Jones for the defense - lawyer Elaine R. Jones

Black Enterprise, August, 1993 by Caroline V. Clarke, Jonathan Sapers

Homespun but hilgh-powered, Elaine, Jones has all the right stuff to chart new directions for the,venerable, NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

HAVING FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES-FIRST LADY Hillary Rodham Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno, John F. Kennedy Jr., for example-has not distracted Elaine R. Jones from whence she came. Born in the segregated South, she hasn't forgotten what it was like having to drink from the "colored" water fountain and being turned away from restaurants and hotels.

She has been working for the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund (LDF) for 21 years, and now she is its head at a time when the issues are more complicated than ever before. But again, Jones can derive perspective and strength from her background. Ours was a family of words and ideas," she has said.

Her father was a Pullman porter and her mother, a college graduate who taught him how to read. Jones talks about "the power of the kitchen table." Gathered around it, she, her older brother and her parents discussed everything during mealtimes.

Now, at 49, she heads a staff of 80 employees and oversees 28 lawyers litigating a docket of more than 300 cases. As director-counsel of LDF, Jones administers a $9.5 million budget that she also has to raise-without resorting to government funding, since the government is often LDF'S opponent in court.

The legal challenges LDF faces are, sadly, much as they were in 1940, when the organization began. They involve battles against discrimination in the areas of education, housing, employment, voting rights, capital punishment and the general administration of justice. Newer on the agenda are issues of healthcare accessibility and environmental protection - both of which Jones lists high among her priorities.

"Civil rights is not a narrow issue," Jones explains in defense of her organization's broad agenda. "Anything that improves the quality of our lives and lessens the suffering and discrimination of black people helps society as a whole."

Jones will zero in on the Supreme Court's J.A. Croson v. City of Richmond decision, in which the high court found municipal minority-contract set-aside programs illegal unless past discrimination was documented by the municipality in question. "You still have set-asides, but you've got to jump through all kinds of hoops to get them," she says. "We've got to get that overturned to make sure African-Americans are not just employees, but employers as well."

Although LDF's cases usually stem from small, localized incidents, they almost always grow to encompass nationwide significance. Earlier this year, LDF lawyers negotiated a landmark settlement in its case against Shoney's Inc., after exposing a pattern of ingrained race discrimination in hiring and promoting the restaurant chain's employees throughout 759 of the company's establishments in 39 states. The $105 million settlement is the highest ever in a case of this kind.

Many lawsuits, particularly such mammoth ones, aren't settled, however. LDF has brought more cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other legal body outside of the Solicitor's General's Office of the U.S. Department of Justice.

If the issues LDF is grappling with are rather traditional, the internal challenges it faces are strictly '90s corporate America: How to do more with less. As money grows harder to come by, the costs of litigation and running a national practice are moving further and further off the map. Seven months into her tenure at the helm of the civil rights movement's most venerable legal organization, Jones must find innovative solutions to LDF's internal and external struggles, while plotting a bold new agenda for the agency.

"I don't have the system in place yet," she says, the southern sway of her native Norfolk, Va., rounding off her words. "But catch me in a year, girl. Things are going to be running smooth."

Right now, though, "running" seems to be the operative word. in a single week, Jones travelled from her New York base (where she led several staff meetings and spoke before a gathering of corporate executives at a dinner hosted by Mayor David Dinkins in her honor) to Washington, D.C., where she schmoozed a couple of senators and met with D.C. staff members. Then she jetted to Los Angeles to discuss pending cases with West Coast staffers and charm some potential corporate patrons and two LDF board members. Hurrying back to Washington, D.C., she addressed a two-day conference sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice that cut her weekend in half. As she was logging some of the 200,000 air miles she expects to travel this year, Jones prepared for her first meeting with LDF'S 90-member board of directors to be held the following week.

Caught between appointments back in New York, Jones conceded that her plate runneth over just a bit, but she offers no indication of cutting back. In her new role - and as the first woman to hold it - she can't afford to let a moment slip by unfilled. Like Rev. Benjamin Chavis, who earlier this year was named executive director of the NAACP (the organization that originated the LDF), Jones must create and lead battle plans against ever more complex forms of racial injustice.