Documentary about Chester debuts on King’s birthday
CHESTER » A documentary revolving around the life and times of the people of Chester, titled “A Chester Story” debuted Monday night to the standing-room-only MJ Freed Theater on Avenue of the States.
The brainchild of Ulysses “Butch” Slaughter, project manager for Chester Made, an initiative partnered with the Pennsylvania Humanities Council that promotes the culture of the city of Chester through a concentration on the arts, the documentary serves as both a time capsule to the city from 2004 and a critical analysis to the issues that persist nearly a generation later.
“In 2004, a student of mine was shot and killed, and it was such a devastating situation that i felt like the best way to remember him and remember some of the other people I had known here and lost here, was to compile it into a documentary,” Slaughter said of the hour-and-a-half film featuring dozens of interviews and archival footage from the streets of Chester.
Presented in 4:3 letterbox format, “A Chester Story,” was raw and imperfect, but at its core attempts to dissect the issues that has plagued the city for decades: Poverty, crime, drugs and murder.
The first shot reveals the abandoned Deshong Mansion, once a symbol of Chester’s prosperity and willed to the city by owner Alfred O. Deshong, who in 1913 placed the mansion and its grounds in a trust, along with Deshong’s considerable art collection, to be enjoyed by city residents in perpetuity. By the 1980s the mansion had fallen into disrepair and in 2014 it was razed to the ground.
“This is no place to raise kids. You’ll lose them to the streets,” moans a woman from Mothers in Charge in the next scene. “This city will not allow you to nurture and grow.”
Slaughter was filming local recording artist Bigga Dre outside the State Correctional Institution in Chester, who in the middle of an acapella verse off his track “Evolve or Perish” was accosted by prison staff for filming across the street on Route 291.
Eric Grimes, the senior consultant of the campaign for black male achievement at Root Cause and weekly cohost of a morning program on 900AM-WURD, Pennsylvania’s only African-American owned talk radio station, spoke on internalized oppression, saying, “You start to believe that you can’t make a difference.”
Councilwoman Elizabeth Williams, cited in the documentary as a “Chester resident,” said, “It’s looks like a dead city,” remarking on the tragedy that befell the onceprosperous industrial town.
The theme of loss and hopelessness is well apparent in the film, as is the city residents’ hostility to a perceived subjugation to the powers that be.
“You get what you tolerate,” Grimes said in a panel following the documentary. “You got to have a fist in your glove.”
Choosing Martin Luther King Jr. Day to unveil “A Chester Story,” which this year fell on the civil rights leader’s true birthday of Jan. 15, Slaughter said Chester didn’t just serve as King’s home between 1948 and 1951, it was the formative years for King who was deeply studious at the seminary and in learning the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.
It was there that King channeled the pacifist teachings of Gandhi with the means to thwart injustice through civil disobedience.
A theme throughout “A Chester Story” revolves around this perceived loss of power through the transition of city populous of predominantly white to predominantly black. Regarding King, the movie quotes, “He stayed for three years in Chester. He had a vision, he had a dream in Chester. He took God, he took Gandhi, but the Devil stayed behind.”
Slaughter said the recent audit of the Chester Upland School District caused him to think back on the footage shot by he, his sons and Devon Walls, the executive director of MJ Freed Theater and a leading voice in promoted positive values through art in Chester.
In 2004, they captured footage of a fight that erupted into a massive police response at Chester High School that resulted in 28 arrests.
One witness on tape compared the police response from 12 different departments around Delaware County, in which former Chester Police Commissioner Joe Bail can be seen separating a crowd of students in the footage, as “practice for a terrorist attack.”
Slaughter said the documentary is meant as a time capsule to reveal the differences and similarities from over a decade ago, but also as a forewarning to avoid perpetuating the same mistakes again.
A takeaway in the film for Slaughter was compromise. Aside from political affiliations, Democrat or Republican, decisions made in the moment may seem to benefit yourself and your family often lead to an oppressed future.
“You see these compromises in ‘A Chester Story’ that you also see all over the county,” Slaughter said. “We’re collapsing on ourselves ... the problems are still ongoing.”