Within a few short years, the Vice Lords became the Conservative Vice Lords, who focused their efforts on community empowerment and self-reliance rather than petty gang enmities.
Black nationalism was on the rise in Chicago in the late 1960s, and the city’s gangs reimagined themselves as harbingers of this new urban consciousness, with the Vice Lords leading the charge.
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It was only after a series of riots in the mid-sixties that the Vice Lords and other Chicago gangs realized who their true enemies were and went through a radical shift in thinking about their rivalries. According to Vice Lord Bobby Gore, this was part of a cycle of black-on-black violence perpetuated by powerlessness in the face of racist oppression, and deep down everyone knew it. As racial tensions were clawing to the surface in Chicago, the young Vice Lords, then under the leadership of Eddy Perry, “got even” with the abusive Chicago police by warring with other black gangs on the West Side. The plot of the film follows the history of the Vice Lords through the lives of several of its most prominent members, beginning in the streets of 1950s Chicago before the proliferation of guns.
Sengali is brilliant, refusing to simply read his lines in the monotone of the traditional chronicler, instead infusing his speech with the slang and frankness of the streets. Casting former Blackstone Rangers spokesman Leonard Sengali as narrator (the Rangers were allies of the Vice Lords), Beall recreates the personal stories told by individuals through staged vignettes featuring actual gang members in a style echoing the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. While another director might have chosen to take a more distant, objective take on Chicago’s Vice Lords, DeWitt Beall does away with the impartiality of the documentary medium.
A must-watch for any Chicago history aficionado, Lord Thing depicts a part of this city’s turbulent past that is not often told but remains relevant in its content as well as its grounded style. Once the curtain rises, however, the inescapable magic of this gem of a film is finally revealed, and one is immediately sucked into the world of the 1960s West Side. The only existing tape of the 1970 documentary Lord Thing was forgotten for decades until a single damaged VHS was recovered and restored by the Chicago Film Archives, only to be shown at select screenings across Chicago, including the Black Cinema House viewing I attended.
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