Carnell Jones Jr.
Adjunct Faculty Member, Africana Studies Program
In teaching his Black Lives Matter course, Carnell Jones Jr. includes stories and artifacts from his own history with racial violence and hate crimes, demonstrating to students that what is public is also personal, and that there is a place for everyone in the pursuit of social justice.
Novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist James Baldwin famously said, “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
Carnell Jones Jr., URI’s director of enrollment services and adjunct faculty member for URI’s Africana Studies Program, understands wholly what Baldwin describes. Time and again, he has observed the students in his Black Lives Matter course transform from neophytes to activists in the space of mere months.
His Black Lives Matters course is always full. Students routinely arrive to class early and afterward trail him to the parking lot with lingering questions and comments on the day’s lesson. Jones has watched his students engage in televised peaceful protests, and he’s had letters from parents moved at how their children have taken classroom discussion to the dining room table.
In June, media outlets Forbes and The New York Times noted that students, many still in their teens, have made significant contributions to the Black Lives Matter movement, organizing protests, raising awareness on social media, and donating money to activist organizations. Today’s youth are informed, engaged, and ready to act, says Jones. “I’m seeing my students out there actively protesting, passionately speaking, taking up the movement, and carrying it forward.”
Jones has taught his Black Lives Matter course since 2015, one of the first of its kind in New England. The readings change each semester to keep abreast of current events and include other groups’ trials in the battle for civil rights. This fall’s syllabus includes readings and discussion about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ employees from discrimination based on sex, as well as the court’s decision to block the revocation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, popularly known as DACA, which has protected from deportation some 700,000 individuals brought to this country as children.
‘I’m talking about wailing crying’
Another teaching tool: Jones’ own painful personal history with racism and violence. In 1986, a then-14-year-old Jones attended the funeral of his 19-year-old uncle, Kelvin Thompson, murdered in a drive-by shooting by two white men, who shot him with a .22-caliber pistol while Thompson was riding a bicycle on the Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans.
Jones shares with his students court papers and articles about the case, among them an appeal made by one of the two men convicted in the crime. In “State v. Messick,” the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal of Louisiana rejected convicted murderer Emmett Messick’s appeal. Messick, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the murder of Thompson, argued in his appeal that it was the other murderer, Harold Allen, who actually shot Jones’s uncle. Allen had already passed away in prison. Added injury: The warden of the prison in which Messick was incarcerated supported his petition, not only writing a letter on his behalf but also showing up at court. “When does a warden get involved in an appeal?” Jones says.
“What the appeal doesn’t talk about, what my father said, is that when they found my uncle, the look on his face was one of shock. Because when you’re hit like that, it captures your last expression,” Jones says.
“And that was the first funeral I went to as a young, Black man—seeing my uncle in a casket due to being killed at the hands of just cold-blooded murderers.”
What Jones needs no documentation to remember is the effect his uncle’s death had on his family.
“To go to that funeral, to see my uncle in a casket, was life-changing for me because that was the first time I saw real pain,” Jones recalls. “I had never seen my grandmother cry. I’d never seen my 17 uncles and aunts cry. I’d never seen my father cry. I’m talking about wailing crying.
“My mother was traumatized. She felt she had to do everything in her power to protect her three sons,” Jones says. “Everything” meant virtual home confinement for Jones and his brothers when they weren’t at school or engaged in sports. “My mom would tell me that when interacting with the police or folks outside of my comfort zone, to swallow my pride.”
“‘I just want you to come back home,’ she would say.”
While Jones the teenager chafed at the curtailment of his freedom, Jones the father still finds himself saying much the same thing to his own sons, now grown, when they head out the door.
“I tell them, ‘I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to go through what my father went through,’” Jones says. “So it just gets passed on.”
A generation willing to take a risk
Jones sees the intersection of two historic events, the Black Lives Matter movement and COVID-19, spurring society to rail against racial injustice in numbers not seen since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. “The pandemic has forced the world to be on pause, and people are seeing events happening, and saying, ‘This is wrong,’” Jones says. “This is why you see people flooding the streets.
“This is a movement,” he says, “not a moment.”
What is encouraging is that Black Lives Matter protests are attracting a broader demographic than what was in evidence in the 1960s. Then, some citizens who might have protested, couldn’t, because such a public action would have surely meant a sacrifice too great to bear,” Jones says.
“During the 1960s, if you protested, you would sacrifice something. You could lose a job, a scholarship. You pretty much had to participate in silence,” Jones says. “This generation questions everything. They push back. They’re not concerned about sacrifice.
“They’ll take the risk.” •
—Marybeth Reilly-McGreen
Photo: Brandon Fuller