Color Lines - Professor D. Marvin Jones Studies Issues Of Race

D. Marvin Jones remembers the East Baltimore of his youth like it was yesterday. He grew up in the era of segregation and remembers separate water fountains marked “colored” and “white” and how blacks had to ride in the back of city buses.

As a boy, he would go to the theaters in the white section of town in hopes of seeing the science fiction movies that didn’t show in his neighborhood. But the theater attendants would always turn him away.

He worked as a bus boy in a restaurant called the White Coffee Pot and remembers vividly how a black woman, upset that she wasn’t allowed to eat inside the establishment, hurled a sandwich at the cook and stormed out.

But through it all, Jones never felt helpless. He knew that the law could be a powerful instrument of social change. So he went to law school and eventually became an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), winning several important discrimination lawsuits.

Today, as a professor in the University of Miami School of Law, Jones is still a leader in the fight against racial inequality and social injustice. His new book, Race, Sex, and Suspicion: The Myth of the Black Male (Praeger Publishers), examines both the legal equality black men have achieved through the victories of the civil rights movement and their social and economic isolation of today. And he recently organized a conference at the law school in which a nationally renowned panel of legal experts discussed issues such as race and gender in the criminal justice system and racial profiling.

Discrimination and segregation, Jones says, are still alive today, though they have taken different forms than in the past. “Many people are blissfully unaware of how significant the problems are that remain. They think that discrimination has stopped, that it’s something that went away. But it’s still here. It’s much more covert, much more subtle, but it remains,” Jones says, citing examples in which minorities pay more for housing and car loans and are rejected more often than whites on loan applications.

“There is nothing more important in a democracy than the issue of how we deal with people who are different,” Jones says, “and in recent years, issues of difference have come to the forefront.” Black victims in search of food and supplies after Hurricane Katrina, he notes, were often labeled as looters in the news media, while their white counterparts were praised for their resourcefulness.

He believes that critical race theory—a legal movement in which historians, sociologists, and philosophers join lawyers in examining problems of race, ethnicity, and equal rights—should be more widely practiced.

Jones says it is vital that today’s lawyers have an understanding of issues of race because they often represent clients of different ethnicities, a fact with which he is all too familiar. As a young attorney for the EEOC during the 1970s, Jones once represented a group of black plaintiffs in their discrimination lawsuit against a popular Charlotte, North Carolina, eatery. For decades, Anderson’s Restaurant had a perfectly segregated workforce; blacks washed the dishes, swept the floors, and served as porters but Jones won the case, showing a pattern of racial discrimination in hiring practices at Anderson’s, and the court ordered the restaurant to make changes in its hiring policies. For Jones, the victory was one of three winning cases he would try that year, his last with the EEOC. He would later go into private practice.

“It was a test in the Deep South challenging segregation, something that was so well entrenched,” Jones says. “We were villains in the eyes of many people for bringing these unpopular cases and going after popular institutions like Anderson’s. But we had to be able to deal with the fact that what we were doing was unpopular and was not going to be well understood by many people.”

Lawyers of today face a similar challenge, one of being “architects of transformation,” says Jones. “This generation of lawyers has to take us through a transition in which America is becoming increasingly diverse and where there are new challenges to civil rights.”

Says Jones, “The reality is that we’ve made tremendous progress in society. This University, which has distinguished itself in terms of its efforts to attract well-qualified minorities and a highly diverse student body, is a testament to the progress we have made. But as a whole, our society still has many promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep.”