Dr. Jones' Biography

BIOGRAPHY

Raised by his maternal grandmother in the hard-scrabble housing projects of Atlanta, Georgia, Ricky L. Jones not only became the first member of his immediate family to graduate high school, but by age 29 he had also earned a Ph.D. Currently, Jones is associate professor, past chair, and Director of the Center for the Study of Crime and Justice in the Black Community in the Department of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. He is an honors graduate in Political Science from Morehouse College (Martin Luther King, Jr.’s alma mater). He was only the second African American to receive a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Kentucky where he specialized in Political Philosophy and Comparative Politics.

As a graduate student, Jones served as a Lyman T. Johnson Fellow at the University of Kentucky and a National Science Foundation Multi-Cultural Teaching Fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Since graduate school, his work has been published in a number of local, regional, and national periodicals and journals including Griot, Black Scholar, Western Journal of Black Studies, Negro Educational Review, DIVERSE Issues in Higher Education, and International Journal of Africana Studies.

Jones has emerged as a strong public scholar doing especially innovative work on black leadership and black male identity. In 2004, he released the first volume in his "Black Manhood Trilogy" - Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities – now regarded as one of the finest works addressing the troubling issues of hazing and violence in American fraternal organizations. Jones has delivered speeches at scores of colleges and universities on the subject and was featured on the E! Network’s documentary "True Hollywood Stories Investigates: Hazing."

Black Haze is much more than the first scholarly work solely dedicated to the subject of black fraternity hazing. It also examines a number of aspects of American socio-political culture from the ritualistic underpinnings of sacrifice to historical and contemporary collegiate and societal discrimination to the very core of America’s myriad perspectives on ethical behavior. This groundbreaking and sometimes controversial book provides a rare and sober analysis of the fraternity pledge/haze process and the identity issues associated with it which should give us all pause. In the wake of a spate of injuries and deaths in Greekdom over the last two decades, it is a must-read for Greeks and non-Greeks alike.

Jones’ next book, the highly anticipated What’s Wrong with Obamamania?: Black America, Black Leadership, and the Death of Political Imagination, received strong reviews well before it’s release in June 2008. Black Agenda Report founder and Executive Editor Glen Ford commented that the book "is an important contribution to intellectual clarity—a scarce commodity at a time of mania." Eminent University of Maryland Professor Ronald Walters opined, "With a critical eye, Jones examines leadership styles in the black community within the context of larger philosophical arguments about culture, education, political agency, and expectations."

Transcending the Talented Tenth author Joy James wrote, "Jones revives a tradition of sharp and clear political thinking and courageous moral engagement." The Publishers Weekly review of What’s Wrong with Obamamania? concluded that "Jones uses Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to launch a fascinating and well-researched exploration into black leadership in America. Jones lucidly enumerates the challenges, choices and limitations Obama will face as he attempts to win the presidency, and provides a level of racial analysis and exploration that is almost entirely absent in the mainstream media."

Outside the academy, Jones has written the Message to the People for the city of Louisville’s most popular alternative weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO). The Message won the Best Minority Reporting Award from the Louisville Society of Professional Journalists for three consecutive years. Recently, because of his commitment to the community as well as his work, Jones was named one of Louisville’s 25 Young Future Leaders by Louisville Magazine.

After completing his term as department chair, Jones sets about working on the two major book projects that will complete the "Black Manhood Trilogy" – The Second Side of the Story: In Partial Defense of Black Men in Their Sometimes Troubled Relationships with Black Women and Letters to my Father: Reflections of a Parentless Child. "I don’t want to just write good stuff. I want to write good stuff that people will actually read and be transformed by." Jones says. He is well on his way.

Read a profile of Ricky Jones in his adopted hometown’s newspaper: When Conscience Calls