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<br><br>
February 21, 2008<br><br>
<br>
Oscar Nomination Caps Columbia Film Professor’s Long Journey<br><br>
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
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> <br><br>
Dozens of people have been nominated for Oscars this year, but none of
them got there quite the way that Jamal Joseph did.<br><br>
Mr. Joseph joined the Black Panthers in Harlem as a teenager, had a role
in a criminal case that practically defined the term cause célèbre and
later went to prison for harboring a fugitive in a deadly armored car
robbery.<br><br>
It was there, in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., that Mr.
Joseph wrote his first play and earned two degrees. He began teaching
when he got out and eventually became a professor at Columbia. He also
helped found Impact Repertory Theater in Harlem, a nonprofit performing
arts group for teenagers and young adults.<br><br>
During the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, the group is scheduled to
perform a song Mr. Joseph helped write called “Raise It Up,” which was
nominated for an award for best original song and was part of the
soundtrack of the movie “August Rush.”<br><br>
Mr. Joseph, 55, flew to California with 25 young members of Impact
Theater on Wednesday. The night before, a crowd gathered inside an old
industrial building in Hell’s Kitchen for a send-off party. Mr. Joseph
stood in a vestibule near an elevator, talking about his trajectory from
being accused of crimes in the 1960s to being honored 40 years later by
the Hollywood establishment.<br><br>
Mr. Joseph said he was merely continuing a form of community-based social
activism that he endorsed decades ago. “We knew back then that we had
bright minds questioning the world,” he said. “Now I want to create a
space for the best and the brightest minds of this generation.”<br><br>
Mr. Joseph is now the chairman of the film division at Columbia’s School
of the Arts, but in 1968, at 15, he was among those protesting at the
campus when student dissenters and their allies seized control of school
administration buildings including Low Memorial Library and the office of
the Columbia president, Grayson L. Kirk.<br><br>
A year later he was among a group of Panthers who were charged with
conspiring to blow up police station houses and the New York Botanical
Garden
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> in the Bronx. Leonard Bernstein
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> held a party on Park Avenue to raise funds for the accused, and Tom
Wolfe
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> lampooned the event in a famous essay called “Radical
Chic.”<br><br>
Mr. Joseph’s case was severed from the others because he was a minor and
he was not tried on the conspiracy charges. In 1971 a jury acquitted the
remaining defendants after deliberating for less than three hours. The
columnist Murray Kempton
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> wrote a book about the trial called “The Briar Patch.”<br><br>
In 1981, Mr. Joseph, who also went by the first name Edward, was charged
with taking part in the robbery of a Brink’s armored car in Rockland
County in which two police officers and a guard were killed. He was
acquitted of participating in the robbery but convicted of helping hide
another man who took part. He spent five and a half years in
Leavenworth.<br><br>
He earned two college degrees there, started a theater group and wrote
his first play, “Beyond the Call of Duty,” about Vietnam
veterans.<br><br>
Mr. Joseph began teaching at Columbia 10 years ago. Around the same time
he helped found Impact, which members said was financed by private
donations and teaches subjects including dance, drama and writing. It
emphasizes dedication and discipline, and participants, who range in age
from early teens to early 20s, spend eight hours rehearsing every
Saturday. Mr. Joseph said that Columbia was going to begin providing
rehearsal space for the group, which has been practicing in the building
where he lives with his wife and three children.<br><br>
The group has performed at the Plaza Hotel
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>, the Green Haven state penitentiary and the Apollo Theater
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>, but never on quite as large a stage as it will on Sunday.<br><br>
“Raise It Up” is among three songs that group members recorded for
“August Rush,” which is about a homeless child who hears music in all of
the mundane sounds of the city and lives with a band of runaways in the
old Fillmore East Theater in the East Village. The theater members were
invited to record songs for the film by James V. Hart, an author of the
screenplay and a friend of Mr. Joseph’s.<br><br>
“A song that was written from the hearts of their experience is going to
be performed Sunday night at the Oscars for a tiny audience of a billion
people,” Mr. Joseph told the crowd at the party as the performers posed
behind him.<br><br>
The group performed two songs, dancing and singing to recorded music.
Then it was time to perform “Raise It Up.” The song started slowly, with
a rhythmic synthesizer, then built toward soaring gospel-tinged vocals.
The performers danced and beamed, and the audience sipped glasses of wine
and clapped.<br><br>
Carolyn Wilder contributed reporting.<br><br>
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