“King of Kings: Chasing Edward Jones” (2022) chronicles European narrator, cowriter and director Harriet Marin Jones’ journey to trace her family’s American roots and discover that her grandfather, Edward Jones, who was the eldest child of a Mississippi reverend and the richest Black man in America, testified in the March 1951 live televised Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce hearings. Jones was known as Big Ed, Emperor Jones or King of Kings, the head of Chicago’s Policy Syndicate which used the Jones Brothers Tailor Shop as its business front. Policy, which is the term used for the handle that turns a tumbling drum or wheel containing slips of paper with numbers on them, is also slang for the Numbers, an illegal daily lottery, and was later legalized into state lotteries. A family story functions as an entry point into examining systemic racism in communities, government and education and tells a little-known story about how Sam Giancana’s The Outfit, which Al Capone once ran, besieged the Syndicate.
In the interest of full disclosure, I briefly met Marin at the Woodshole Film Festival in 2023 before seeing “King of Kings.” It is a genius move to start the documentary by introducing her global, multilingual, gorgeous family, and while it may not be fair to equate beauty with goodness or judge people by their family, in this case, such biases work in Marin’s favor. She and her family are ready for the camera. They are photogenic, knowledgeable, engaging and credible. Marin’s mother, Prof. Harriet Jones, who was born in the US but often lived abroad, praises her father as a well-educated gentleman whereas in a different family, it may sound like glossing over criminal, dissolute origins. While some people may reflect on their past with rose-colored glasses, this presentable family gives such a favorable impression that it is easier to infer that Edward Jones may have been a gangster, but not the kind popularized in Hollywood as brutal, ruthless killers, and not his dominant identity.
Unlike her mother, Marin is not from the US and less concerned about respectability politics. “King of Kings” becomes a story of how racism created the conditions for the intelligent Jones brothers to prioritize a practical path to prosperity instead of proper poverty, the usual option in a segregated system that closed routes to authorized entrepreneurial enterprises to Black people. Marin explains, “What was there to be ashamed of? Policy was an illegal business, but it was not an immoral business….Slavery was legal but it was highly immoral. Realizing the game was rigged, my grandfather just refused to be confined in the box in which centuries of conditioning had put African Americans.” In other words, the preacher’s son rejected societal shackles to try and escape the imposed limits placed on Black people.
Like most documentaries, there are a lot of montages from archival black and white film and family photos playing while talking heads provide historical context, but most of these speakers are Chicago residents and have personal connections to the story. Like the Jones family, historian, and author Timuel D. Black Jr.’s father was also part of the Great Migration. Photojournalist Robert Sengstacke’s father, Robert S. Abbott, founded The Chicago Defender, the local paper that served the Black community. Famous music producer Quincy Jones, who was no relation, knew Jones personally because his father worked as a carpenter for the Kings, which meant that he played with Prof. Jones when she was a child. Usually documentaries which use famous figures feels like an excuse to attract more moviegoers, but Jones was the perfect fact checker against Prof. Marin’s sanitized recollection, “Baby, your father was a gangster.” Tom Harris, an ex-Policy driver explained that the Jones carried a gun for self-defense, not as a tool of intimidation like The Outfit.
Experts with law enforcement background such as Judge Nicholson R. Ford, Prof of Criminal Justice and Psychology Arthur Lurigio, retired policeman and Criminology Professor Robert Lombardo verify Harris’ interpretation of Jones’ activities. Instead, Jones ends up being a community leader who acted as a benevolent patron to the Black community, including artists, athletes, and journalists. Marin, whose roots are in the drama genre, aimed to model her film as a thriller with blood red tinged animation to reference the one drop rule and causalities of gang war. Marin cedes a huge part of her family’s story to her grandfather’s trusted colleague, a flashier fellow, King Ted Roe, because he was closer to our imagination of a gangster who was willing to fight back with force and elected assassination in a hail of bullets over a death bed. Roe does act as a perfect foil for Jones, a Northwestern alum (he dropped out early), who preferred a more elegant and sedate life.
Some of the experts have a less personal connection, but their encyclopedic knowledge roots the personal story in scholarship. Journalist Nathan Thompson acts as Marin’s tour guide throughout the city and wrote a book about the Policy Kings. Prof. Sylvie Laurent, who appears to be a French white woman, describes America’s racist history in an unflinching tone with none of the diplomacy and dispassionate dialogue customary among American scholars who reflect on the past. For some reason, hearing America getting read to filth in French feels more authoritative because she does not have a dog in the fight. “King of Kings” frames racism as an American problem, not a worldwide problem, but to be fair, that is Marin’s family’s experience even if it is not a widespread objective reality (ahem, colonialism).
Viewers who are unfamiliar with the Policy Kings may need to set aside some time to watch “King of Kings” twice because it is an ambitious and informative documentary. The set up will make some expect the story to solely focus on Edward Jones, but he is a jumping off point for the documentary to act as an unofficial historical tale of Chicago: underground crime syndicates, corrupt local politics, ethnic neighborhoods, segregation in the North and Black voters switching from Republican to Democrats. Also Jones spends time in Manhattan, Mexico and France. Jones’ story becomes emblematic of expats like Josephine Baker as he is forced to flee his native country to find sanctuary in less racist countries such as World War II France! It is not always easy to follow the thread when Jones is not the focus, but because the film is a chronological tale, those familiar with the era will find their footing.
Also anyone who saw “The Outfit” (2022) may spend a lot of time comparing “King of Kings” with the fictional gangster film, which was not really about the titular criminal organization and made the rival Black gang into a French speaking, matriarchal (I forget) immigrant criminal organization as fearsome as the Irish gang. It makes me curious whether director and cowriter Graham Moore and cowriter Johnathan McClain knew about the Policy Kings or created it from their imagination. Edward Jones’ mother provided her sons with the funds to start the business. Also while many of Jones’ descendants are now French, they had no French origins and did not even hail from Louisiana. While Moore claimed to model the fictional Harlem racketeer leader Stephanie St. Clair, it seems like an interesting creative choice considering there was a real-life war between The Outfit and The Syndicate with the unofficial blessing of local government to keep the Black community from upward mobility theorized Lombardo. Moore and McClain probably did not know, but it has always been easier for Americans to respect Black immigrants as more equal than Black natives to divide a wedge in the Black diaspora.
It appears that Jones was underestimated in life and death. Marin is setting the record straight with her award-winning documentary that delivers an understated, but challenging blow to history revisionism, concepts of morality and media images of gangsters.
