• Became a Communist in the aftermath of the 1992 "Rodney King riots" in Los Angeles
• Founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996
• Was active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER
• Served as a board member of the Rainforest Action Network and Free Press
• In March 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called "Green Jobs Czar."
• Resigned in early September 2009

Born in 1968 in rural West Tennessee, Van Jones (whose birth name was Anthony Jones) attended the University of Tennessee at Martin. As an undergraduate aspiring to a career in journalism, he founded an underground campus newspaper as well as a statewide African American newspaper. After earning his BA degree, Jones abandoned his plan to become a journalist and instead enrolled at Yale Law School, where, as an angry black separatist, he first arrived wearing combat boots and carrying a Black Panther bookbag. "If I'd been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect," he reflects. "But as it was, I went on to an Ivy League law school.... I wasn't ready for Yale, and they weren't ready for me."

Failing to develop a passion for legal studies, Jones contemplated dropping out of Yale. Realizing, however, that a law degree would furnish him with perceived credibility as a critic of the criminal-justice system -- which he believed was thoroughly infested with racism -- he persevered and earned his Juris Doctorate.

During his years at Yale, Jones served as an intern with the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR), which views the United States as an irredeemably racist nation and "champions the legal rights of people of color, poor people, immigrants and refugees, with a special commitment to African-Americans."

Jones says he became politically radicalized in the aftermath of the deadly April 1992 Los Angeles riots which erupted shortly after four L.A. police officers who had beaten the now-infamous Rodney King were exonerated in court. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th," says Jones, "and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist."

In early May 1992, after the L.A. riots had ended, Jones was dispatched by LCCR Executive Director Eva Patterson to serve as a legal monitor at a nonviolent protest (against the Rodney King verdicts) in San Francisco. Local police, fearful that the event would devolve into violence, stopped the proceedings and arrested many of the participants, including all the legal monitors. Jones spent a short time in jail, and all charges against him were subsequently dropped.

Recalling his brief incarceration, Jones says: "I met all these young radical people of color. I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary."

After leaving Yale in 1993, Jones relocated to San Francisco, where he helped establish Bay Area Police Watch, a hotline and lawyer-referral service that began as a project of LCCR and specialized in demonizing local police. In 1996 he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which, claiming that the American criminal-justice system was infested with racism, sought to promote alternatives to incarceration. According to the Baker Center:

"Decades of disinvestment in our cities have led to despair and hopelessness. For poor communities and communities of color it's even worse, as excessive, racist policing and over-incarceration have left people even further behind."

Jones headed the Baker Center from 1996 to 2007. Between 1999 and 2009, the Baker Center received more than $1 million from George Soros's Open Society Institute.

By the late 1990s, Jones was a committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who viewed police officers as the arch-enemies of black people, and who loathed capitalism for allegedly exploiting nonwhite minorities worldwide. He became a leading member of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a Bay-Area Marxist-Maoist collective that was staffed by members of various local nonprofits, a number of whom had ties to the Ella Baker Center. STORM would grow in influence until 2002, when it disbanded due to internal squabbles.

Jones helped organize an October 1999 rally in Oakland, California, calling for a retrial on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal. Around 2002, Jones, who had experience as a record producer, produced (for the Ella Baker Center) an album that starred Abu Jamal. Among the lyrics on this album were the following:

"The American way manufactured by white folk in office, by these rich men here to mock us. The United States; a piece of stolen land led by right-wing, war-hungry, oil thirsty ... And when it's all said and done, still can't [garbled] the wrong place cause they got people of color playing servant to do that sh** for them; mother f***ers ready to wipe out soft targets on territories harboring terrorists? Tragedy. The true terrorists are made in the U.S."

In 2000 Jones campaigned aggressively against California Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that established harsher penalties for a variety of violent crimes and called for more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults. Jones' efforts incorporated a hip-hop soundtrack that aimed to attract young black men clad in such gang-style garb as puffy jackets and baggy pants, who would call attention to the alleged injustices of the so-called "prison-industrial complex." But infighting and jealousies between various factions of Jones' movement caused it ultimately to fall apart. "I saw our little movement destroyed over a lot of sh**-talking and bullsh**," said Jones.

After the demise of his anti-Prop 21 movement, Jones decided to change his political tactics. Specifically, he toned down the overt hostility and defiant rage that he previously had worn as badges of honor. "Before, we would fight anybody, any time," he said in 2005. "No concession was good enough; we never said 'Thank you.' Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward.... I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends."'

Added Jones: "I realized that there are a lot of people who are capitalists -- shudder, shudder -- who are really committed to fairly significant change in the economy, and were having bigger impacts than me and a lot of my friends with our protest signs."

Jones' new approach was modeled on the tactics outlined by the famed radical organizer Saul Alinsky, who stressed the need for revolutionaries to mask the extremism of their objectives and to present themselves as moderates until they could gain some control over the machinery of political power. In a 2005 interview, Jones stated that he still considered himself a revolutionary, but a more effective one thanks to his revised tactics.

Just hours after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Jones stood in the streets of Oakland, California with his fellow STORM members to denounce the United States for having brought the disaster on itself. In October 2004 he joined a host of notable leftists in signing the 9/11 Truth Statement (signature #46), which called for a federal investigation into whether President Bush had been privy to advance knowledge of - or perhaps had colluded in - the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In the early 2000s, Jones and STORM were active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER, a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. STORM also had ties to the South African Communist Party and it revered Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader (of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands) who lauded Lenin as "the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples." (In 2006 Van Jones would name his own newborn son "Cabral" -- in Amilcar Cabral's honor.)

During his tenure with STORM, Jones collaborated on numerous projects (including antiwar demonstrations) with local activist Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, who served as a "mentor" for members of the Ella Baker Center. Martinez was a longtime Maoist who went on to join the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), a Communist Party USA splinter group, in the early 1990s. To this day, Martinez continues to sit on the CCDS advisory board alongside such luminaries as Angela Davis, Timuel Black (who served on Barack Obama's 2004 Senate campaign committee), and musician Pete Seeger. Martinez is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, the parent organization of Progressives for Obama. Martinez and Van Jones together attended a "Challenging White Supremacy" workshop which advanced the theme that "all too often, the unconscious racism of white activists stands in the way of any effective, worthwhile collaboration" with blacks.

In 2005 Jones and the Ella Baker Center produced the "Social Equity Track" for the United Nations' World Environment Day celebration, a project that eventually would evolve into the Baker Center's Green-Collar Jobs Campaign -- "a job-training and employment pipeline providing 'green pathways out of poverty' for low-income adults in Oakland."

During the George W. Bush administration, Jones ridiculed the President for advocating an increase in domestic oil-driling:

"We began to drill more, to drill off shore, to drill here, to drill there, to liquify coal ... to do whatever you can to get more petroleum into the system. And we heard our president saying just that. That's what he wants to do. And I hate to say this and I hope I don't offend anybody, but the president of the United States sounded like a crackhead when he said that. [Mimicking a crack addict:] Just, a little bit mo,' just a litlle bit mo,' a little mo', a little mo', a little mo' … Like a crackhead trying to lick the crack pipe for a fix.... I'm sorry, I'm gonna speak some ebonics up here. Good luck with the translation."

Soon after attending the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2007, Jones launched "Green For All," a non-governmental organization "dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty … advocating for local, state and federal commitment to job creation, job training, and entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging green economy - especially for people from disadvantaged communities." A major funder of Green for All was George Soros's Open Society Institute.

Said Jones:

"There is a green wave coming, with renewable energy, organic agriculture, cleaner production. Our question is, will the green wave lift all boats? That's the moral challenge to the people who are the architects of this new, ecologically sound economy. Will we have eco-equity, or will we have eco-apartheid? Right now we have eco-apartheid. Look at Marin; they've got solar this, and bio this, and organic the other, and fifteen minutes away by car, you're in Oakland with cancer clusters, asthma, and pollution."

In a January 2008 speech, Jones said: "The white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities because they don't have a racial justice framework."

In 2008 Jones published his first book, The Green Collar Economy, which focused on environmental and economic issues. The book received favorable reviews from such notables as Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Laurie David, Winona LaDuke, environmentalist Paul Hawken, and NAACP President/CEO Ben Jealous.

After the Bush administration had drawn to a close, Jones reflected:

"[A]n authoritarian sentiment seized control of the reins of power in our country, burned the Constitution, enshrined torture, launched an unjust war under false premises ... somebody had taken the American flag and turned it into a war flag, and used it to beat and whip and lynch anybody who didn't agree that we should be bombing people and torturing people."

Jones has served as a board member of numerous environmental and nonprofit organizations, including the Rainforest Action Network; Free Press; the Apollo Alliance; Bioneers (which accepts the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Report's warning that "[h]uman activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted"); the Social Venture Network (which aims "to build a just economy and sustainable planet"); and Julia Butterfly Hill's "Circle of Life" environmental foundation.

Jones also co-founded Color of Change (COC), an organization that views the United States as a profoundly racist country, and whose mission is "to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone." In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late August of 2005, COC waged a campaign to censure President Bush, claiming: "He knew about the levees, and he knew about the Superdome. But he did nothing." In 2006, COC collaborated with MoveOn.org Civic Action to screen Spike Lee's film When the Levees Broke, which features allegations that the federal government dynamited the levees -- a view popularized most famously by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In a 2005 blog on the Huffington Post, Jones asserted that the hurricane had been exacerbated by Bush's environmental policies and "deep contempt for poor African-Americans."

At a February 11, 2009 speaking engagement, Jones was asked by an audience member to theorize as to why the Bush administration had been so effective at passing legislation even though Republicans (under Bush) had not held anything even remotely resembling the types of majorities that Democrats eventually (in 2006 and 2008) would establish in both Houses of Congress. "How were the Republicans able to push things through when they had less than 60 senators," asked the questioner, "but [now] somehow [President Obama] can't?" To loud applause, Jones replied:

"Well, the answer to that is, they're assholes. That's a technical political [inaudible] term. And [President] Barack Obama's not an asshole. Um, now, I will say this: I can be an asshole. And some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are going to have to start getting a little bit uppity."

Later that same month in Berkeley, California, Jones made clear his desire to incrementally socialize, by stealth, the U.S. economy:

"Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we're not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether. But, that's a process and I think that's what's great about the movement that is beginning to emerge is that the crisis is so severe in terms of joblessness, violence and now ecological threats that people are willing to be both pragmatic and visionary. So the green economy will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society."

In late February 2009, Jones spoke at a Washington, DC event called Power Shift '09, which was billed as the largest-ever youth summit (attended by 12,000 young adults) on climate change. There, Jones advocated what WorldNetDaily reporter Aaron Klein said "can easily be interpreted as a communist or socialist agenda." Among Jones' comments were the following:

• "Now I'm gonna tell you this: All that clean coal stuff ... We could have clean coal. I'm for clean coal. But I'll tell you what. If we're gonna have clean coal, let's have a couple other things.... We could power the country with clean coal, or we could have unicorns pull our cars for us ... Equally fictitious, equally fantastical, equally ludicrous. You know, so, we could have the tooth fairy bring us our energy at night. I mean, equally ludicrous. There is no such thing as a tooth fairy. There is no such thing as unicorns. And there is no such thing as clean coal, so let's be clear about that."
  
  
• "When we talk about 'Green for All,' 'Green for Everybody,' where was it written that only men could put up solar panels? Where was it written that only men could manufacture wind turbines? If the green economy has the same sorry track record of sexism; if women in the green economy are making 70 cents to the dollar, just like they're doing in the pollution-based economy, something's wrong with our movement.... We need to have gender equity in this movement."
  
  
• "What about our Native American sisters and brothers?... They told us a long time ago that this was sacred land.... [They] were pushed and bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn't want, where it was all hot and windy. Well, guess what, renewable energy? Guess what, solar industry? Guess what, wind industry? They now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources. No more broken treaties! No more broken treaties! Give them the wealth! Give them then wealth! Give them the dignity! Give them the respect that they deserve! No justice on stolen land! We owe them a debt!"
  
  
• "What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about people who've come here from all around the world, who we're willing to have out in the fields with poison being sprayed on them, poison being sprayed on them because we have the wrong agricultural system. And we're willing to poison them and poison the earth to put food on our table, but we don't want to give them rights, and we don't want to give them dignity, and we don't want to give them respect. We need to get down on our knees and thank these Native American communities. But also the Latino community, Asian community, and every otherr community that's willing to come here and help us out, 'cause we obviously need some help. We need some wisdom from someplace else. 'Cause what we've come up with here don't make no sense at all."
  
  
• [W]hat about our sisters and brothers that are in prison right now? What about the formerly incarcerated? We need to have a green economy that doesn't have any throw-away species,... resources,... [or] any throw-away people either."
  
  
• "If all you do is have a clean energy revolution, you won't have done anything.... If all we do is take out the dirty power system, the dirty power generation in a system, and just replace it with some clean stuff, put a solar panel on top of this system, but we don't deal with how we are consuming water, we don't deal with how we are treating our other sister and brother species, we don't deal with toxins, we don't deal with the way we treat each other; If that's not a part of this movement,... this is all you'll have: You'll have solar-powered bulldozers, solar-powered buzz saws, and bio-fueled bombers, and we'll be fighting wars over lithium for the batteries instead of oil for the engines, and we'll still have a dead planet. This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don't stop there! Don't stop there! No, we gonna change the whole system! We gonna change the whole thing! We not gonna put a new battery in a broken system, We want a new system. We want a new system."

On March 10, 2009, President Obama named Jones to be his so-called "Green Jobs Czar"; the formal title for the position was "Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation" for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. At the time, Jones was a Senior Fellow with John Podesta's Center for American Progress and a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He described his new role with the Obama administration as that of "a community organizer inside the federal family."

In a July 2009 interview with Newsweek magazine, Jones said he could not explain exactly what a "green job" is:

"Well, we still don't have a unified definition, and that's not unusual in a democracy. It takes a while for all the states and the federal government to come to some agreement. But the Department of Labor is working on it very diligently. Fundamentally, it's getting there, but we haven't crossed the finish line yet."

Amid mounting controversy, Jones resigned his post as the Obama administration's Green Jobs Czar on Labor Day weekend 2009. In his statement, he claimed that he had been "inundated with calls — from across the political spectrum — urging me to 'stay and fight.'" But "opponents of reform," he said, "have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

After stepping down from his administration post, Jones was offered office work space by the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC.