Chapter & Verse, which finishes a run in Chicago tomorrow night, follows a former gang leader (Daniel Beaty) who, after serving eight years in prison, reenters society and struggles to adapt to his changed Harlem neighborhood. Beaty cowrote the film with director, educator, and activist Jamal Joseph, who loosely based the narrative on his own experience.
Leah Pickett: According to the Sentencing Project, one in three black men in the United States will end up in prison. How did you feel about making a film that put a face to this statistic, and also to depicting how the system for people leaving prison is just as broken as the system that leads them in?
I came up in a time where there was kind of formal mentorship in the community, in the form of community centers and after-school programs. And even in the Black Panther Party, there was mentoring happening between the adults and the young people, and from the women especially. Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mom, wrapped her arms around me and became my big sister—not only in the Black Panthers, but through life. There was also informal mentorship on the street corners and playgrounds—older guys who would look after you and look out for you. They’d run you off the corner before the cops did. They’d say, “You have no business in this dice game, go home and do some homework.” There were eyes on kids in the community, to give them some advice and help them stay clear. There’s been a breakdown of that, and I attribute that to the expansion of the prison industrial complex.
When I speak to people I know who are still in prison—unfortunately still in prison, because I’ve been out for 29, almost 30 years—they say that structure is not in place anymore. That same kind of rebellion we see in Chapter & Verse of the younger men toward Lance—someone who should have gotten respect, someone those kids should be looking up to, how they condescend to him and don’t listen to him—the same thing is happening in prisons. And it’s conscious: Keep those gangs going at each other.
The race and class critique, and understanding the connection, is so important. Slavery was a business. The first slaves were white, and they weren’t making enough money, and their terms of [indentured] servitude would expire after five or seven years. And so the white [colonists] began enslaving the Native American people; and they were like, are you crazy? This is my land—I kept you from starving and dying from disease when you first got here. And they fought to the death, or starved themselves to death if they were captured. And then the colonists figured out that the gold mine was African-American slaves, and learned about how to identify your property, and making them wake up under a different sun and stars than they woke up under in Africa, and everything that went along with that.
When Dr. King started talking about poverty, racism, and war in his great speech at Riverside Church, and merged race with labor—organizing black and white sanitation workers in Memphis and in Chicago—and had called the war in Vietnam “a war of capitalist exploitation,” he was dead within a year. When Malcolm X started talking about race and class—saying he prayed with white and Chinese Muslims, and giving a speech at Oxford University where he talked about class struggle, saying our struggle is capitalism—he was dead within a year. The Panthers began to say, “all power to the people”; and that means class struggle, because that means people who are white, black, brown, red, and yellow can struggle against racism and capitalism as an institution. And because we wanted to bring down an institution that oppresses all poor people, we were brutally destroyed within five years.
