News & Events 2002-2003

LeAlan Jones Inspires Students to Make a Difference

LeAlan Jones, co-author of Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago featured on National Public Radio (NPR) and Showtime, spoke to a full house at Armstrong-Hipkins Center for the Arts on September 17, 2002 as part of the Society of Skeptics lecture series.

As teenagers in 1993, LeAlan Jones and his friend Lloyd Newman created the NPR documentary Ghetto Life 101 about the life, adventures and hardships in the Chicago projects which received over a dozen national and international awards. They later produced another NPR documentary, Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse, which investigated the murder of five-year-old Eric Morse by two young boys because he refused to shoplift candy. These documentaries earned Jones and Newman the Peabody and RFK awards for radio journalism. With further help and encouragement of NPR producer David Isay,Our America became the third effort by the two teens. Compiled from more than 100 hours of taped interviews, conversations and monologues, Our America lets us in on a piece of their world at the Ida B. Wells housing development on the south side of Chicago.

After watching a 60 Minutes clip about his experience, LeAlan spoke to the Blair community about creating opportunities to make a difference in the world — regardless of your current circumstances — and leaving it a better place for the next generation. He stated that poverty isn’t the problem that prohibits people from getting out of the ghettos and rising above their situations. It is the hopelessness that poverty creates that is the toughest thing to overcome, especially when you don’t have anyone to help guide you to that better place, as David Isay did for them.

LeAlan encouraged the students in the audience to continue getting a quality education and to question and investigate the things around them in hopes of changing that which isn’t right within their communities and the world. He reminded them that they are in control of their futures, and if they could help only one other person, it would make a huge difference.

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