Jolanda Jones is not your conventional candidate for U.S. Congress, something she quickly admits.
“I’m not your traditional elected official,” said the Texas state representative running in a special election for Texas’s 18th Congressional District on Nov. 4. “I think people like my authenticity,” Jones told theGrio.
Throughout the nearly hour-long Zoom interview from her car outside a Houston voting precinct during early voting, Jones stopped several times to introduce herself to voters and ask them for their support.
“My name is Jolanda Jones. What do I have to do to earn your vote?” or “I would love it if you would vote for me,” she would say in some variation to voters, handing them campaign pamphlets.
Jones entered the crowded race months after her opponents for the seat vacated by former Rep. Sylvester Turner, who unexpectedly died in March. Turner held the seat for only two months, several months after longtime Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee died of cancer while serving in the seat.
Outspoken advocate and attorney
This past summer, Representative Jones joined fellow Texas Democrats to flee the state in protest to break quorum and, ultimately, delay Republicans from passing their redrawn congressional map, which jeopardizes seats held mostly by Black and Latino Democrats in Congress from districts elected by majority Black and brown voters. Lawsuits challenging the map say it is racially discriminatory and a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Jones, an attorney who runs her own defense law firm, gained national attention when she called out Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, who ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to find and arrest her and more than 50 other Democrats who sought refuge in Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York.
“I’m a lawyer. A part of my practice is criminal defense work. There is no felony in the Texas penal code for what he says. So respectfully, he’s making up some s–t,” Jones said at an August news conference.
“He’s trying to get sound bites, and he has no legal mechanism. And if he did, subpoenas from Texas don’t work in New York. So he’s going to come get us how? Subpoenas in Texas don’t work in Chicago. He’s going to come get us how? So let me be clear, he’s putting up smoke and mirrors.”
Jones said her unabashed conviction for what she believes in is why she is the best fit to serve in the legacy of “fighters” who served in Congress from the Houston district, which is comprised of more than 800,000 majority Black and Hispanic residents; from Jackson Lee to Barbara Jordan, the first African American to serve in Congress from the state of Texas post-Reconstruction.
“Everyone knows I fight,” said Jones, who notably shut down the Houston Police Department’s crime lab after defending a client who was framed with fake DNA results, also known as “dry labbing.”
The 59-year-old Texas lawmaker recently went viral while explaining why Democrats should theoretically stop “fighting” by the rules.
“If you hit me in my face… I’m going to go across your neck,” she told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Oct. 22. The remark was in reaction to Jones explaining why she does not follow First Lady Michelle Obama‘s famous 2016 quote, “When they go low, we go high.”
Despite Republicans and conservative media suggesting that Jones called for violence with her remarks, Jones said she was speaking figuratively.
“That works for [Michelle Obama]. She lives in a world where she has the power, the access, and the money to be able to do that. Well, I don’t live in that world. I live in a world where if they go low, you better go in the gutter,” Jones told theGrio. “When we fight, I need to fight so hard that you don’t want to fight me no more, even if you beat me.”
Jones, a three-time heptathlon national champion who even starred on WeTV’s reality series “Sisters In Law,” said she is not moved by critics or trolls, explaining, “The hate motivates me.”
A life of being battle-tested
As President Donald Trump and Republicans in Washington, D.C. claw back trillions in health care, food assistance, and education, while also purging civil rights protections and racial equity programs, Jones tells theGrio that she is “uniquely qualified” to take on Trump and his MAGA movement.
“I’m gonna fight as hard for my constituents as Trump fights for all that racist, anti-Black, anti-gay [agenda],” said Jones, who is openly queer, and, if elected, would become the first Black LGBTQ+ woman elected to Congress.
If elected to Congress, the attorney and politician said she looks forward to channeling her traumatic childhood to advocate and agitate on behalf of her constituents.
“I had to fight to overcome,” said Jones, who grew up as the oldest of five children raised by a single mom who experienced chronic poverty. Her mother, she recalled, would often struggle to pay for basic utilities.
“I can remember in 10th grade, we didn’t have electricity. My mother would always have to choose between paying for the lights or the water. It would depend on the season,” she shared. “If we didn’t have electricity, we would use candles, so at least we could see at night.”
One day, their home was destroyed in a fire. Jones recalled to theGrio, “We lost everything that night, except for our lives.”
“I was in panties and a T-shirt, and that’s, like, totally embarrassing. But at that time, really, like, everything we owned was gone,” she said.
She also lost the possessions of her father, a Texas Southern University-trained artist, who died by suicide. The memory of losing her father’s belongings, including his art canvases, brought her to tears.
“I’m sorry, I’m emotional…,” said Jones. “But my grandmother had given me this stuff that was supposed to be mine when I grew up, like remnants of my dad, like his baby shoes and stuff like that. And we lost everything in the fire.”
The subject is especially raw because Jones tragically witnessed her father, a Vietnam Marine Corps veteran who suffered from mental illness, take his own life. The Texas native said she was also sexually abused by her uncle as a young child.
“I’ve had a ton of counseling. You never get over something like that, but you can learn to deal with it,” said Jones.
The sum of her life experiences is why the Texas state lawmaker says she is best suited to take on MAGA in the nation’s capital.
“Trump and the Republicans have made nasty the norm, and they’re mean-spirited, and they don’t like anything about anybody that I represent…I fight for regular people,” said Jones, who derided the Trump administration’s cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and SNAP.
“I know I’m a fight that man, figuratively speaking,” she added. “I’ve had to overcome that trauma, so I understand what it’s like to be a victim. And right now, under Trump, America is victimizing its people, and it’s wrong, and I’m gonna fight like I never fought before.”
