LeAlan Marvin Jones (born 1979) is an American journalist and the Green Party's 2010 nominee for United States Senate from Illinois. Jones lives in Chicago's Englewood community where he is the legal guardian for his nephew and the linebackers coach for the Simeon Career Academy football team.
Jones' radio documentaries have received critical acclaim and numerous awards. If elected, Jones would be the fourth African-American to occupy the Senate seat held by Roland Burris, Carol Moseley-Braun and Barack Obama.
Early life
Jones grew up in the South Side of Chicago, a block from the Ida B. Wells housing project. He was raised by his grandparents, Gus and June Jones, in the same house his family has lived in since the 1930s. Jones has never met his father. He was a junior spokesperson for the No Dope Express Foundation, a youth education and anti-drug organization.
At the age of 13, Jones and his friend Lloyd Newman created a radio documentary for National Public Radio entitled Ghetto Life 101. Jones was contacted by David A. Isay, who was producing a piece on poverty for Chicago Public Radio. The documentary illustrated life in the South Side of Chicago in 1993. The recordings made by the duo centered around interviews with the boys' families, friends, and members of the community.
The broadcast was well received, and praised for its raw portrayal of life in the projects in Chicago. It won several awards, including the Sigma Delta Chi Award, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Awards for Excellence in Documentary Radio and Special Achievement in Radio Programming.
Jones and Newman made a second documentary in 1994, The 14 Stories of Eric Morse, which explored the backgrounds of the people involved with Eric Morse, a five-year-old boy who was tragically thrown from a fourteenth-story window in the Chicago projects by two older boys. The documentary premiered on NPR's All Things Considered in 1996. It won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Peabody Award.
The two documentaries and further footage from when Jones and Newman were nearing high school graduation were condensed into a book published in 1997 entitled Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago.
Jones graduated from Chicago's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. College Preparatory High School in 1997. He studied criminology at Florida State University before transferring to Barat College in Lake Forest where he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. He received a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies with a minor in Social Science.
Senate campaign
At the height of the Rod Blagojevich scandal, Jones made the decision to run for United States Senate. In 2009, he announced his candidacy in the 2010 election for the seat currently held by Roland Burris. Burris, who was appointed by Governor Blagojevich to fill the seat vacated by Barack Obama following Obama's election as President of the United States, has chosen not to seek election.
Jones ran unopposed in the Green Party primary and gained the nomination. He is running against Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias in the general election scheduled for November 2010.
An early May poll saw Jones taking 5% of the vote. Following the controversy over Mark Kirk embellishing his military record, Jones saw a spike in his poll numbers.[10] A June survey made by Public Policy Polling saw Jones picking up 14% of the vote,[11] behind Mark Kirk's 30% and Alexi Giannoulias with 31%.
Political views
Jones has called for the immediate ratification of UNICEF's Convention on the Rights of the Child, a ban on land mines and complete nuclear disarmament. He supports troop withdrawal from, and ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He has been critical of credit default swaps, derivatives trading and the financial industry as a whole, saying "a bunch of guys on Wall Street have done more to devastate the white community than any black man ever could."[15] He is in favor of the decriminalization and taxation of marijuana and the creation of cooperatives and credit unions as measures to bolster the economy.
Bibliography
Ghetto Life 101. 1993. National Public Radio.
Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse. 1996. National Public Radio.
Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (with co-authors Lloyd Newman, David Isay and John Anthony Brooks) Simon and Schuster. 1998.
Out of the Ghetto. 2008. BBC World Service.
No comments:
Post a Comment