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The Life and Career of Van Jones; Founder and National Executive Director, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights; Oakland, CA

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published May 15, 2006

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Having grown up in the rural South, with schoolteacher parents who spoke out boldly on the subject of desegregation, Jones was destined to be a leader in the fight for justice and equality.

"I grew up in a very pro-civil rights household, and that really affected my worldview," he said.


Jones first began to consider becoming a lawyer while working at a newspaper in Shreveport, LA.

"I felt that there was a lot of racism discrimination in the community that the newspaper was actually adding to and fanning the flames of, as opposed to correcting, and I felt implicated because I was working there," he said. "I just disagreed with a lot of things—a lot of the slants and angles and the way different neighborhoods and communities were being portrayed—and so I decided that I wanted to make the news and not write it and went to law school."

While in law school, Jones once again became aware of discrimination in the community around him, and this time, it led to the decision to focus his legal career on battling human rights abuses.

"I noticed that students at Yale University used drugs fairly freely—breaking the law pretty much every weekend—and never got arrested or put in prison for that criminal behavior," he said, "but, literally four blocks away, kids doing that in the housing projects were labeled drug dealers and drug abusers and sent off to prison. That really shocked me. I thought it was unfair. So, that began to inform what I wanted to do with my law degree."

Upon graduation, Jones took a job at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, and it was there that he met Eva Paterson, the civil rights attorney and mentor who would help him accomplish his dream of founding the EBC.

"Based on the things I saw working as a young civil rights attorney, I decided to create a human rights center that would be really focused on some of these abuses and wouldn't stop at calling them civil rights abuses or miscarriages of justice, but would say that these are human rights abuses," he said. "Same way that if we saw any other country that was putting its poor people and its minority population in prison in disproportionate numbers to its majority population, we'd call those human rights abuses. I wanted to say the same thing was happening inside U.S. borders."

Three years later, Jones turned his dream into reality.

"I started the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996, so it'll be 10 years old in September," he said. "Our initial mission was to document, challenge, and expose human rights violations, especially by U.S. law enforcement."

The EBC's first program, Bay Area PoliceWatch, was created in 1995 to "police the police." The program works to expose police misconduct and campaigns on behalf of victims' families to bring about justice.

"We were and are still one of California's only state-bar-certified, police-misconduct-lawyer referrals," Jones said.

Other programs the EBC has implemented include Books Not Bars and Reclaim the Future. Books Not Bars is a program dedicated to getting California's youth out from behind bars and into positive rehabilitation centers, and Jones is proud of the progress the program has made so far.

"As a result of our efforts and the efforts of others, there's been about a one-third reduction in the number of kids who are locked up in the state system, and that's something we're pretty proud of," he said. "We've got a long way to go, but we're seeing real progress."

Reclaim the Future is a program designed to help people with barriers to employment, such as those with criminal records, find quality jobs. The EBC also helped start Freedom Fighter Music, a music label featuring artists whose work expresses the EBC's beliefs.

"We think that they [Freedom Fighter Music artists] are adding an important perspective—an important voice—especially in the world of hip-hop music, where socially relevant music isn't as popular or common as it was in the late '80s," Jones said.

When asked why he believes young people have responded so well to the EBC's programs, Jones said it's because the organization allows the youth of today to speak out in their own voices and do things their way.

"We don't try to dress them up or water them down," he said. "We think that people really need to hear from young people in urban America—raw and uncensored—in all their hope and all their pain so we can start making wiser choices about how to lift those young people up."

Since he founded the EBC, Jones has been brazenly educating the world on human rights abuses and opening people's eyes to the injustices taking place in their own communities.

"I get a chance to talk to elected officials. I get a chance to talk to philanthropists, students, [and] community leaders that are maybe not focused on this part of the problem," he said. "It always feels good when you're able to see the light bulbs go off in people's heads and you realize that you are helping to shape people's understanding of the world and what in fact is going on."

For law students interested in effecting some major change in their society, Jones advises finding a mentor who has been in their field of interest for a while and who can make recommendations and give advice. He also vigorously encourages students to go with their instincts and fight for what they believe in.

"If you feel called to start something, chances are if it's worth doing at all, most people will tell you don't do it," he said. "So, listen to your own heart. Get a patron or somebody—get a couple—and then, don't be afraid to fail."

"The worst thing in the world is not being passionate about something and trying to start a project and it failing," he said. "That's not the worst thing at all. The worst thing is to be passionate about something and take no action and always wonder whether you could've thrown a rock that would've caused an avalanche in the direction that you think things should go. That's the worst thing."

Over the past decade, Jones has worked relentlessly to create an organization dedicated to justice, opportunity, and peace; and now that the EBC is established and flourishing, he has no intention of slowing down.

"I think the Ella Baker Center is on the path to becoming a world-class strategy and action center for justice and opportunity…and we're going to continue on that road," he said. "And as for me, I'm going to keep trying to find ways to make this country more just and to make the struggling in marginal communities more healthy and prosperous."
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  6. The Life and Career of Van Jones; Founder and National Executive Director, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights; Oakland, CA

published May 15, 2006

( 72 votes, average: 4.9 out of 5)
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