Up From Poverty

I've now woken up to the fact that I've spent virtually my entire adult life working on issues around urban poverty, and in some ways it has been a family profession, just like plumbing. My grandfather, Thomas S. Jones, came as a highly educated immigrant (a school master) to this country from Barbados around 1905. Because of the color line in New York, he couldn't even get a job as an elevator operator because he was too dark, but he managed to get himself educated as a podiatrist, recognizing that the Black community of his day desperately needed that service and couldn't get served by white doctors.

But his real love was as a pamphleteer. I always remember being somewhat embarrassed walking with Dad down Hancock Street in Bedford Stuyvesant as he insisted on handing out his "Footnotes" newsletter to everyone we walked past. The pamphlet was much like a blog; it was filled with calls for voter registration, health tips, Black history - particularly about the Black members of Congress during reconstruction - news on lynching and police brutality, and continual calls for more education and better schools.

But my father, Thomas R. Jones, was the one I was always trying to emulate. He grew up in Brooklyn, was an activist even as a teenager, became one of the few Black lawyers of his day, and was drafted a year earlier than anyone else because of his activism in organizing youth. Drafted as a private, he rose to the rank of First Lieutenant by the end of WWII. He came home and ran with Henry Wallace as a citywide candidate for judge (he lost). Ultimately he became one of the deans of Black politics in Brooklyn, founding a political club which elected him as Assemblyman and Shirley Chisholm to Congress and broke the back of the machine which had controlled Black Brooklyn for decades.

He left the Assembly and became a Judge and had a well known confrontation with Senator Robert Kennedy when he bitterly complained to the Senator of repeated visits by state and national figures to Bed-Stuy, with no outcome other than photo ops. This led to work with the Senator right up to his death in creating Bed-Stuy Restoration, which in Kennedy's and my father's vision would be the prototype for rebuilding Inner City neighborhoods across America.

I remember as a boy meeting a steady stream of unique people who came to argue about everything from Black Nationalism, to McCarthyism, police brutality, the arts. I met Eleanor Roosevelt, Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Robeson, Paul O'Dwyer, the artist Jake Lawrence who left paintings at the house on Dean Street when he couldn't pay his legal bills, and now is prominently displayed at MOMA. Everyone seemed to pass through our kitchen on Dean Street.

So from very early on I began to take up my father's and grandfather's professions. I helped register voters in the Breevort Houses when I was 10. I use to go to doors with an adult in tow and say that if I was old enough I would want to vote, and ask if they were registered. I ran the duplicating department for my father's campaigns, and was taken out of school to go with him to Albany.

I went to Wesleyan University , interned for Senator Kennedy the summer before he was killed (along with Bob Reich, the former Labor Secretary), went on to Yale Law School and then clerked ( I wasn't a very good clerk) for Constance Baker Motley. And then I temporarily went "off track."

I ended up being recruited by a "white shoe" law firm, Cravath Swaine and Moore. Instead of urban poverty, I focused on being a very junior associate working on cases for Shell Oil and Time Inc and IBM. And I liked doing it. The pay was great, the work challenging, the excitement of doing work as part of the mainstream elite was seductive, and leaving behind the less glamorous work of advocating for poor people didn't seem such a bad idea.

But then in 1976, because of my work in Kennedy's office in Washington and my father's widely recognized work, I was recruited by Bill vanden Heuvel to work as a New York City deputy campaign manager in the Jimmy Carter run for the White House. I took a six month leave of absence and in some ways never fully came back to the law. When I got back to Cravath, one of the partners took me aside and said that my leave indicated that I wasn't really committed to the firm. He was right.

After 23 years leading CSS, I find that the issues that I work on are almost precisely the same as those my father and grandfather were confronting: inferior education, poor housing, racial intolerance, substandard health care, police brutality, and - perhaps more frightening - a growing body of urban poor who, with the loss of manufacturing jobs and few skills, may have worse outlooks then were available in Black Brooklyn of the 1950's and '60s. The emergence of the hugely successful Black middle class did not lift all boats.

CSS has been on the front lines of urban poverty for 164 years and some of its innovations have stood the test of time. It created the Columbia School of Social Work, founded the Hospital for Special Surgery, established the first free school lunch program, free public baths, and the list goes on. It survives because each generation requires new approaches to chronic income inequality and racial prejudice. http://www.cssny.org/advocacy/

In the weeks to come, I'd like to provide some insight in the things we're struggling with, particularly in efforts to help the working poor of New York, and to seek your comments about what you agree and disagree with me about, as well as other ways to look at a city with nearly one-third of its residents who are poor or near poor.

Comments

[debrajean]

I am inpsired by your story. Recognizing that each generation requires new approaches for new times enables CSSNY to continue its good works. I look forward to reading the blog and participating in the discussion.

[HBrooklyn]

From Barbados to Bed Stuy. What a family.You have a remarkable history. How refreshing to have someone with your substance and lens on the Huff P. Brooklyn's in the house!!! Talk about the NYC that does not make it to House and Garden mags or to the US Open.