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February 24, 2005

Virgil Wright

Twenty years ago, Andrew P. Jones set political imaginations aflame with his vision of Boston’s black community incorporated as a new city within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The idea of a new municipality, to be named “Mandela” after the imprisoned African National Congress leader, provoked heated debate, attracted national attention, and led to successive ballot measures in which voters expressed a preference, to Jones’ disappointment, for the status quo.

In 1998, Jones left Boston to pursue his career as a filmmaker and teacher in Nelson Mandela’s homeland. Now married to a South African and living in Johannesburg with his wife and their two young sons, Jones is bringing to the Hub his latest vision of empowerment: An “International Fathers Bill of Rights” to ensure fair treatment of dads in the courts.

The 12-point manifesto covers a broad range of complaints that have been aimed at the judicial system since the advent of the fathers’ rights movement in the 1970s. Jones has sent copies of the document to members of Congress and to lawmakers on Beacon Hill in hopes of finding legislative champions in advance of his next visit to Boston in the fall.

Jones’ involvement in the crusade dates back to 1993, when he stopped paying child support for a five-year-old daughter after a Massachusetts judge ruled against his bid for visitation rights.

In Jones’ view, imposing the responsibility of child support without any commensurate right of visitation or custody violated a basic precept of law and human justice.

“The court reduces everything to a matter of money when everyone knows that fatherhood is far more than that,” said Jones after his latest showdown with the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, which enforces child custody rulings.

“Rights and responsibilities have to be balanced and when they’re out of balance justice is out of balance. What I’m doing is no different from what Thomas Jefferson did 200 years ago. He stood up to the king and said, ‘I am a man and I have rights.’ I’m standing up to the Department of Revenue and saying, ‘I am a man and I have rights. I am not just a paycheck.’”

In 2003, after voluntarily returning from South Africa to argue his case, Jones had his passport seized and was led out of the Edward Brooke Courthouse in handcuffs and taken to the South Bay House of Correction. The 52-year-old filmmaker spent 60 days in lock-up while his wife and family sold assets and emptied bank accounts to come up with over $30,000 to begin satisfying the $100,000 child support judgement against him.

Released from jail, Jones got his passport back and returned to South Africa, coming back again last year to seek medical care for one of his sons and make his case in court once again.

Jones is still considered in contempt of court for close to $70,000 in back child support still owed, but he vows to keep fighting, contesting even the right of the courts to pursue him. “Not a penny of taxpayer money has even been spent on the care of my daughter,” said Jones, pointing out that the child’s mother and stepfather have professional incomes and have financed private schooling for the girl.

While Jones compares himself to idealist revolutionaries, the Massachusetts legal system and the mother of his daughter describe him in blunter terms: Deadbeat Dad.

In a written response to questions about the legal battle over child support, Loraine Matthews accused Jones of abandoning their daughter and said his time would be better spent providing for her needs.

“I’m appalled that Andrew would come to Boston, my hometown where plenty of my family reside, and attempt to use the press to deceive Bostonians into believing he is justified in his fight for fathers’ rights or even deserving of their attention because of his 1980s Mandela campaign and then leave for his homeland in Africa,” wrote Matthews.

“I believe he would better serve fathers by leaving this fight to those men who have genuinely experienced parental injustice.”

For its part, the Department of Revenue declined to comment on the case.

The centerpiece of Jones’ current efforts, the International Fathers’ Bill of Rights, consists of 12 points touching on both the legal process and basic human rights:

1) All fathers are born with an inalienable right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and due process under the law. Therefore, no father can have his freedom taken away without a bail hearing, the option of a jury trial, the opportunity to call witnesses on his own behalf, representation by counsel and in the case of a restraining order, the opportunity to face and question his accuser.

2) All fathers have the right to be notified of the impending birth of their children.

3) All fathers, faced with the prospect of becoming parents out of wedlock, have the right to choose whether or not they wish to care for that child financially and/or play the role of parent in that child’s life.

4) All fathers who have children out of wedlock have the right to enter into a contractual relationship with the mother of their child and the state that protects their rights as a father and their role as a parent to their child.

5) All single and divorced fathers have the right to shared custody of their children.

6) All fathers have the right to decide how the financial, emotional, and psychological care they give to their children is managed.

7) In the case of divorced and out-of-wedlock parentage, the rights of parents and children are equal.

8) All fathers have the right to receive the medical, educational, social, emotional, financial, and psychological help they may need to become effective parents.

9) All fathers have the right to have direct and unsupervised contact with their children.

10) All fathers have the right to offer direct emotional and psychological care to their children.

11) All fathers have the right to parent their children.

12) All fathers have the right to enjoy these rights so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others.

The third point in Jones’ bill of rights has been the “Cri de Coeur” of his parental crusade: The notion that a father, who has no legal say in whether a woman carries his child to term, retains the choice of whether to be involved in that child’s life. The courts have thus far refused to even consider Jones’ argument.

Other points, however, have gained support, in particular the argument that fathers deserve equal presumption of legal and physical custody of children in all divorce cases. A non-binding ballot referendum endorsing that view overwhelmingly passed with an average of 85 percent approval in dozens of Massachusetts communities last fall.

In Europe, fathers’ rights supporters have taken dramatic steps to highlight their grievances. One divorced father donned a Batman costume, clambered up the sandstone side of Buckingham Palace, and broadcast his complaints against a system that awards custody to mothers in 90 percent of all cases from the same window from which Queen Elizabeth II waves to her subjects.

Jones’ battle on this side of the Atlantic is characteristic of the intense personality whose passionate calls for black independence in Boston attracted global media coverage.

Growing up in the segregated housing projects of Richmond, Va., Jones showed a prodigy’s promise on the violin and won a full scholarship to the elite Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. After earning a degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, he switched, in his words, from one form of entertainment to another, getting a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University and becoming an ABC field producer.

In the early 1980s, an assignment to cover a town meeting in rural New England inspired Jones with the idea of drawing Boston’s communities of color into a new municipality - an incorporation drive built on the model of Yankee self-determination.

After the Mandela drive fizzled, Jones went back to teaching and filmmaking, traveling throughout the U.S. and Russia, South Africa, North Korea, Panama, and Iraq to create documentaries, most of which aired on public television stations.

By 1998, frustrated over his child-support fights, Jones moved to South Africa to start a new life. In 2003, he began the process of reaching out to his daughter and preparing for his return to Massachusetts to face the courts.

“I just wanted to be a father to my daughter and I never had that chance,” said Jones. “Now that I have a family, I know more than ever before how important that is.”

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