If there's irony in Richard's answer, he doesn't let on. Intergenerational poverty is Richard's status quo, neither good nor bad. Growing up in the land of MLK, it's all he's ever known. The same goes for just about everyone else he encountered growing up in the hood. "That's how Montgomery people is," he says with a shrug, trading his pawn for position.

A generation after the Montgomery bus boycotts purged the city and state of legal segregation, Richard was still riding de facto segregated buses and attending de facto segregated schools right through to senior year—schools where the best imaginable outcome for a youth of his complexion (dreams of NFL greatness aside) was to land a steady job in the trades.

Richard came very close. He was one transformer box away from getting fully certified as an electrician, courtesy Job Corps, and on his way to a lucrative tradesman's practice earning 20 bucks an hour. But a fear of heights on the final test—climbing the telephone pole to "mess with the high-voltage transformer"—left him in the lurch. "I could do everything else but not that, so they failed me …. That wasn't part of the plan."

His telephone-pole descent was soon followed by a headlong dive into illicit living on the street. As a teen, he had occasionally been picked up by the police for petty offenses—jaywalking, wearing his pants low, turning the volume up high—but now Richard started running with the wrong crowd and putting his mortality to the test.

It takes a bit of mental maneuvering to imagine this soft-spoken youth, with his chess sophistication and melancholy aspect, packing guns and robbing stores for fun. "It's crazy," he admits. "It wasn't even about the money." Having tried his hand at responsible living—"playing by the rules"—and come up short, Richard set out to reclaim his power by force. "It started becoming like a rush to me, like a drug to me," he recalls. "The shock when you bust in the store, the fear in people's eyes."

Fortunately, the police put an end to Richard's antics before he had the chance to shoot another person or get himself shot. He was tried and convicted without a fuss. Now, four years after the fact and recently released from federal prison, Richard makes no bones about serving his time in the pen. It's the stuff that happens after his release—what's brought him to this place—that has him in a state.

With an air of defeat, Richard describes the multiple attempts he's made since his release to line up work and a home—along with food stamps and public assistance in the meantime—and to reclaim his right to vote. The experience is always the same, he says: when he discloses his felon status, doors close in his face. "Some people don't believe in second chances," he says. "Once you're a criminal, always a criminal—they'll do anything to keep our people down."