How Mets great Cleon Jones is helping restore Africatown neighborhood where he grew up
Cleon Jones didn’t own his first baseball glove until he was 13 years old because his family couldn’t afford one. By that age, though, he had already started developing into a good player – only because he borrowed a glove from one family, a bat from another when the kids would play ball. To this day, he still wonders how he would’ve learned to play without the generous neighborhood families.
“There would be no major league Cleon Jones,” he said, “if not for my city, my hometown.”
From the time Jones signed with the Mets in 1962, he had a purpose. “My driving force was I couldn’t let my neighborhood down,” he now says.
MLB 2021: Who's all in and who's tanking?
MORE: Dodgers manager speaks out on bullying against Asian Americans
That special place is Africatown, a primarily Black neighborhood three miles north of downtown Mobile, Alabama. The Mobile area has raised many baseball Hall of Famers, including Hank Aaron and Satchel Paige.
After Jones, who is Black, retired from baseball in 1976, he could’ve lived anywhere, like New York (where he played 12 seasons for the Mets and was a member of the 1969 World Series championship team) or California (where he had a possible job opportunity at one point). He instead chose Africatown, even though its population, once over 10,000, has dropped to around 2,000.
“He’s loyal,” says Maxcine Agee, the widow of former Met Tommie Agee, another Mobile-area native and Jones’ lifelong friend.
Jones, now 78, is helping restore Africatown by completing various home improvement projects – everything from replacing roofs to painting homes to helping tear down dilapidated properties. He’s been doing this since around 2015, and most projects involve elderly residents and single-parent homes. The Cleon Jones Last Out Community Foundation, a non-profit organization created to raise funds for these efforts, aims to help those who can’t help themselves.
“It’s been a gigantic project, but I can see the difference that we’re making,” Jones said in a recent phone interview with The Record and NorthJersey.com.
That’s because Jones – and Africatown’s other longtime residents – saw its sad decline. In the late 1950s, the neighborhood buzzed. Jones estimates there were around 75 kids on his street alone. He knew a family of 21 and a family of 19. Multiple other families had 10-plus kids. There were around 20 mom-and-pop shops.
But, Jones explains, as the neighborhood kids went to college and received degrees, they returned to the neighborhood seeking bigger and better homes. Because of building restrictions, that often wasn’t possible, which meant many people chose to build in surrounding neighborhoods. As grandmothers and grandfathers died, the mom-and-pop shops closed. Jones said Africatown is a food desert, and one must drive about six miles to get groceries.
By now, Jones estimates he and his crew have replaced at least 20 roofs and painted at least that many houses. He may be able to notice the changes in the neighborhood, but that’s not his measuring stick. Instead, he wonders if outsiders would be able to tell: If you visited the neighborhood for the first time, would you be impressed or pity the folks who live there?
Jones’ mission began around six years ago, when his wife, Angela, had spoken to a woman living in a facility for the elderly. The lady wanted to return home, but couldn’t because her house burned down and she had lost everything. Angela came home and told Cleon: We have to get her back in her home.
Cleon gathered a group of neighborhood volunteers, and they gutted and renovated the house. The woman felt overjoyed to get back into her new home. “If I had to say,” Jones says, “that (project) was our claim to fame at the time.”
Jones and other volunteers have since done more, including a paint project in which the city donates the paint if community members volunteer their time to paint houses. And because hurricanes have ravaged the South throughout the years, they’ve also repaired and replaced roofs. They even complete small tasks such as paying bills for those in need, or mowing lawns. Along the way, they’ve secured buy-in from local industry, including electric company Alabama Power.
“What could be more basically human than getting people into homes that wouldn’t otherwise be in them?” said Ron Swoboda, Jones’ Mets teammate and another 1969 World Series champion.
“You see a lot of people out here that are like, ‘Oh, I just want to be retired and hang out and go golf and lay in the sun, and he’s like, ‘No, I want to get on my tractor and I want to help this person get their roof done,’” said J’nelle Agee, Tommie and Maxcine’s daughter.
As a big leaguer, Jones wanted to succeed for his neighborhood – for those who let him borrow equipment, for those who believed in him, for those who supported him along the way.
He spends his days in retirement pursuing a cause just as noble: Helping revitalize that community.
“Any time you can help just one person,” Jones said, “then you still move forward.”