - with jobs or social activities - became critical after riots erupted around the country in the wake of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

That summer, Mantua activist Herman Wrice, who founded the Young Great Society as a self-help group, enlisted gang members in making a movie about the neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city.

In Francisville, I was trying to get Morroccos to write - or talk - about what they knew best: slices of their lives, including crime, politics, racial tension and problems at school and with police.

Seventeen-year-old Lee Sanders dictated his "life of crime" from age 6 to Gregory Lewis, who typed the account on my portable typewriter.

Steve Mixon and Douglas Keith, both 17, wrote about a community meeting that discussed racial tension and teens' problems with police outside Bok High School in South Philadelphia.

Mixon and Keith quoted teen John L. Barnes, who'd been hit by police, as saying, "Should a policeman use a glove with metal in it on someone?"

In the October-November issue - published in December - Ronald Jones, 15, wrote about the Morroccos' "senseless gang war with 12th and Poplar," while the "white" man "sits in his downtown office waiting for us to kill each other off."

By the time the newspaper was published, the 12th and Poplar gang opened the "Hip City" branch of Dig This and contributed articles on how to stop the violence.

Other articles recounted a new way to learn math by playing games, the Morgan State vs. Grambling football game and a concert by Klub Soul Men. Girls contributed an appeal to help starving Biafrans and a fashion story about pants suits.

The articles and poetry were published as written. Some were meandering, others poignant, an expression of what was on teens' minds.

As for circulation, "Lil' Willie" Thompson, 15, then a "junior" in the Morroccos gang, grumbled when he had to sell newspapers for a dime. Thompson later changed his name to Asim Abdul Rashid, became a Muslim imam and now heads the Majlis Ashura, a council of area mosques.

His circulation pal, Tommy Brown, briefly joined the Army before he was discharged and later killed in a corner armed robbery.

The first business manager, Vincent Pearson, contributed to one edition, then set off for Lincoln University, and Hershey Medical School. Pearson later returned to Francisville to medically treat his neighbors and pay off his school loans. He now works for Independence Blue Cross.

What is remarkable is how many gang members who left - for school, jail and better lives - returned to give back to the old neighborhood.

Fred Snead, known as "Ali Abdullah," enlisted numerous "old heads" who call themselves the "New Morroccos," and now carry out community projects.

The New Morroccos regularly hold senior-citizens' breakfasts and Thanksgiving dinners, run essay contests, raise money for computers to award to contest winners and enlist tutors for neighborhood students.

They want to turn around their turf. *