Funeral services will be held next Monday for Bill Jones, a persistent player in New Haven African-American community politics since his days as a member of a band of campaign rebels known as “The Magnificent Seven.”
Jones was 76. His wife, Damonne, said that the funeral will probably be at the Bible Gospel Center at 143 Leeder Hill Rd. Celentano Funeral Home is handling the arrangements.
Jones burst on the scene in 1966 and remained a figure in the city’s ever-shifting African-American political alliances for decades afterward.
That year he and a buddy lawyer named Ward A. White III founded a group called the “Progressive Democrats” in the basement of Florence Virtue Homes in the Dixwell neighborhood. White recalled that they saw themselves as an alternative to “Dick Daley (Chicago) style politics.” In New Haven that meant opposing slates put together in the black community by citywide Democratic machine boss Arthur Barbieri. White and Jones were allied with the late Rev. Edwin “Doc” Edmonds, the influential leader for decades of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church who also headed the New Haven Board of Education for several years.
White (who left town after graduation from Yale Law School) remembered Jones going to Chicago to serve as a delegate at the infamous 1968 Democratic convention.
Back home, Bill Jones hitched his star to Henry “Hank” Parker, the city’s first viable black mayoral candidate, who first ran in 1969. That year Jones joined a slate of aldermanic candidates on Parker’s slate. Parker lost the election. (He went on to become the state’s first black treasurer.) But seven members of the aldermanic slate, including Jones, won. They were dubbed “the Magnificent Seven.”
He served on the board for six years. Then he was the running mate of Frank Logue, who ran for mayor against the Barbieri machine in 1975 and won. The machine returned to power in 1979 with the election of Biagio DiLieto, who later picked Jones as his director of organizational development.
Jones split with DiLieto in 1987 and challenged him in a Democratic mayoral primary. He and his fellow black Democratic rebels teamed up with a group of white Green Party (the 1980s version of the party) activists to form a joint “Progressive Coalition” slate. They elected one aldermanic candidate, Toni Harp, who went on to become a state senator. While Jones failed to unseat DiLieto, his campaign was considered the early version of a challenge to the machine that prevailed two years later, in the form of John Daniels’ mayoral campaign.
Before his retirement Jones served as a consultant to the housing authority. He died from complications related to Alzheimer’s, according to Damonne Jones.
Jones always had an easygoing manner, even in the heat of political battle.
“He loved life. He liked helping people. He was just a fun guy to be around,” Damonne Jones recalled. “He never got angry at anything. You got angry at him because he never got angry! He was just fun-loving. He was the first person I’ve known to cook a whole turkey on the grill. He cooked that bad boy all day long. When he finished it was so nice and tender and juicy.”
Jones is survived by, in addition to his wife, five children and three stepchildren.