Van Jones leads the battle against "criminal injustice"

By Julia Scott

Human rights leader Van Jones grew up in rural west Tennessee with a first-hand experience of what it felt like to be bullied. Years later, armed with a law degree from Yale, he founded Bay Area PoliceWatch and later the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC) to defend victims of police brutality and reform the criminal justice system.

With Van's guidance, EBC has found creative ways to get its message out to lawmakers: with a record label, Freedom Fighter Music, and its Books Not Bars and Let's Get Free campaigns, where young activists lead the charge to put an end to the California Youth Authority prison system and its horrific record of abuse.

Van took some time in July to tell us about his work and share some thoughts about affirmative action, the media, and getting arrested in San Francisco.

When you were younger, what were you interested in?

I was mainly interested in journalism and poetry and writing. I read a lot of comic books, James Bonda lot of good guy vs. bad guy type of stuff. I was a big 'Star Wars' fanÉI played a lot of strategy board games—I was basically a nerd.

Do you see any connection between that and the work you ended up doing?

Definitely—when I was younger I was really small and I was always picked last for Phys. Ed, sports teams and stuff. I was a bully magnet, so I grew up with a really strong hatred for bullies and people who abuse their power.

And then?

When I was at college, I worked as a journalist. In the '80s, there were really strong affirmative action and diversity policies at newspapers across the country. They were still trying to integrate newsrooms. I was hired on as an intern reporter, photographer, copy deskÉI worked a number of internships in Southern news rooms—my hometown newspaper and a newspaper in Louisiana.

And the reason you bring this up in the context of affirmative action is that you were the token African American?

No, I just think it's importantÉI went to college on a minority scholarship. All my internships were minority internships that at that time existed, and that have been taken away now. They were a ladder towards success that I had in the '80s that kids today don't have. There was still a social commitment to seeing African Americans and other people of color at least have access to the campuses and the workforce—to at least get you in the door. So you think affirmative action programs are still relevant? I think they're more needed now than before, because in the past I think people were more willing to admit, "Okay, I might be racially biased," because society as a whole was kind of taking up the question. Now everybody wants to pretend that it's all over, that racism has been defeated, which it clearly hasn't been. I think now it's even more important that organizations look at their composition and say, we need to take affirmative steps. I think now, people are more comfortable saying, "Well, if there aren't any people of color here, it's because they're just not qualified."

So I got a minority scholarship to go to a state school about an hour from my parents' house. At the newspaper I learned a bunch about media, and became thoroughly disgusted with the mainstream media by the time I was a senior in collegeÉI was disgusted by the complicity of newspapers in keeping the unjust racial status quo in place.

What do you mean?

There were lots of good stories about African Americans and low-income people doing really beautiful things that weren't considered "news," that would be consigned to one feature story every four months. But anything negative that happened would be front-page, exaggerated. So I decided I wanted toÉmove more over into sticking up for little people directly. I thought that going to law school would help with that.

I had a professor who encouraged me to apply to Harvard and Yale [for law school], which was almost unheard of for students coming from the kind of public schools that I was coming from in the rural SouthÉI was accepted to both places, and decided to go to Yale because Yale didn't have any grades and was smaller than Harvard. I figured, once I enroll I'm guaranteed to graduate, so I can just go and be a radical hellraiser student, and they can't do anything about it. Which is pretty much what happened.

You were a radical.

Even as a student journalist, I was always pushing the envelope, challenging the administration. I had an underground newspaper on the campus that took over the official student newspaper. I also put out a statewide African American student newspaper.

Do either of those newspapers still exist?

The Third Eye, which is now a community newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee, has been around for about 15 years—I helped start that in the summer of 1990.

How did you come to be out in the Bay Area?

I didn't really know what going to law school wasÉI was really thinking I was going to 'justice' school, but law is more about laws and regulations. It seemed like more of the crap I was trying to get away from leaving journalism. I was a disgruntled student, always stirring up controversies. I had a friend who had worked for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights out in San Francisco, and I had a professor who thought it was a good idea [to go]. I took a semester off and came to the Bay Area. That happened to be spring semester, 1992, the spring the Rodney King uprising happened in Los Angeles. [ed.note: Four white L.A.P.D. police officers were caught on tape beating an unarmed black motorist, provoking mass demonstrations and arrests in LA and major U.S. cities].

I was working as a legal observer [in San Francisco during the demonstrations] and was arrested with a couple of hundred other peopleÉThey had us in these big warehouses, holding us for hours on end. I just happened to meet a bunch of young people of color who had also been opposed to the first Gulf War and didn't like police brutalityÉthis whole section of people in the Bay Area who were in their twenties and late teens—Arab kids, black and Latino and Asian, Native Americans and some white punk kids. I'd never seen anything like that before, so I was really inspired to finish law school and come back to the Bay Area.

So I came back, with dreadlocks and attitude. I was 24 years old, done with law school. I was still pretty disgusted with how little opportunity there was for other people. I was still committed to the agenda that had opened the doors for me. I worked at the Lawyers' Committee for a couple of yearsÉ but I wanted to focus on the toughest issues, police and prisons, and still mostly do. I got a fellowship and a little bit of money and incubated Bay Area PoliceWatch, a police misconduct lawyer referral service, a legal helpline for people who've had their rights violated.

What year was that?

1994. We went from getting a couple calls a week, to a couple dozen calls a day. It was too much weight on the host organization, the Lawyers' Committee. So we spun it off, created the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996.

What are some of the most exciting projects you're working on right now?

The Books Not Bars project is our flagship. PoliceWatch was always reactive—always responding to some police outrage. Books Not Bars is more proactive. The safest communities are not the communities that have the most police, the most prisons. The safest communities have the best jobs, the most opportunities for youth. We wanted to have a campaign that said this very directly: we keep spending all this money on police and prisons in certain neighborhoods, and there aren't even any books in the classrooms on the same blockÉBooks Not Bars speaks to that—opportunity over punishment as the main guarantor of a safe, healthy community.

I'm curious about how you approached young people to lead Let's Get Free and what that's been like. We used to go into public high schools and we would say to teachers, we'll talk to the kids for an hour about their rights and the U.S. Constitution and this sort of thing. And you come and do a workshop on "know your rights": If you're in the mall and the cop tells you to show your I.D., do you have to do it? Get them engaged in their own lives, get their attention. And then, the ones who seem particularly interested…you start working with them, get them to do their own workshops or a hip-hop talent show on 'schools not jails,' or Mumia Abu-Jamal or something like that.

Because the two things every kid knows how to do is write poetry and throw a party. And so we would make it political. What we've seen over and over again is that it's incredibly powerful: these young people who everyone sees as a problem, being the solution to all these social problems. They're fearless in talking about it, because they're the kids who are 35 to a classroom with six books and no scholarships.

What advice do you have for a hellraiser who's reading this right now?

Well, the reality is they probably know enough people to change anything they want to change. People act like it takes 4,000 people marching down the street to change something and it just doesn't. If you can name three or four caring adults and some peers who are also pissed off, you can get a lot done. Obviously, if you're trying to change U.S. Foreign Policy and you're in high school, you're likely to feel a little frustrated. The easiest thing for young people to do is find something they're passionate about and then set as a goal educating their peers about it. Maybe it's the environment or the war. Make a comic book about that and share it. Make a newsletter, set up a website about it.

If you're 14 years old and you're interested in big issuesÉfind out what groups you can join. Can you start a chapter of a pre-existing organization, like Greenpeace or Amnesty International, with three or four other people, even ten people? You can learn so much by doing that.