Black Nationalist to Amazon Prime Guy: the Journey of Jimmy Jones in America and Islam
“How do you want to be buried?”
Dr. James Jones asked his son this question six months before the night Malik Jones, his only son, was shot and killed by a police officer. Malik had spent time in and out of jail.
“He got caught up in the inner city. That’s just the truth.” Dr. Jones had put it to his son straight: “If you keep doing the things you’re doing, you’re going to end up dead or doing a long-stretch in jail.” On one night in 1997, Malik Jones refused to be pulled over.
“I think the police shouldn’t have chased him…I don’t think the police should have shot him six or seven times.”
When we sat down in the bright and mostly empty café of the Yale bookstore, Dr. Jones kept his coat on. We didn’t order anything or speak to anyone else. He wore a long shirt with a rounded, eastern collar that is characteristic of Muslims. The top button was missing. Dr. Jones tells me, “I live in the inner city by choice.” He refuses to leave. Only a minority of inner city residents sell drugs. Only a minority of inner city residents gangbang. Only a minority of inner city residents steal. Only a minority of people make the inner city look bad. The majority of folks get up every morning and go to work. Unfortunately, Malik Jones got caught up with the misbehaved minority.
Dr. Jones named Malik after Malcolm X, who changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz shortly before his death. In the summer between Dr. Jones’ junior and senior years at Hampton University, he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It engendered within him an awakening about race relations. By his senior year, Dr. Jones became “sort of a black nationalist.” In 1968 his racial paradigm changed because of the events surrounding the Democratic Convention and the Vietnam War.
“I watched the Chicago police department bash in the heads of white kids and I said, ‘Now this stuff is deep.’ They’re beating their own kids.”
After graduation, Dr. Jones went to Yale Law School. Smiling, he says, “I was going to change the world by going to law school, going to Congress.” At Yale, “I figured out . . . I could be the best criminal justice lawyer in the world, and get off all of my clients, and still not make a dent in the criminal justice system.” The racist system would remain racist.
Moreover, Dr. Jones, a tenured associate professor of world religions and African studies at Manhattanville College, claims Thomas Jefferson “believed that blacks were human beings but he had this sneaky suspicion that they’re weren’t equal to whites.” As Jones puts it, “The South made it clear that they didn’t like you because you were black…in the North they would pretend.”
In New Haven the Black Panther Party invited Dr. Jones to join its ranks. But he refused: “They were smoking too much marijuana. I said if I’m going to do the revolution I’m going to do it clear-headed.” Dr. Jones did not find New Haven that different from Virginia.
When Dr. Jones enrolled at Yale Law School, the draft rules exempted him from eligibility because he was pursuing a graduate degree. Sometime during his legal education the rules changed and he became eligible to be drafted. At the time a lot of folks felt dissatisfied with the Vietnam War. African-Americans were disproportionately on the front lines, and his community especially opposed the conflict. Malcolm X and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against it. Consequently, Dr. Jones decided to take a year off and work for an agency supporting the public good, which would exempt him from draft eligibility. He joined an agency combatting substance abuse. And he never returned to Yale Law School.
“When I compare my life to my father’s, I’ve done materially and professionally much more than I think he could have ever imagined,” says Dr. Jones. “He was a janitor. He worked 6 days a week. That was hard work. It wasn’t easy like my job.” Dr. Jones continues, “I make more money than my father ever thought about making, as a college professor, just for talking. I’m relatively successful living the so-called American dream.”
James, or Jimmy, Jones grew up in Roanoke, Virginia. His father lived in Baltimore, while James lived with cousins. Up until he attended Yale Law School, Jimmy Jones attended segregated schools. “From Harrison Elementary School, to Booker T. Washington Junior High School, to Lucy Addison High School — ” each was legally segregated from 1952–1964. Dr. Jones may have got second-hand books, but he did not get a second-hand education. He says, “I can remember doing book reports on Shakespeare in the 5th grade.” According to Dr. Jones, “the teachers were determined that we were going to learn in spite of being seen as second class citizens.” And ever since he was a kid, Jimmy Jones has been a bibliophile. “I tried to read all the books in the Gainesboro Public Library.” Dr. Jones describes it as a segregated public library about four times the size of the seating area in the café. With the advent of Amazon, he gets a book a week. Grinning through his grey beard, Jones says, “I’m an Amazon Prime guy” and “I’m in heaven.”
In the middle of our interview, Dr. Jones’s cell phone goes off: the Arabic adhan, or call to prayer, plays out of its speaker. Jones grew up in the black Baptist Church, which is what he describes as “the kind of milieu Martin Luther King was raised in except that my family was not middle class like his.” The church nurtured Jimmy Jones’s faith in God. Describing his experience as a Southern Baptist, Dr. Jones softly sings, “Jesus loves me, this I know/ For the Bible tells me so.” He believes that in retrospect the theology was wrong, but he gained his faith nevertheless.
“When I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X I started looking into Islam and it took me several years before I left simply because I loved the black church.” Jones read every book about the topic that he could find. “The book that really turned me around was the Qur’an,” he declares. “There was a social justice model” and “a model about race” that made sense to James Jones. But “I wanted to give the black church another chance,” he says. “The whole idea that Jesus was God…that was a problem,” as was that “people would get in the pulpit and say things that weren’t in the Bible.” Eventually in 1979 he professed his shahada, or testimony declaring belief in Islam, in the community of Imam Warith Deen Mohammed. After that community, a derivative of the Nation of Islam, left the inner city, Dr. Jones joined Masjid al-Islam in New Haven. He likes that Masjid al-Islam is multicultural and that it is open for the five daily prayers, which he understands are essential.
I first became familiar with Dr. Jones because he led prayers and delivered a guest sermon to the Muslim community at Yale. He preached, in the soft but piercing voice of a lawyer, about racial problems and potential changes students can create. Currently he is Secretary of the National Board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. As he puts it, “I was sort of dragged on the board, because I know being on boards is a lot of work.” He’s also President of the Islamic Seminary Foundation and a member of the board of the Muslim Endorsement Council of Connecticut. “I’m trying to cut back,” he claims.
“At this stage of my life I’m not particularly interested in owning or running anything, I’m more interested in helping start something,” Dr. Jones says. He’s been a college professor for 24 years and he loves teaching. He wants to see an American institution that produces professionals in the field of Islam. A few years ago Dr. Jones “ran into a group of Muslims raising money to give to a Christian seminary to train Muslim chaplains,” and he told them: “Really?” In the past, Muslims spent much time in the minority wherever they were. Nevertheless, they could be paragons of virtue. “What we need to do as a people is regain the moral high ground,” declares Dr. Jones. “We change our priority — we change the world.”
“I have no regrets,” and “I hope it’s because I’m not too attached to the dunya (this world). It’s not all that.” Dr. Jones’s proudest accomplish is bringing his family together. “Two of my brothers became Muslim, and we helped organize a family reunion that’s been going on for 22 years. The Muslims tend to be the bridge-builders,” he says. He ends, “What I’d most like to see is my grandchildren be good, strong practicing Muslims.” Dr. Jones asked me to pray for them.
