Van Jones
Anthony Kapel "Van" Jones is an American political analyst, media personality, lawyer, author, and civil rights advocate. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author, a CNN host and contributor, and an Emmy Award winner.
Jones served as President Barack Obama's Special Advisor for Green Jobs in 2009 and was appointed as a distinguished visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2010. He founded or co-founded several non-profit organizations, including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and the Dream Corps. The Dream Corps is a social justice accelerator that operates three advocacy initiatives: Dream Corps Justice, Dream Corps Tech and Green for All.
Jones has hosted or co-hosted CNN shows including Crossfire, The Messy Truth, The Van Jones Show and The Redemption Project with Van Jones. He is the author of The Green Collar Economy. He is the co-founder of Magic Labs Media LLC, a producer of the WEBBY Award-winning Messy Truth digital series and Emmy Award-winning The Messy Truth VR Experience with Van Jones. He is a regular CNN political commentator.
Jones was formerly CEO of the REFORM Alliance, an initiative founded by Jay-Z and Meek Mill to transform the criminal justice system. He was also a longtime colleague of, and advisor to, musician Prince.
Early life and education
Anthony Kapel Jones and his twin sister Angela were born in Jackson, Tennessee, on September 20, 1968, to high school teacher Loretta Jean and middle school principal Willie Anthony Jones. His sister said that as a child, he was "the stereotypical geek—he just kind of lived up in his head a lot." Jones has said as a child he was "bookish and bizarre." His grandfather was a leader in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and Jones sometimes accompanied him to religious conferences. He would sit all day listening to the adults "in these hot, sweaty black churches."Jones graduated from Jackson Central-Merry High School, a public high school in his hometown, in 1986. He earned his Bachelor of Science in communication and political science from the University of Tennessee at Martin. During this period, Jones also worked as an intern at The Jackson Sun, the Shreveport Times, and the Associated Press. He adopted the nickname "Van" when he was 17 and working at The Jackson Sun. At UT Martin, Jones helped to launch and lead a number of independent, campus-based publications. They included the Fourteenth Circle, the Periscope, the New Alliance Project, and the Third Eye. Jones later credited UT Martin for preparing him for a larger life.
Deciding against journalism, Jones moved to Connecticut to attend Yale Law School. In 1992, in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and trial, he was among several law students selected by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, based in San Francisco, to serve as legal observers to the protests triggered by the verdict. King had been beaten by police officers in an incident caught on camera. Three of the officers were acquitted and the jury deadlocked on the verdict of the fourth officer. Jones and others were arrested during the protests, but the district attorney later dropped the charges against Jones. The arrested protesters, including Jones, won a small legal settlement. Jones later said that "the incident deepened my disaffection with the system and accelerated my political radicalization". Jones was deeply affected by the trial and verdict. In an October 2005 interview, Jones said he had been "a rowdy nationalist on April 28th" before the King verdict was announced, but that by August 1992 he had become a communist.
Jones's activism was also spurred by seeing the deep racial inequality in New Haven, Connecticut, particularly in prosecution of drug use. Jones has said, "I was seeing kids at Yale do drugs and talk about it openly, and have nothing happen to them or, if anything, get sent to rehab... And then I was seeing kids three blocks away, in the housing projects, doing the same drugs, in smaller amounts, go to prison." After graduating from law school with his Juris Doctor in 1993, Jones moved to San Francisco, and according to his own words, "trying to be a revolutionary". He became affiliated with many left activists, and co-founded a socialist collective called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement. It protested against police brutality, held study groups on Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, and aspired to establish multi-racial socialism.
Career
Early career
Jones was affiliated with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, which had brought him to the city as a legal observer in 1992. In 1995, Jones initiated their project of Bay Area PoliceWatch, the region's only bar-certified hotline and lawyer-referral service for victims of police abuse. The hotline started receiving fifteen calls a day.Jones described the development of the project:
"We designed a computer database, the first of its kind in the country, that allows us to track problem officers, problem precincts, problem practices, so at the click of a mouse we can now identify trouble spots and troublemakers", said Jones. "This has given us a tremendous advantage in trying to understand the scope and scale of the problem. Now, obviously, just because somebody calls and says, 'Officer so-and-so did something to me,' doesn't mean it actually happened, but if you get two, four, six phone calls about the same officer, then you begin to see a pattern. It gives you a chance to try and take affirmative steps.
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
By 1996, Jones founded a new umbrella NGO, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He operated out of "a closet-like office" within the space of Eva Paterson, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee, and used his personal computer.In 1996–1997, Jones and PoliceWatch led a campaign to gain the firing of officer Marc Andaya from the San Francisco Police Department. Andaya was accused of excessive force in the in-custody death in 1995 of Aaron Williams, an unarmed black man who fought on the street with several officers. There was community outrage about his death and pressure on the department to bring justice against Andaya, who witnesses saw kick Williams in the head. In the year after the incident, the press reported that Andaya had a record of incidents of misconduct in the 1980s. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in addition that Andaya was named in 10 complaints between 1983 and 1993, eight of them allegedly for misuse of physical force, when he was a policeman with the Oakland Police Department. Investigation revealed more brutality complaints in Oakland and two lawsuits against him; the San Francisco Police Commission voted to fire Andaya in June 1997 for falsifying his application to the department.
In 1999 and 2000, Jones led a campaign to defeat Proposition 21, which would increase "penalties for a variety of violent crimes and required more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults." He worked to mobilize a student protest movement against the proposition; this effort made national headlines, but it ultimately imploded. He began to work for more solidarity and building broader alliances across politics and class to achieve goals.
The proposition was passed by voters, part of a nationwide wave of states' increasing punishments for crimes. This has led to increasingly high rates of incarceration in the United States, especially of minorities. In 2001, Jones and the Ella Baker Center launched the "Books Not Bars" campaign. From 2001 to 2003, he led an effort to block the construction of a proposed "Super-Jail for Youth" in Oakland's Alameda County. Books Not Bars later launched a statewide campaign to transform California's juvenile justice system.
During the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, Jones served as Arianna Huffington's statewide grassroots director.
Color of Change
Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Jones and James Rucker co-founded a Web-based grassroots organization to address Black issues, called Color of Change. Color of Change's mission, as described on its website, is as follows: "ColorOfChange.org exists to strengthen Black America's political voice. Our goal is to empower our members—Black Americans and our allies—to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone."Foray into environmentalism
By 2005, Jones had begun promoting eco-capitalism and environmental justice. In 2005 the Ella Baker Center expanded its vision beyond the immediate concerns of policing, declaring that "If we really wanted to help our communities escape the cycle of incarceration, we had to start focusing on job, wealth and health creation." In 2005, Jones and the Ella Baker Center produced the "Social Equity Track" for the United Nations' World Environment Day celebration, held that year in San Francisco.The Green-Collar Jobs Campaign was Jones's first effort to combine his goals of improving racial and economic equality with mitigating environmental damage. He worked to establish the nation's first "Green Jobs Corps" in Oakland. On October 20, 2008, the City of Oakland formally launched the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, a public-private partnership to "provide local Oakland residents with job training, support, and work experience so that they can independently pursue careers in the new energy economy."
''The Green Collar Economy''
Jones published his first book, The Green Collar Economy, in 2008. He describes his "viable plan for solving the two biggest issues facing the country today—the economy and the environment." The book received favorable reviews from Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle, Carl Pope, and Arianna Huffington.In the book, Jones contended that invention and investment was needed to transition from a pollution-based "grey economy" and into a healthy new "green economy". Jones wrote:
Jones had a limited publicity budget and no national media platform. But a viral, web-based marketing strategy earned the book a #12 debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Jones and Green For All used "a combination of emails and phone calls to friends, bloggers, and a network of activists" to reach millions of people. Due to the marketing campaign's grassroots nature, Jones said that achieving bestseller status was a victory for the entire green-collar jobs movement. In August 2008 Jones was featured on the grassroots radio program ''Sea Change Radio.''