The Birth Certificate
Said “Colored.”
C. Gordon Jones — Founder
Not Black. Not African American. Colored. A document — issued by the United States government — that told a newborn child exactly where he stood. That child was Gordon Jones. He remembers everything.
The Bloodline
His grandmother, Nellie Craig Jones, was born in Alabama in 1900. She studied at Selma State for seminary — the same Selma where John Lewis and 600 marchers would later walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge into history. She migrated to Detroit, carried her faith forward, and lived a full life.
When she died in October 1972, Rosa Parks came to mourn her.
I have spent years trying to understand their connection. Two Alabama women. Two lives rooted in faith, migration, dignity, and resistance. No headline. No museum label. Only a family book, a signature, and a question that never left me.
Good Trubble grew from that question.
What happens to the stories America forgets, buries, or refuses to teach? I turn those stories into art people stop for, share, wear, and remember.
Rosa Parks signed first.
Relatives & Friends book — Nellie Craig Jones, October 1972.
Other signatories blurred to protect family privacy.
That Little Girl Was Me
In October 2020, Gordon Jones had an idea — not about one woman or one election, but about every person the global majority has ever been pushed to the margins to make room for someone else’s story.
He created it: Kamala Harris striding forward, casting the shadow of six-year-old Ruby Bridges — drawn from Rockwell’s once-rejected painting — walking faithfully beside her across time.
That Little Girl Was Me.
When Harris became Vice President-elect, the image went viral overnight. Ruby Bridges herself reposted it. The Norman Rockwell Museum called it a bridge between past and future. It ran in 50+ publications worldwide — Good Morning America, People, The TODAY Show, NBC, CBS, PBS, and more. Norwegian educators placed it in a national curriculum textbook to teach adult immigrants about democracy and citizenship. Good Trubble’s name is in the credit line.
The Name
John Lewis said get in good trouble.
Gordon Jones said: I never had the option of getting out.
That’s why it’s spelled the way it’s spelled. “Trubble” didn’t come from inspiration. It came from a life — born into a category the government printed on his birth certificate, whose grandmother Rosa Parks called friend, whose father bled for a country that wouldn’t give him the GI Bill.
Good Trubble is John Lewis’s phrase carried by someone who never had the option of putting it down.
Good Trubble
Make It. Mean It.
© C. Gordon Jones / Good Trubble. All rights reserved.
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