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When Van Jones picked up the San Francisco Examiner on June 7, 1995, his blood ran cold. The cop he’d helped take to court two years earlier for shooting a mentally ill black man nine times was in the news again, this time implicated in the death of Aaron Williams, an unarmed black robbery suspect who was beaten and pepper-sprayed.

Jones, then a 26-year-old lawyer with dreadlocks down to his shoulders, didn’t just get mad — he organized. He rallied hundreds of urban youth to pack San Francisco’s weekly police commission hearings and demand that Officer Marc Andaya be dismissed from the force. Jones didn’t tell the activists to put on suits or mind their manners. He simply told them to speak out, which they did — loudly. The hip-hoppers disrupted the usually somnolent meetings with raps like “Up on the pavement / Out of enslavement / Why do cops gotta act like cavemen?”

“They didn’t want to hear our culture,” Jones says, “so we gave it to them. They didn’t want to see intelligent, marginalized people on television, so we gave it to them. They didn’t want to see some uppity young lawyer like myself showing up in a suit and quoting all their laws, so I did it every chance I got.”

In 1997, after months of turbulent hearings, Andaya was suspended, and eventually fired, ostensibly for lying on his application. The victory was sweet, but Jones’ crusade against police violence, and his commitment to the youth he’d helped organize, was just beginning. In 1996, Jones had founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, named to honor the great, often unheralded, civil rights organizer. The center created the first lawyer referral service for victims of police violence in northern California, and it now fields more than 50 calls a week. “Our staff looks like the fucking Muppets,” Jones laughs. “We’ve got every color in the Skittles bag — hip-hoppers, transgender activists, lawyers — all working together.” The center recently expanded its horizons, opening a branch office in New York City and helping to spearhead the fight against California’s Proposition 21, a draconian juvenile crime initiative voters passed last spring.

Jones’ efforts to mitigate police violence earned him the prestigious Reebok Human Rights Award in March 1998. But he isn’t resting on his laurels, and he isn’t stuck behind a desk. That fall, Jones led a band of hip-hop activists to the home of San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan. The district attorney hadn’t satisfactorily answered their questions about the death of a white 17-year-old girl inadvertently shot in the head during a drug bust, so the group decided to pay him a house call — with television camera crews in tow.

“There’s Mr. Terence, TV cameras in his face, kids asking, ‘Why are you protecting a killer cop?'” says Jones. “This is what you live for. If you get 20 phone calls a day about people getting beat up by police, children getting their arms broken, then this is what you live for.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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