Elgin James

Elgin James is an American filmmaker, musician and a former member of Friends Stand United (FSU), a Boston, Massachusetts area group in the early 1990s which has been classified by several law enforcement agencies as a gang. James left FSU in 2007, and the following year was announced as a fellow for the Sundance Screenwriters lab. He directed the film Little Birds in 2009, which was released shortly before James was arrested on historical charges relating to his activities with FSU, for which he was sentenced to one year in prison. Since his release from prison, James has co-written the 2016 film Lowriders, and co-created the TV series Mayans M.C.. Early life 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 also became a vegetarian at age 11 after watching the animals he raised on the farm slaughtered. James 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 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 became Freedom Riders), and began studying the writings of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, fusing them with aggressive punk ideals.