Skip to main content

Chip Jones

Biography

Chip Jones

Chip Jones has been reporting for nearly 30 years for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Roanoke Times, Virginia Business magazine and others. As a reporter for The Roanoke Times, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Pittston coal strike. He is the former communications director of the Richmond Academy of Medicine, which is where he first discovered the heart stopping story in THE ORGAN THIEVES.

Chip Jones

Books by Chip Jones

The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South
by Chip Jones - History, Nonfiction

In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in THE ORGAN THIEVES, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge. The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s.