A rediscovered 44-year-old film about the genesis and transformation of one of Chicago’s oldest street gangs is becoming a training tool for interventionists working with the city’s street organizations today.
The 1970 non-fiction film, “Lord Thing,” from once-prolific and now nearly forgotten Chicago documentarian DeWitt Beall, chronicled the early history of the Conservative Vice Lords, one of the first of the modern African-American street gangs, organized in the late 1950s.
The heart of the non-fiction film looks at the late 1960s transformation of the North Lawndale-based Conservative Vice Lords from a criminal organization into a legitimate political and community outreach group, creating business and recreational centers on the West Side.
“I’m using the film as a teaching tool,” said Benneth Lee, a former Vice Lords chief during the 1970s who is now the director for the National Alliance For the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated and an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern Illinois University.
“It shows how a street gang with the proper backing can become a positive influence in communities,” said Lee, who has shown a DVD copy of the film to street gang members and leaders over the past month. “If Mayor Emanuel and (Chicago Police Chief Garry) McCarthy would watch this film, it would be an eye-opener for them. I’m sure they could pull some good ideas from it.”
Lee got the DVD from Chicago Film Archives, which rediscovered and restored the 52-minute film in late 2013 and early 2014.
The restoration, which was funded through grants the CFA received through the National Film Preservation Foundation, will have its official theatrical premiere on Thursday, when it will be shown at the 20th Annual Black Harvest Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
“It’s such a compelling and unusual film,” said Nancy Watrous, executive director of Chicago Film Archives. “And we think that because of nature of the story, there’s going to be a lot of new eyes on ‘Lord Thing’ in the future.”
“Lord Thing” is indeed a unique experience. It tells the story of the rise of the Vice Lords, which was started in 1958 by seven teens who had been incarcerated in the St. Charles youth reformatory.
Actual Vice Lords participate in a series of staged scenes, shot in stark black and white, which show how the gang used brute force to become a powerful criminal organization on the West Side.
It then uses actual color documentary footage to show how certain members of the Vice Lords — including group spokesman and co-founder Bobby Gore, acting president Kenneth “Goat” Parks and president and co-founder Edwin Perry — decided to transform a faction of the group into the Conservative Vice Lords, a not-for-profit neighborhood social organization. The group had the support of powerful backers, including the Rockefeller Foundation (which provided a $275,000 grant to create recreational areas and businesses in North Lawndale) and other major grantors; the Chicago Police Department; and West Side aldermen.
“Lord Thing” shows some of the results of this transformation — the opening of Conservative Vice Lord-owned Tastee Freeze franchises in North Lawndale, the creation of a teen youth center called Teen Town on the West Side and the institution of various job-training centers in the neighborhood.
By 1969, the Conservative Vice Lords had joined forces with factions of the Blackstone Rangers and Gangster Disciples in an effort to get federal grants from organizations for business and community-based enterprises on the West Side. (That cooperative effort was reflected in the film, which was narrated by then-Blackstone Rangers spokesman Leonard Sengali).
The film ends in 1969-’70 with the demise of the reformed Conservative Vice Lords, caused by a crackdown on gangs that was led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and Cook County State’s Atty. Edward Hanrahan.
“There were still other factions of the Vice Lords that were still involved with crime, and that was putting a negative light on what the Conservative Vice Lords were trying to accomplish,” Lee said. “The media and law enforcement made it seem like what the Conservative Vice Lords were doing was a front for criminal activities, and it wasn’t.”
Beall, a Dartmouth University graduate who embedded himself with the Conservative Vice Lords during the filming of “Lord Thing”, was enamored with the gang and used his influence to help enroll 15 street-smart Vice Lords into his Ivy League alma mater from 1967 to 1973.
“DeWitt really saw the possibilities in the men that he met, and he was really impressed with their intellectual capabilities,” said Cynthia Kobel, a friend of Beall’s who worked as a production assistant on “Lord Thing”
The film, meanwhile, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970 and won a silver medal at the Venice Film Festival in the same year. But “Lord Thing” never received proper distribution in Chicago and the United States, Kobel said.
“It wasn’t pushed enough in this country,” she said. “And the atmosphere had changed. By 1970, people were more upset with gangs than they had been a few years earlier.”
Beall stayed in Chicago after completing “Lord Thing” and did other interesting work, most notably an early 1970s TV series for WTTW called “Earthkeeping”, which explored environmental, ecological and sociological issues. That series featured filmed sketches on environmental subjects starring the comedians who graced the stages of Second City at the time — John Belushi, Joe Flaherty and Harold Ramis, performing perhaps for the very first time on television.
But the filmmaker moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, where he failed in an attempt to become a screenwriter. He ended up as a kitchen designer in Southern California, where he died in 2006, forgotten as a Chicago filmmaker.
“It was strange we know all the usual suspects doing documentaries in Chicago at the time — the Film Group people (makers of “Cicero March”), the early Kartemquin people,” Watrous said. “No one knew about DeWitt.”
“Lord Thing” also disappeared from the public eye. Watrous first saw it three years ago, screened from a VHS tape at the South Side Community Art Center in the Bronzeville neighborhood. She was intrigued and immediately set about trying to track down a print to preserve.
“I contacted a colleague on the East Coast named Bucky Grimm,” Watrous said. “In a little more than a week, he had found the elements in California with DeWitt’s widow.”
The Chicago Film Archives acquired Beall’s entire film collection from his widow. about 25 titles, Watrous said.
Meanwhile, “Lord Thing” continues to circulate on the South and West Sides, where current gang members are said to be inspired by the story.
But even though the film is receiving a positive grass-roots reception, the interventionists showing the film say it will be difficult for street organizations to replicate what the Conservative Vice Lords did 45 years ago.
“In the ’60s and early 1970s, the civil rights movement was still a positive force in the black community,” said Lance Williams, the son of a former Vice Lord. Williams teaches at Northeastern Illinois and as an interventionist has shown the film to the gang members. “Absent of these movements, it’s going to be difficult for kids to accomplish what the Conservative Vice Lords accomplished.”
“Lord Thing” will be shown at the Gene Siskel Film Center at 8 p.m. Thursday.A panel discussion follows the screening, with Lance Williams of Northeastern Illinois University, Cynthia Kobel of Second Chance Initiative, and Benneth Lee of the National Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskel film center .org, $11.
Watch video clips of “Lord Thing” and a commentary from ex-Vice Lord member Benneth Lee online at chicagotribune.com/vicelords.
jowens@tribune.com
Twitter – john_p_owens
