Providence — News of another family member shot dead broke while Corey Jones was describing to a reporter what led him, in April 2020, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa to a friend's couch in Rhode Island and at one point a political adviser to the Governor. Dan McKeehis staff.
In his new town, Jones spends his nights knocking on doors as a candidate for Providence City Council. He also had a harpoon in a recent tweet posted by a friend of his in the Black Lives Matter movement.
It said, “We're coming for you political elite of Rhode Island!” (More on how he felt about that later.)
As he talked about the events that led him here, Facebook posts from family members cast his thoughts back to the life he left behind in the Midwest.
“I got word that a cousin of his in Chicago was killed,” Jones told the Journal reporter who was chatting with him that August afternoon.
Of The 19-year-old cousin, Keon “Fred” Binion, was not the first friend or relative killed by a gun. There were four others.
After a series of shootings in Providence a few months ago, Jones tweeted: “This recent violence in our city reignites the trauma. I am [at a] at a loss for words, and I'm hurt, and our city is hurting.”
“What time is the protest against gang violence tonight?” tweeted conservative radio talk show host John DePetro.
Jones responded: “We must organize and mobilize against all violence. [But] Protest alone won't do it.”
Jones, 24, hopes to win over skeptics from all sides of the political divide — including some of his progressive colleagues, who believe “police defunding” is an answer.
He has other ideas, based, he said, on predictive analysis of human behavior — data — and a belief in the kind of immediate intervention by a white police officer that kept him out of the system as a child in Iowa.
And he has an ally he met at a rally in East Providence: McKee, who was then lieutenant governor.
The family leaves the chaos of Chicago
As Jones tells it, his story begins in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Chicago after his father got out of prison and tried to leave the gang life behind.
“At times we would have to lay on our stomachs because, during the shooting, a bullet would just fly through the building.”
The ransacking of his family's apartment while he and his siblings were at home in their beds led the entire family to pack up and move out the next day – 11 of them, including aunts and uncles.
They landed first in Indiana and then in Anamosa, Iowa.
“We were the first Black family in Anamosa. My first friend came up to me and said, 'I don't have a problem with the color of your skin. My dad says black people are hilarious.” … My brother's first friend said, “I don't like black people, but I love your family.”
“My mom said, 'Wait, Cody. How many black people have you met?” He says, “Well, I guess you're the first.” He said, “Maybe your portrayal of Black people should be based on the first Black people you've met.”
“I guess you're right,” his new friend recalls him saying.
Jones' mother, a pharmacy technician who sometimes worked two or three jobs, is a recurring voice in his memories.
At one point, he drew attention on Twitter to a “Dear Black Boy” letter that his mother, Marna Coleman-Jones, said she wrote and uploaded to her blog.
Starting with a look back at during the era of slavery, he wrote: “They built a force [judicial system] that would trap you and hold you back. They wanted to keep you in a mental and physical prison.”
Part of her advice: “Not all white people are racist…Many white people are our allies in this dark struggle for justice.”
Her advice to a young Corey when he was taunted with the N-word: “You have to rise above these people… You have to rise to positions of power because they can't look down on you when they look up.”
Hairstyles and attitudes
Jones was a teenager when he started growing out his dreadlocks in 2012.
“At the time, it was really big in rap culture,” he explains… and for me, it was about getting more in touch with my roots.”
“I didn't understand why I had to leave the family [behind in Chicago]. … I didn't understand why I had to leave my friends, and so my rap and hair felt like I was closer to Chicago. I felt like I was still home when I looked in the mirror.”
And now?
“I'm working hard on it.”
“I have to sit down, I have to twist it. I have to take care of it. Sometimes it itches and I couldn't scratch it.”
“The beginning is the hardest, but once it locks in then you can do whatever you want with it. I can go swimming. I can wash it every day… [and] each piece of the length reminds me of a different moment in my life. A different race.
“As they grow, it shows me my discipline, my tolerance.”
Leaning to the left, turning to politics
As a 19-year-old, Jones turned to politics.
He did some work for the Iowa Democratic Party, “started organizing for Bernie in a small town that was very Republican,” and finally went to the 2016 national convention as a “Bernie Sanders for President” delegate:
He was, he says, “Iowa's youngest black national representative in history.”
When he graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 2020, he says, he didn't see a welcome sign for young black progressives in the Iowa Democratic Party. He needed work. He applied for about four dozen around the country.
Then “COVID happened” and jobs were canceled.
Miguel Sancheza Rhode Islander he had met and befriended in college piqued Jones' interest in Providence with online photos of India Point Park and the beach and said, “Come here. You can crash on my couch . . . What are you looking for?
“I said, 'Diversity.' He said, “Come here and stay a while with me.”
She moved in with Miguel, who is running for a different seat on the Providence City Council, and his brother Enrique Sanchez.
The day he came out of his 14-day quarantine, Jones said, he met Brother Gary Danzler, the founder of Black Lives Matter Rhode Island. He went to a protest that night and was soon participating in demonstrations almost every night.
A woman named Joyce Wise “He came to me at [one] we're protesting… and he said, “I love that we're protesting every day, but how do we turn that into real systemic change? How do we turn this into policy change?'
“I told her we should start a Black PAC [political action committee]. If we don't put the money in the hands of progressive candidates, then they won't be able to do anything.”
Out of this discussion came the BLM RI PAC that Jones, Wise and Joshua Franco was created. It has raised $41,498 and spent $40,148 since July 2020, according to a June 30 filing.
An unexpected ear, an opening
Jones no longer clearly remembers all the details of the East Providence protest, but “lo and behold, the lieutenant commander was there. … [He] talk about working with us.. [asked]what do we want from the East Providence police?”
“We had asked the East Providence police: what are you doing to engage the community… They told us they had to stop all their engagement because of COVID… and our response was: everyone else still has to come to work … It's time for you all to adapt and we can be a part of that.”
“Afterward [McKee] he said, “I'll be happy to help you all, facilitate any kind of meeting.”
“We've probably had about seven meetings since that meeting … talking about a lot of things, from education to policing and equality across the board.”
And “McKee had said to me, 'If we have an opportunity to go to the next level, I want you to come and bring to the table these issues that we've been talking about.'
Ground floor, new management
In March, when Gov. Gina Raimondo left for a job in Washington and McKee took her place, Jones was one of his first hires.
On his website, Jones describes his $58,000 role on McKee's transition team as follows: “I advocated for the fair legalization of cannabis, more funding for education, and exploring innovative ways to handle our underserved teachers of color.”
And more.
Asked one recent evening if he thought he had made a difference, he said: “My job is not to talk him into anything or convince him of anything … but to find the facts and present the facts to him.”
“I do a lot of research, fact-finding [and] meeting with lawyers”.
“I wouldn't say that things wouldn't have happened … without me being there, but I think the harm reduction centers [are] a huge win for progressives,” he said of the new law McKee signed to reduce the chance of illegal drug users dying of overdoses by allowing them to shoot up in monitored environments.
“Government body cameras were a [also] huge win. … The relationship with the Non-Violence Institute, the funding we were able to give them.”
Jones doesn't personally believe in any of these actions, but he's sure his voice was heard.
Jones, meanwhile, has raised $8,289 so far for his bid for the City Council seat that Nirva LaFortune expected to resign to run for mayor: 85% of out-of-state donors, he says, came through national progressive networks.
About this “elite” tweet.
“We're coming for you political elite of Rhode Island!”
The tweet was posted on July 15 from his friend Enrique Sanchez, the political director of the BLM RI PAC.
The words appear with a photo of the two Sanchez brothers, Sen. Sam BellRep. David Morales and Jones on the patio outside Riffraff Bookstore during a Morales fundraiser.
Given extraordinary freedom — for any assistant governor — to speak his mind on social media, Jones has occasionally blasted police, chided lawmakers for not repealing the Rhode Island Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights and applauded the new state law allowing drug users to shoot up at safe injection sites.
“For the blunt, who are the 'elite'?” asked a Twitter user who goes by the name “Tweeting Butler.”
Sanchez responded: “Politicians who vote against the interests of regular working class RI families.”
“Those words don't represent my feelings,” Jones said. “I will be running for an open seat. I work for the governor.”
“Enrique probably meant this with his whole heart. He probably comes for the political elites. … [But] I think very realistic. … I think the political elite should make openings for people like me, like Governor McKee did.”
How long does he plan to stay in Rhode Island?
“Forever,” he says.
He and his partner, Abby McDonough, who followed him here, chase home.
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