The Village
I Think I’m Going to Raise Hell: In the Depths of Texas with Denita Jones
By Yumna Elhdari
On a Tuesday in Neptune Beach, Florida, at a polling site, the air was thick with humidity. The enduring heat lingered alarmingly through the South’s November as Election Day loomed. For most of the city’s residents, the fleeting promise of civic engagement pushed them to an airtight corner, shriveling any sense of resolve. A much more tangible and immediate theft of air awaits Americans driving past Orange Air Pollution Watch signs that line highways. A suffocating environmental threat expands with every new road lane that is painted. When Florida’s imprisoned population of 157,000 people sit behind bars in the sweltering heat, a drive to a polling site just ain’t been doing it.
For most of us, these problems feel far removed from daily mundanity—until they turn toward our direction. In the dim buzz of the Neptune Beach polling site, the humdrum cracked when a person entered with a machete, as Denita Jones, a Texas grassroots organizer, recalls. The people waiting in line to vote frantically scattered as the machete’s blade approached them.
“They’re leaving to go home, they’re not even focused on going elsewhere because they’re thinking: someone just tried to slice me with a machete,” Jones says. Where do we go when the horror of America finally reaches our doors?
As American politics ebbs and flows, the news proliferates into a dizzying pattern, citizens are imprisoned or otherwise isolated from community, and the direction forward becomes rather difficult. When the high waters of civic disempowerment lull, grassroots organizers like Denita Jones spring up, tucked within the small pockets of local communities.
Denita Jones began her work within the nonprofit and electoral ecosystems of Mississippi and Texas, having previously worked for Black Voters Matter. Her nonprofit work funneled her focus back to the ground, where community roots and hands drive progress.
Denita Jones
For many Americans, community organizing is a vague concept, wandering in our minds without a sound understanding. For others, demystifying these practices is the charm of the work.
“An organizer is someone who is actively trying to make transformational change in their communities, rather than transactional,” Jones says. Such transformation can take many forms, from teach-ins to marches to knocking on doors and talking to our neighbors.
“For me, it’s about getting people together with the same agenda [and] organizing and building momentum collectively.” This agenda lays down a unique configuration of soil to grow community solutions.
For Denita Jones, the journey started in Mississippi. Covered with high forested land reaching down to low beds of swamp water, trunks of live oak trees meeting the dampness of the ground, and rivers pirouetting down the veins of Turtle Island, the state of Mississippi is a generous land margined by an intolerant history.
“I grew up in a time where there were still places I couldn’t go because of the color of my skin,” Jones shares with a heavy breath. “White students had prom at the country club, Black students had prom at the gym. I grew up with a racism that was in front of your face—there was no question what it was.”
Jones’s recollection rings true to the collective experience of young Black girls. Self-awakening begins with a curious gathering of information, as it does with every child: a peculiar rock, a bird’s feather, a growing wonder at the darlings of nature. The young Black girl’s curiosity, however, fetches information that comes with a faint din, suddenly lending its way to a swathing cacophony. The Black girl realizes, almost all at once, that social and political institutions have excluded her from equality’s simple unity. For people like Jones, the hurt cinders to an anchored flame that begets a choreography of action instead of imitating the paleness of hatred.
“I saw the foundational information needed to spark a revolutionary thought,” Jones says. “I grew up knowing who Fannie Lou Hamer was and why she was organizing the way she was.” Fannie Lou Hamer, a leading 20th-century civil rights activist who fought for voting integration and resources for Black Southern farmers, paved the way for organizers in Mississippi.
The force behind Fannie Lou’s organizing—the sort of do-it-yourself vigor—traces its steps back to Jones’ domestic life in America, as it does for many Black women organizers.
On the far sides of Mississippi, white students enjoyed the privilege of a summer vacation. To extend the solace of a carefree childhood to her students, Jones’ mother began loading them in a school bus every summer for a trip to Libertyland in Memphis.
“She just wanted them to be kids. It was their vacation; they had never done anything like that,” Jones adds. “Even to this day, people hit me up like, ‘Is Miss Jones your mom? I remember when she took me to Libertyland.’” As she sits with the weight of that memory, the light of her mother’s legacy flickers through her softening features. “That shaped me,” she says.
Decades later, in the amassed land of Texas where there are bigger playgrounds to cover, she is still fighting to get folks together in a room.
In the Lone Star State, the heat is denser. As government planning agencies toss deep green remnants of Earth to the fringes of expanding highways, extremism stretches across the state and limits the capacity for making change. In 2023, Texas was reported to be home to 97 hate and anti-government groups. In 2022, a report found that Texas led the nation in white supremacist propaganda incidents—Patriot Front, a Texas-based group, is responsible for roughly 80% of all propaganda incidents nationally. The white supremacy that radicalized young Denita lives on in this wildflower land, prompting a stronger, more strategized response from organizers fighting to make change.
“It takes a lot of calculation and coordinated efforts moving across Texas, convincing people that it’s best to organize together and just not in our own regions.”
The battle in Texas doesn’t end with extremist hate groups but extends to corruption in local and state governments. Denita and I discussed the rife spate of jail deaths in Tarrant County, an urgent and relentless reminder of the necessity of political liberation.
Since Republican Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn took office in 2017, there have been more than 65 inmate deaths. Despite calls for investigations into these jails—given that most of those who died were Black men, and nearly all had mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities—the Sheriff has absolved the procedures of his county jail, discounting these deaths as mere circumstantial happenings. Recent records also reveal that the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office has not updated its use-of-force and restraint procedures in more than 15 years, with the last revision of use-of-force policies occurring in 2007.
The most recent deaths include the headline-grabbing murder of Anthony Johnson Jr. The 30-year-old Johnson was killed on April 21st, 2024 after an officer knelt on his back, blocking his airway, while another officer filmed the altercation. In the video, Johnson can be heard pleading, “I can’t breathe”—a cry from the edge of death that, not too long ago, carried around the globe.
“You see these issues with the jail deaths in Tarrant County but people in Dallas County don’t even know what’s happening,” Jones says. “And they’re only half an hour away.”
As Dallas County’s imprisoned population reaches capacity, the call for change is no longer simmering within the depths of society’s fissures. The scale of police and prison brutality is swelling into a tumorous enormity. To address the concern, Dallas County leaders continue to invest in jail expansion, as well as a sweeping front of “law and order,” grooming new grounds for the malady to spread across Texas’ precious remaining open spaces.
In the wake of its blundering reliance on policing, Dallas County is building a new “cop city” on the University of Dallas campus with a hefty $50 million price tag. In response, a local Dallas “Stop Cop City” movement formed, noting that the facility is proposed to be built in an area made up of 51% Black residents and 45% Hispanic or Latino residents. Additionally, organizers pointed out the astounding amount of funding allotted to the project, arguing that these resources could be better spent on mental health services or affordable housing.
The issue of disproportionate funding does not smother Dallas or Tarrant County alone but cloaks the furthest reaches of Texas’ sprawling highways. In fact, Texas as a whole has been reported to consistently allocate the most funds in the nation to prisons and jails—a pattern that has long and greedily skyrocketed past the rates of spending on education, public welfare, health, and parks and recreation.
Institutional efforts to bolster policing jolt all other public services into uncertainty, suspending Texas’ welfare in the hazy air. The very fiber of humanity—health, housing, and education—is a split spine met with increasing industrialized force.
“I had worked for the state Medicaid office and I saw firsthand how neglected people are,” Jones says. “I had these clients—a husband and wife who were both HIV positive. They were taking turns with medication because they couldn’t afford it and they were over the income [for Medicaid].”
The case of this couple spins the same wheel as Johnson’s story, who was refused mental health care because he didn’t “seem violent enough” despite being imprisoned during a schizophrenia episode. Both Johnson and Jones’ clients are the remote victims of a bargain between money and muscles, one that sifts people through its fingers into mere afterthoughts. Allowing existing structures to rust and malfunction at the expense of people’s well-being carries deadly consequences. The fourth leading cause of death in America is cumulative poverty and prison mortality rates have skyrocketed in recent years—a testament to how misaligned investment decisions, in the rippling of time, extend into our everyday lives.
To address these issues, Jones’ fervor for community gathering now shoulders the efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign, walking alongside the movement demanding that “Everybody Has the Right to Live.” The campaign connects communities across the nation under the web of “Moral Revival,” actively striding, calling, writing, and organizing against “systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism, and war economy.”
“What I love about the Poor People’s Campaign is that there is the strategy of organizing from the bottom up, and what we call fusion building,” Jones says.
Bottom-up organizing allows communities across the nation to remain rooted and self-sustaining—entrusting the land to familiar hands that know how to tend to it and ensuring local organizers aren’t hemmed in by unfamiliar agendas set by national teams. Fusion building, in a welcomed addition, allows the intersecting lifelings of our identities to meet, mingle, and candidly live as a collective.
“It aims to work across socioeconomic lines, across racial and ethnic lines,” Jones adds. “My perspective is to keep the movement building on itself by bringing in others from outside of my community, especially those that are also suffering from the same thing.”
That fusion continues to whirl, weaving a diverse braid of different ambitions within, through the centripetal force of storytelling and education. The passing of resistance storytelling from one community to another is a gradual practice, instilling our collective with recognition of the ripe colors of knowledge, like nature’s fruit, drawing them to sustenance. For Jones, it’s about “actually getting down in the trenches, going door to door, talking to people, and sharing your story.”
She conducts this work through Citizen’s Lab, a nonprofit organization she founded to help build an informed electorate through education.
“When I would ask people, ‘why don’t you vote?’ some of them were real honest and would say ‘I don’t know what I’m voting for’ and so that sparked the idea of Citizens Lab, to start going into the communities and do that civic education that is needed so that we can have better-informed citizens,” Jones says.
The heart of her work is meeting community members where their hands can reach. With the extension of her care and skill, she shortens the gap between community members and access to civic education.
“One of the programs of Citizen’s Lab is working with those that are formerly incarcerated, helping them navigate that system and getting them civically engaged to the point where they want to organize around change,” Jones says. “The only people that can change what happens in our criminal justice system are those that have that lived experience.”
She shares an example of her work with Crystal Mason, whose story captures a transparent picture of extremism within our criminal justice system. In 2016, Mason was on federal supervised release when she filled out a provisional ballot. Mason was not made aware that she was ineligible to vote while on supervised release. “She went to her federal parole officer, got her paperwork,” Jones says. “He gave her a list of do’s and don’ts. Nowhere on that list indicated that she could not vote.” The state didn’t count her vote, but hauled a years-long hunt to send her to federal prison.
“Crystal is a good friend of mine,” Jones shares. “Her life has been upended for eight years straight because she genuinely did not know. No one should have to go through that.”
For years now, Jones and Mason have been working together to deliver the details of this case to the community, building awareness via a tried and true experience of one brave individual.
“It’s important for me that her story is continually shared and that we provide the knowledge to our community,” says Jones, a rattling shake reaching the cadence of her voice. Building a new world from one that has dug us underground is no small feat. I think of a widely used phrase I’ve encountered as the world howls with pain around me: They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds. I think of Mexico’s Indigenous movement and their rich imagining of a new world through what they called “dignified rage.” Dignity and rage are the words that made sense of the shake in her voice.
“We have to be proactive in our own life, and we have to be proactive in our own quest for democracy because no one is going to do it for us. No one is going to hand us the playbook.”
Similarly to her efforts with Crystal Mason, Jones hopes to continue the work of Citizens Lab with those who have experienced the merciless hands of corruption.
“It’s stressful, but the joy I have after someone calls me and says, ‘I voted,’ or someone calls me and says, ‘I wrote my testimony out,’ it’s transformational.”
Jones’ work isn’t simply about getting someone to vote or write a testimony, but the transformative elements of her organizing reveal their wonders in the residual feeling of taking such action. It’s the ability to see purpose in our individual roles within the collective.
“For me, it’s about being able to see people excited about the possibility of how they can transform their communities,” Jones says. “It doesn’t take anyone else to come in, it doesn’t have to be a big organization. It can be me.”
Witnessing community transformation has lit a fire in Denita Jones—a fire that fuels her organizing. During one conversation we had about her career background, she acknowledges that blazing the way for change is a fiery path.
“I have my bachelor’s in Business Management, with an emphasis in Marketing. I have my master’s in Public Policy Administration and a PhD in Public Policy,” Jones says, painting a dazzling portrait of education.
“My mom asked, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ And I told her, ‘I think I’m just going to raise hell.’” And fire does she raise.
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Edited by Ava Emilione
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