Biographical Database of Black Woman Suffragists

Biographical Sketch of Anna H. Jones, 1855-1932

Leah Payne, Rachel Oncza
Undergraduates, University of Michigan-Dearborn

Anna H. Jones
Oberlin Archives

Anna H. Jones was born in Chatham, Ontario in 1855, to James Monroe and Emily Jones. Jones’s father escaped slavery in North Carolina and took refuge in Canada, eventually becoming one of the first African American men to graduate from Oberlin College in 1849. Little information on Jones’s childhood survives, but she spent most of her adult life in Kansas City, Missouri where she became an educator, a clubwoman, and an author. She found her voice in the suffrage movement through her career as an educator in the black schools of Kansas City. Both Jones’s professional and activist work sought to improve conditions of African Americans through education.

Following the path of her father, Anna H. Jones graduated from Oberlin College (Ohio) in 1875, at the age of twenty. Jones resurfaces in the historical record in 1885, when she secured a position teaching English at Wilberforce University, where she remained until 1892. Jones next focused her energy on the African American women’s movement for the next twenty years. In 1911, Jones became the first African American woman principal of the Douglass school in Kansas City. She then joined the faculty of Lincoln High School from 1916-1919 as an English teacher. In 1917, Jones became a member of the National Education Association.

Jones’s friendship with fellow activist Josephine Yates launched her into the club movement in 1893, when the pair established the Kansas City’s Colored Woman’s League. Their work through the KCCWL provided moral and intellectual education for local African American women and girls. Their organization was one of the first clubs affiliated with the Colored Woman’s League in Washington, D.C. After Yates’s resignation in 1895, Jones became president of the League, which allowed her to represent their national organization during talks of a significant merger with the National Federation of African American Women (Boston). From this merger, the National Association of Colored Women emerged in 1896.

Anna H. Jones first utilized writing as a method of activism with Yates in 1894, co-authoring an account of the KCCWL for Women’s Era. Through her connections in Kansas City, Jones also befriended activist and author, Anna Julia Cooper, with whom she attended the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London. These two were the only African American women selected to speak, and Jones presented “The Preservation of Race Individuality” to the Congress.

Jones’s activism and experience in schools, led her to write a letter to W. E. B. DuBois in December 1911, about the living conditions of African Americans in Kansas City. These concerns also translated into support for suffrage. For Jones, suffrage was another method of uplifting African Americans, and in 1915 Jones contributed an essay to a special woman suffrage issue of The Crisis, “Woman Suffrage and Social Reform.” Jones remarked on the necessity of a woman’s right to vote in order for the reform of institutions predominantly run by African American women, such as families, churches, and schools. Years later Jones wrote three short profiles about those with whom she formed the tightest bonds. Homespun Heroines signified the depth of her involvement with the African American women’s movement and the intimacy it created amongst comrades.

In the 1920s, Anna H. Jones moved to Monrovia, California with her sister. The Anna H. Jones chapter of the National Council of Colored Women’s Clubs formed as a tribute to Jones shortly after her death, at age 77, in 1932 and is still relatively active in Monrovia today. Most of the club’s efforts center around establishing scholarships for young African American women.

Sources

Primary Sources

Jones, Anna H. Letter from Anna H. Jones to The Crisis, February 20, 1919. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries

Jones, Anna. Letter from Anna H. Jones to W. E. B. Du Bois, December 18, 1911. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries

Jones, Anna H. "Josephine Silone Yates: 1852-1912." In Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, 178-181. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 1988.

Jones, Anna H. "Miss Mary J. Patterson: 1840-1894." In Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, 145-46. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 1988.

Jones, Anna H. "Mrs. Lucy Smith Thurman: 1849-1918." In Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, 176-177. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 1988.

Report of the Public Schools of the State of Missouri. Carter & Regan, State printers and binders, 1910. https://books.google.com/books?id=I7ugAAAAMAAJ&dq=anna h jones douglass school&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

Residence of Anna H. Jones (AC027-32). Williams Photo Studio Collection (AC27), Montgall Avenue (Kansas City, Missouri). In Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City. http://blackarchives.org/node/1665.

Students at Douglass School (AC027-38). Williams Photo Studio Collection (AC27), Douglass School (Kansas City, Missouri). In Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City. http://blackarchives.org/node/1671.

The Michigan Alumnus. Vol. 27. Ann Arbor, MI: UM Libraries, 1920. https://books.google.com/books?id=uxviAAAAMAAJ&dq=Sophia Bethena Jones&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

Transactions and Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America. Vol. III. Baltimore: The Association, 1888. https://books.google.com/books?id=SHcxAQAAMAAJ&pg=PR113&lpg=PR113&dq=wilberforce universityannahjones&source=bl&ots=RiFjtSOj-c&sig=jCX1ba2KjFqGz5-pNy_kFefrvqs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFy9Gp5vLRAhUBTCYKHRVBCXUQ6AEIKDAD#v=snippet&q=wilberforce%20university&f=false.

Yearbook and List of Active Members of the National Education Association. The Association, 1919. https://books.google.com/books?id=QAnfAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Oberlin College portrait of Anna H. Jones, accessed online at www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780821418871_photo2.pdf

Anna Jones and a class of students at the Douglass School in Kansas City, 1911, accessed online at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5075895f84ae84c1f4ec0443/t/54aebb45e4b0c9b72f259461/1420737349442/bhm2015-posters-web.pdf

Secondary Sources

Adams, Tom. "Anna H. Jones Scholarship Fundraiser." Monrovia, CA Patch. November 11, 2013. Accessed March 28, 2017. http://patch.com/california/monrovia/anna-h-jones-scholarship-fundraiser.

Baumann, Roland M. Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.

Bigglestone, William E. They Stopped in Oberlin: Black Residents and Visitors of the Nineteenth Century. Oberlin, OH: Oberline College, 2002.

Brown, Hallie Q. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 1988.

Coulter, Charles Edward. Take Up the Black Man's Burden: Kansas City's African American Communities, 1865-1939. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Davis, Elizabeth L., and Sieglinde Lemke. Lifting as They Climb. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. LINK

Driving, Back Seat. "History of African Americans in Monrovia." Monrovia, CA Patch. March 18, 2015. Accessed March 28, 2017. http://patch.com/california/monrovia/history-african-americans-monrovia-0.

Finkelman, Paul. Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: from the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Hine, Darlene Clark and Elsa Barkley Brown, eds. Black Women In America. Second ed. Vol. 2. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 2005.

Hine, Darlene Clark and Elsa Barkley Brown, eds. Black Women In America. Second ed. Vol. 3. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 2005.

Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Facts On File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: Education. NY: Facts On File, 1997.

Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Facts On File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: Social Activism. NY: Facts On File, 1997.

Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. Facts On File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: The Early Years, 1619-1899. NY: Facts On File, 1997.

Des Jardins, Julie. Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race and the Politics of Memory: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880-1945. Chapel Hill, NC.: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Keetley, Dawn, and John Pettegrew, eds. Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism: 1900 To 1960. Vol. II. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Leslie, LaVonne. The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, Inc.: A Legacy of Service. Xlibris Corporation, 2012.

Ling, Susie. "Community Life South Of the Tracks: Black's in Monrovia's History." Monrovia Weekly. February 04, 2015. Accessed March 28, 2017.

May, Vivian M. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2007.


Links to Additional Biographical Sketches

Women of Distinction


 

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"Miss Mary J. Patterson," in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1926), pp. 151-152
https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3179835#page/151/mode/1/chapter/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C3179874

"Mrs. Lucy Smith Thurman," in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1926), pp. 182-183
https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3179835#page/182/mode/1/chapter/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C3179883

"Josephine Silone Yates," in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1926), pp. 184-188
https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3179835#page/184/mode/1/chapter/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C3179884

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