Anna H. Jones (September 2, 1855 – March 7, 1932) was a Canadian-born American clubwoman, suffragist, and educator based in later life in Kansas City, Missouri.
Early life Anna Holland Jones was born on September 2, 1855, in Chatham, Canada West, the daughter of Emily Francis Jones and James Monroe Jones.Gwen Robinson, "Grandfather Arrived in North Carolina Aboard Slave Ship" , Chatham Daily News (February 25, 2017). Her father was one of the first black graduates of Oberlin College, finishing in 1849.Steven Lubet, The "Colored Hero" of Harper's Ferry: John Anthony Copeland and the War against Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2015): 38, 102. . Her father was a gunsmith and engraver who, with his brother Elias Toussaint Jones, was involved with John Brown's Canadian abolition activities.Jacqueline L. Tobin, From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2007): 50. . Anna H. Jones attended university in Michigan,"A Shame", Washington Bee (October 27, 1894): 2. via Newspapers.com. and graduated from Oberlin College in 1875.Roland M. Baumann, Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History (Ohio University Press, 2014). . She achieved a degree in English.
Her sister Sophia Bethena Jones (1857–1932) became a medical doctor, and "the first black faculty member at Spelman College" and founder of the school's nursing program."Sophia B. Jones Charts a Course of Success for African-American Doctors", Our Stories, Spelman College (April 2016). Her sister Fredericka Florence Jones (1860-–) also became a teacher."An Appreciation" Rising Son (March 17, 1905): 5. via Newspapers.com.
Career Anna H. Jones taught elocution at Wilberforce University in Ohio from 1885 to 1892. She taught high school and was a school principal in Kansas City, Missouri, until 1916, when she retired from classroom work.
In 1892, Jones accepted a teaching position at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri. Jones taught English and English Literature at Lincoln.
She was president of the Missouri Association of Colored Women's Clubs from 1903 to 1906. She raised the money to build a YMCA in Kansas City."$4,000 More Needed to Furnish Y. M. C. A." Kansas City Sun (October 10, 1914): 1. via Newspapers.com. She represented the Kansas City Colored Women's League in the talks that resulted in the creation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.Charles Edward Coulter, Take Up the Black Man's Burden: Kansas City's African American Communities, 1865–1939 (University of Missouri Press 2006): 39-41. . She wrote three biographical sketches for Hallie Q. Brown's Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (1926).Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Aldine Publishing, 1926): contents.
Jones traveled to London in 1900 for the First Pan-African Conference, in the company of Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Ella D. Barrier, among others. Jones and Cooper were the only two African-American women to address the Conference;Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present (Oxford University Press 2009): 246. . Jones presented a paper titled "The Preservation of Race Individuality."Vivian M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2012): 23–28. She later corresponded with W. E. B. DuBois.Letter from Anna H. Jones to W. E. B. Du Bois, December 18, 1911, W. E. B. DuBois Papers, University of Massachusetts. In 1905 her two-part essay "A Century's Progress for the American Colored Woman" appeared in consecutive issues of Voice of the Negro magazine.Anna H. Jones, "A Century's Progress for the American Colored Woman", Voice of the Negro (September 1905): 631–633 and (October 1905): 692–694. Her short essay "Women Suffrage and Social Reform" appeared in a 1915 issue of The Crisis.Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew, eds, Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism: 1900 To 1960 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005): 194–195. . Jones was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Katherine D. Tillman wrote a poem about Jones, titled "My Queen".Claudia Tate, ed., The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (Oxford University Press, 1991): 35. .
Personal life After 1892, Jones moved to Kansas City, Missouri and eventually purchased a shirt-waste style house on 2444 Montgall Avenue. In 1919, she sold her Montgall home to her colleague, John Bluford, and left Kansas City.
Jones moved to Monrovia, California, in 1921. She died there on March 7, 1932, aged 76. The Anna H. Jones Colored Women's Club was organized in Monrovia in 1932, in her memory.Susie Ling, "Community Life South Of the Tracks: Blacks in Monrovia’s History", Monrovia Weekly (February 4, 2015).
References
External links A photograph of Anna H. Jones in later life, from the Oberlin University Archives.