LeAlan Jones rushes onto the West Chatham Park practice football field and shoves his right outside linebacker: “Why are you waiting for him to come to you?” he demands, then shows the young man how it’s done, squatting into the stance of a linebacker like a velociraptor ready to spring.
Yet he’s a factor in the race, and a trouble spot for Giannoulias in particular. A Chicago Tribune/WGN poll this week showed Kirk leading Giannoulias 44 percent to 41 percent—with Jones getting 5 percent. Despite a lack of support from black leaders, Jones expects to get many of his votes from Chicago’s traditionally Democratic African-American neighborhoods. And he’s undeterred by the possibility that he might play a role in handing Obama’s old seat to the Republicans. “I don’t know how you ‘spoil’ a process that’s already rotten,” he says. “The Democratic Party is just as much a part of the problem in their policies as the Republicans.”
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The Greens so far have struggled to win over blacks. In the 2006 election, Green gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney took more than 10 percent of the vote statewide, legally establishing the party and making it easier for Greens to get on the ballot in the next two elections. But in seven predominately black wards in Chicago, he failed to win even 2 percent. The party didn’t put up any African-American candidates in Illinois in 2006 or 2008, but worked hard to recruit some for this election: Jones is one of seven. “While it’s true we’re making inroads into the African-American community we haven’t before, a lot of African-American thought is impacting what we think as Green, everywhere,” says Phil Huckelberry, the Illinois Green Party chairman. He says Greens want better funding for education and social services, for instance, and see urban food deserts as an economic problem to solve.
Jones grew up on the south side, a block from the Ida B. Wells housing project. He never knew his father. His mother gave up custody, and Jones was raised by his grandparents. “I figured he’d go into politics, he liked to talk,” his mother, June Jones, says. When he was 13, he was working as a junior spokesman for the No Dope Express Foundation, a youth education group, when he attracted the attention of public radio producer Dave Isay.
The setting for Jones’s two famous documentaries, the Ida B. Wells project at 39th and King, is all but gone now, razed as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation, under which most of Chicago’s notorious housing projects have been demolished. Some of the residents were resettled in new mixed-income developments near their former homes, but many have been scattered across the metro area, breaking up extended families and communities. To Jones, the Plan for Transformation is a clear example of Democrats exploiting African-Americans. He says it’s benefited politicians, banks, developers, and real estate agents. “The only people who didn’t profit,” he says, “were the residents of public housing.”
Jones has encountered that viewpoint frequently, and it’s wearing on him. “If I can’t win a race where you have two people who have such a lack of character, and I can’t get support from the African-American community . . .” His sentence goes unfinished.
