And not just for its likely impact on people of color. He believed in high moral standards, which also seem out of style in Trump’s Washington. A column Jones wrote in 1993 charged that “the rule of law is not respected by the vast majority of Americans because it has no meaning in daily life. Why shouldn’t an individual run a red light if there are no cars coming? What’s wrong with smoking pot or drinking to drunkenness? Why not defraud customers if you can get away with it? The answer — that when we violate the rule of law we compound the injustice of society and embrace our own destruction — is widely ignored.”
“The world in which we live,” Jones wrote, “will never be safe until we relinquish these contradictions and unashamedly embrace goodness as the standard by which we live.”
That may not seem like an especially debatable sentiment. His critics, of whom there were always a few and sometimes more than a few, found plenty of other assertions to debate and denounce. Among his other talents, Jones was an accomplished playwright, and he sometimes wrote in the voice of an invented character. Most often he turned his column over to Dr. Wilton T. Jabazz, a fictitious professor emeritus of Northern Racism Studies at Bemidji State University.
The fictitious Dr. Jabazz would answer letters from equally fictitious readers and speak in a distinctive style not usually found in the opinion pages of the Star Tribune. Among the lightning rods that bristled from the Jabazz columns were the terms “Sun folk” and “Ice people.” Here’s a sample:
“Dear Dr. Jabazz: Why don’t you and Kwesi Mfume tell it like it is? You know very well that whites are afraid of blacks because of the crimes they commit, not because of their skin color. – Tony B., Bryn Mawr.
“Dear Tony-Baloney: People like you give Ice folk a bad name. If Sun people thought like you, images of Ted Bundy, Richard Speck and other mass murderers would keep us inside with the doors locked. You better get somethin’ on your mind.”
