Jones leaves ghetto for FSU
By Amy Welch
Managing Editor, Florida State Times
For many students, college means passing exams, eating
a full meal once in a while and staking out the cheapest bars in town. For
LeAlan Jones, just being on FSU's campus this fall will mean survival, and
more.
Jones, right,
interviewing the Chicago Housing Authority Chairman Vincent Lane, left,
during a tour of a building in the Ida B. Wells complex.
Jones is arranging to leave his home in the crime-ridden south side of Chicago, where making it home from school was a tribute to being alive.
His ticket to escape has been his determination to write about the life he knows best: pervasive drug use throughout his neighborhood, killings and hopelessness.
As a result, Jones has become a published writer and a focus of national media attention.
"This is only the beginning," he said.
Jones' playground as a child was over Lake Shore Boulevard, where he and his best friend, Lloyd Newman, would throw rocks at windshields of cars.
Occasionally, when the boys had money, they would celebrate by taking the city bus "to the end of the line," just to get out of the Ida B. Wells ghetto district, one of the nation's most dangerous neighborhoods.
But, in 1993, Jones and Newman, then 13 and 14, found different games. Jones started speaking out at No Dope Express, a program designed to keep kids off drugs. That's where David Isay, a National Public Radio producer, discovered the two teens and asked them to record their lives.
For Isay, it was an experiment: If you offer a chance to be responsible to kids who don't think they have a future, will they make a better life for themselves?
The answer, in this case, is "yes."
Jones' and Newman's documentary, "Ghetto Life 101," won awards and led to another documentary and a book, which received this year's Peabody and Robert Francis Kennedy awards, two of the most distinguished in broadcasting and journalism.
Jones appeared on the CBS news show "60 Minutes" and said that by going to FSU, he's trading gunshots for an education.
FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte and his wife, Patsy Palmer, believe Jones supports Isay's theory.
"He's such an extraordinary young man," Palmer said. "He's already a strong journalist, and he has a strong and important voice."
Getting to this point in Jones's life has been extremely difficult. He has never met his father, and his mother is mentally ill.
Jones said his grandparents, Gus and June Jones, taught him and his two siblings that there is more to life than vacant fields where people are shot every day, drug addicts and murders of children. Jones said he will not feel that he has survived until he's on a plane to Tallahassee. But he is much closer than Newman to getting out of a neighborhood where he regularly hears that another friend, relative or acquaintance has been shot or killed.
For Newman, life was different. His mother died from cirrhosis of the liver. His father, Chill, is an alcoholic, so his two sisters, Precious and Sophia, are rearing him. Among the tributes that the two have received is the Peabody award for "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse." The radio documentary was based on the death of Eric Morse, a 5-year-old boy, who was first dangled and then dropped out of a 14th-story window in 1994, near the two-story faded red house where Jones grew up.
Jones said he and Newman wanted to do the story because the local media "didn't get in-depth in their story," and he and Newman knew the ones accused of killing Morse.
The youths interviewed Morse's mother and the father of one of the accused, interviews that not even The Chicago Tribune had.
After their first documentary, they followed with another for NPR, at Isay's request.
Jones and Newman wrote a book, "Our America - Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago," published by Simon and Schuster. Recently, Tom Brokaw of NBC sent the two a note: "Someday you'll have my job."
The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, CNN and others have reported the impressive accomplishments of Jones and Newman. But the two still experience stereotypes of black youths from the ghetto.
"People are solely convinced that I'm in their store to shoplift," Jones said. "I get harassed a lot by police. You know, the usual stuff."
D'Alemberte and Palmer have not stereotyped Jones. They saw an honor student and the captain of the football team. They saw a teen-ager with a promising future.
Although many colleges and universities have tried to recruit Jones, he applied only to FSU, a place that is not too urban and not too rural, but a mixture of both, Jones said.
"I wanted a change of scenery," he said. "I didn't want to go to a city college. I wanted less buildings and more grass and trees."
Through financial aid Jones will enter FSU this fall, and he plans to major in criminology or linguistics. He would also like to be a walk-on player for FSU's football team. But, for the moment, he's concentrating on his book tour.
He continues to speak to kids about survival in the ghetto.
Through the lectures, Jones said, he wants to send a message across the country that kids without his advantages can survive, too.
"In this community people are getting shot, people are getting killed, and you come to expect death," Jones said. "You come to expect failure. But you can be great, and I'm here to show you that."
Send a letter to the Editor: fstimes@unicomm.fsu.edu
Copyright © 1997 Florida State Times