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Although he was born in Tarboro, North Carolina in 1941,
Ben Jones moved to Portsmouth, Virginia at the tender
age of three weeks.
He grew up in a railroad “section house” in a freight yard on the docks in the Sugar Hill section of the Pinners Point neighborhood.
“I had three brothers and that old shack didn't have nay electricity or indoor plumbing.” Jones says. “But I have wonderful memories of growing up there.”
Jones graduated from Portsmouth’s Woodrow Wilson High School in 1959, then worked at a series of blue-collar jobs to save up money for college. A year later he hitchhiked off to East Carolina University, the first member of his family to attend college. After a year there he transferred to the University of North Carolina with a dream of becoming a writer.
It was in Chapel Hill in the 1960’s that he became deeply involved in filmmaking and politics. “I discovered that I had a gift for acting. And once I found that I could make money at it, I was really hooked. And in the sixties in the South, I became very committed to the civil rights movement. President Kennedy made a big impression on my generation. We felt like anything was possible.”
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