Digging Up the Ghosts in the Family Closet – Chicago Magazine

Two years ago, in October, a French filmmaker won the Chicago Award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Although she lives in Paris and English is her third language, director Harriet Marin Jones won the award for her first documentary: King of Kings: In Search of Edward Jonesa quintessential Chicago story about her grandfather, whose astonishing biography had been largely erased—both from the history books and from her family’s collective knowledge.

The documentary has been on the festival circuit for the past 23 months, winning more than two dozen awards at film festivals from Los Angeles to New York to Monaco. This past weekend, it premiered at Hyde Park. The week-long run (through September 26) at the Harper Court Theater, along with another week-long run in LA, qualifies King of kings to be considered for an Academy Award nomination. The documentary will be available on video-on-demand and DVD on November 19.

The 59-year-old director spent a decade researching her family’s history, anchored by her grandfather, Edward Jones, the so-called Policy King who became a multimillionaire in the 1930s and 1940s. In the early 20th century, the term “policy” referred to an illegal numbers scheme that Jones ran with his two brothers and several other black individuals. They eventually came into conflict with both the Chicago Mafia, who kidnapped Jones, and the federal government, who imprisoned him. In the 1970s, Illinois officials, eager for a share of the revenue, codified the game as the state lottery.

As the film reveals, Jones lived a fascinating life. After moving with his family to Chicago during the Great Migration, he initially studied medicine at Northwestern University, but the race riots of 1919, also known as Red Summer, played a role in changing his career path. His business acumen led him into policy, and his incredible success landed him in a career that intersected with a variety of prominent 20th-century figures, from Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington to Al Capone and Sam Giancana.

Another influential figure Jones knew is still alive: legendary producer Quincy Jones — not related to the Jones family profiled in the film, but a colleague of Edward Jones’ daughter Harriet. (Director Harriet Marin Jones was named after her mother.) Quincy Jones, an executive producer on the film, also appears on camera, explaining the benevolent side of the Policy Kings, who helped build Bronzeville into a thriving community. They worked with thousands of people and used their underground economy to fund new businesses and scholarships. As Quincy Jones notes, “I would call them the Robin Hoods of Chicago during the Depression. They took care of their people.”

Marin Jones spoke with Chicago magazine when she arrived in town last week for the premiere of her film at the Harper Court Theater.

You grew up in Europe, but you studied in the US, and your undergraduate career started in Chicago. What brought you here?

I was born in Mexico and at 6 months old we moved to Madrid, where my dad is from. My mom is of course from Chicago, so I moved to the US when I was 17. I went to Loyola University and went to live with my grandmother, who used to live in the Lake Point Tower. I lived in Chicago for a whole year, which was great. I wanted to study film and Loyola had a small film department, so I moved to Washington, to American U., because they had a big film department. But Chicago is where I met Nick Ford (a now retired judge) who you see in the film. It was actually Nick who told me my family story. I had no idea because it was kept quiet — my mother and my grandmother hardly talked about it. He’s the one who first told me the story of Edward Jones.

What did you learn about your grandfather as a child?

My mother talked about her father, who was her hero, but all she said was what a great man he was. We had no idea of ​​the policy; we had no idea that he had been kidnapped; we had no idea that he was in prison. She said nothing. I started digging into my family history, trying to understand why my mother was so secretive about everything. Was she ashamed? What was going on? When you don’t know the real story, there’s a mystery around you. It’s like there are ghosts in the closet.

A great element about King of kings is your willingness to present conflicting versions of your family biography. In particular, we hear your mother say, “Oh no, he was never violent. He was not a gangster.” But then you immediately switch to other people, including Quincy Jones, who tell us, “Of course Edward Jones was a gangster who carried a gun to protect himself.”

It was incredibly important to me to tell the truth, whatever the truth was. That means the great side — how he helped the community — but also the dark side. So yes, of course he was an outlaw. I mean, the game was illegal. But there’s outlaw and there’s outlaw. Yes, he was considered a gangster, and yes, there was tax evasion. But he never killed anyone. Just because he became so powerful in the ’30s and ’40s doesn’t mean you can just be a saint. I thought it was really funny to show my mother’s side, and she was in complete denial.

How did your mother react when she saw the film?

She didn’t say anything for two days. It was too much information and too emotional for her. Now she loves the film. She’s so proud of it. By making this film, my grandfather and the Policy Kings will get their rightful place in history.

You know, to this day, there’s nothing about Policy Kings in the Chicago History Museum. You have tons of stuff about Al Capone and blah blah blah, and the Red Summer riots, but nothing about policy. It’s so important to also show that African Americans were behind what became the state lottery. That’s really information that the whole world needs to have.

Another fascinating element in King of kingsAt least for viewers in Chicago, it’s stunning archival footage of our city, particularly the Black Metropolis. How did you get all that beautiful footage?

Actually, I’ll be completely transparent: most of the money went to archival footage and the music. When I picked all that great footage, well, I had no idea it was going to cost that much. But it was so important to me to have all that footage from the past. I wanted to show what Bronzeville looks like today, and how thriving and beautiful it was in the ’30s and ’40s. I worked with an archivist named Patricia Lofthouse from Chicago, who sent me about 70 hours of footage. From those 70 hours, I picked about 40 minutes for the film — the most beautiful footage I could get. Patricia is amazing, a walking encyclopedia. I couldn’t have made this film without her.

By means of King of kingsTo match the black and white archive footage, you repeat that grayscale palette in animated sequences. Then you added an artistic touch by using red accents. This evokes “blood” as in family — a shared DNA connection — and of course a connotation of violence. How about this visual aesthetic?

Visuals are very important to me. I come from a fictional world; this is my first documentary and I would definitely not make a film with only people talking. I really wanted to have something strong visual. There are 11 sequences in the film where I didn’t have (archive) footage or images. That’s why I used animated sequences. I don’t want people to be bored.

As for the red, I felt like it would be the visual thread through the whole film. It’s actually the drop of blood, which represents not only the Jones bloodline, but also the one-drop rule. I mean, my grandparents, to a lot of people, they could have passed for white, but they were black. There was a time when if you had one drop of African-American blood, you were considered black. So that red blood also symbolizes the discrimination that comes from Jim Crow laws. The fact that black Americans couldn’t get most jobs, that they couldn’t vote without being threatened — it was really horrible.

In the film, Quincy Jones addresses your theme: “It’s so important to know and understand history, because when you know where you come from, it helps you get where you want to go.” How has your perspective on your family and the world changed since you started this project?

It’s an American family story that touches on the universal. It’s a small story and a big story. Has it changed my life? To see how audiences have received the film at these festivals — the standing ovations, and people coming up to me and saying, “Because of you, I’ve learned so much.”

I had no idea how it would be received. I didn’t get any subsidies, really. I didn’t get a distributor in the beginning. Everybody said no. In France, they said to me, “This is an American subject. We’re not going to do it.” In the US, nobody wanted it, for whatever reason. Really, nobody believed in the subject. When the film was finished, somebody said to me, “If you go to one festival, that would be great.” You know, I’ve done 32 festivals and won 27 awards, mostly at “white” festivals — if I can say that, in quotation marks. Now I’ve had four offers from American distributors and three from France.

And now people say to me, “Oh my God, we never thought it would be this bad.” Listen, this is what happened. I’m not hysterical; I’m not angry. I’m just sharing the facts. As Quincy says, it’s so important that people know what happened. I really feel like in some parts of the United States, they’re trying to rewrite history. Let’s remember that, so that history doesn’t repeat itself.