African American Lives

At that October diocesan convention Jones was received as a candidate for holy orders in the Episcopal Church and was licensed as a lay reader. On 21 October 1794 he formally accepted the position of pastor of St. Thomas Church. At the diocesan convention on 2 June 1795, it was stipulated that St. Thomas Church was not entitled to send a clergyman or any lay deputies to the convention, nor was it “to interfere with the general government of the Episcopal Church.” Jones was ordained a deacon on 23 August 1795 and then priest on September 1804, the first black to become a deacon or a priest in the Episcopal Church. From 1795 until his death, Jones baptized 268 black adults and 927 black infants. His ministry among blacks was so significant that he was called the “Black Bishop of the Episcopal Church.” Jones died in Philadelphia.

JONES, ADDISON.

See Nigger Add.

JONES, BILL T.

(15 Feb. 1952–), dancer and choreographer, was born William Tass Jones in Bunnell, Florida, the tenth of the twelve children of Ella and Augustus Jones, migrant farm workers who traveled throughout the Southeast. The family became “stagnants” in 1959, when they settled in the predominantly white community of Wayland in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. There they harvested fruits and vegetables and also operated a restaurant and juke joint.

In childhood Jones navigated between the rural, southern black cultural values of his home life and the predominantly white middle-class world of his peers at school. Black English was spoken at home, white English in the classroom. That experience was not without its complications and, sometimes, pain, but Jones believed that it served him well as a performer by teaching him that the “world was a place of struggle that had to be negotiated” (Washington, 190). He did well at school, won awards for public speaking, directed a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and starred on the track team. But Jones also cultivated an independent streak that one of his teachers, Mary Lee Shappee, encouraged. An outspoken atheist in a largely devout community, Shappee advised him, “There’s something more than this” (Washington, 191).

Determined to find that “something,” Jones entered the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1970 to study drama and prepare for a career on Broadway. He found himself increasingly isolated from fellow black students, however, believing that they viewed him as an “unauthentic, white dependent Negro” (Jones, 81). Although he had been in relationships with women in high school, he was also sexually attracted to men and was intrigued by a student group poster with the invitation “Gay?? Come Out and Meet Your Brothers and Sisters!!” At the consciousness-raising meeting, Jones confessed that coming out was especially difficult for him, because he was convinced that African Americans felt that being gay was the “ultimate emasculation of the black man” (Jones, 82).

During his second semester Jones met Arnie Zane, a Jewish Italian American photographer and drama student from Queens, New York. In 1971 Zane became Jones’s first male lover, and the couple began a personal and professional partnership that would last for seventeen years. Jones had begun dance lessons shortly before meeting Zane, but it was Zane who inspired his passion for dance. Jones enrolled in Afro-Caribbean and West African dance classes at Binghamton with the Trinidadian choreographer Percival Borde, participated in workshops on contact improvisation, and became grounded in the Cecchetti method of classical ballet. Martha Graham, who codified the language of modern dance, and Jerome Robbins, who choreographed West Side Story, were also influential in his development as a dancer.

Dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones has infused the world of international contemporary dance not only with his own personal dance vocabulary but also with social concerns, such as HIV/AIDS, interracial relationships, and tolerance. © Lois Greenfield, 2003

During the early 1970s Jones and Zane lived a peripatetic, bohemian existence, first in Amsterdam and then in San Francisco, before returning to Binghamton in 1974. There the couple helped a fellow dancer, Lois Welk, revive her American Dance Asylum, supplementing their income with part-time jobs—Zane as a go-go dancer and Jones as a laundry worker. By 1976 Jones was beginning to achieve recognition in the dance world, receiving a Creative Artist Public Service Award for Everybody Works / All Beasts Count, a performance in which he spun around half naked in Central Park while shouting, “I love you” to the heavens in memory of two of his favorite aunts.

Determined to establish their own distinctive style, Jones and Zane rejected both the refined, regimented modernism that they believed characterized ALVIN AILEY’s Dance Theater of Harlem and the cultural nationalist aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement. Instead, they developed an avant-garde approach influenced by Yvonne Rainier, a postmodernist choreographer and filmmaker known for her experiments with fragmented movements and for placing characters and narrative in radical juxtapositions. From the beginning of Jones and Zane’s collaboration, reviewers noted that the bodies, movements, and personalities of the two dancers provided the most dramatic juxtaposition of all. As one early review noted: “Mr. Jones is black, with a long, lithe body, a fine speaking voice and a look of leashed hostility. Mr. Zane is white, short and chunky, with a buoyant, strutting walk and the very funny look of an officious floorwalker in a second-rate department store.” (New York Times, 5 Apr. 1981). The couple also experimented with innovative locations for their performances—including the Battery Park Landfill in lower Manhattan—and often employed dancers who had little in the way of professional dance training. Looking back at their work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jones recalled that he and Zane “used to turn up our nose at refined technique. We thought it made for dead art. Instead, we’d look for the beauty in falling, running or in watching a large person jump” (People, 31 July 1989).

Jones and Zane left the American Dance Asylum in 1980, and the following year Jones appeared in Social Intercourse: Pilgrim’s Progress, which was one of five pieces by promising newcomers selected for performance at the prestigious American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. In that piece Jones improvised a solo with a monologue in which he paired seemingly paradoxical outbursts: I love white people / I hate white people; Why didn’t you leave us in Africa? / I’m so thankful for the opportunity to be here; and I love women / I hate women. Jones’s provocative style also ensured plenty of detractors, notably the New Yorker’s Arlene Croce, who described his work as narcissistic.

In 1982 Jones and Zane founded Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and Company, with Zane focusing mainly on directing and managing and Jones starring as the primary dancer. The company debuted the following year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Intuitive Momentum, a performance that drew on the martial arts, vaudeville, and social dance and which received positive reviews for the dancers’ frenzied, acrobatic movements. The company won its first New York Dance and Performance Award (known as “Bessies”) for their 1986 season at New York’s Joyce Theater, and soon emerged as among the most popular and challenging troupes in the world of modern dance. In March 1988, however, with Jones at his bedside, Zane died of AIDS-related lymphoma. Jones, too, was diagnosed as HIV positive in the 1980s but remains asymptomatic. The couple’s last collaboration, Body against Body (1989), includes Zane’s photos, Jones’s poetry and prose, performance scripts, and commentaries by dancers, critics, composers, and others.

Jones’s career continued to flourish after his partner’s death, and the company—which retained Zane’s name—remained true to its founders’ vision of an inclusive troupe that embraced different races, sexual orientations, and body shapes. Jones received a second Bessie in 1989 for D-Man in the Waters, and the following year, along with his sister Rhodessa Jones, he won an Isadora Duncan Dance Award (Izzy) for Perfect Courage.

Despite his growing fame, Jones continued to infuriate some reviewers, notably for Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin / The Promised Land (1990), a multimedia work that ended with audience members joining the dancers on stage in taking off all of their clothes. Jones responded to those critics by noting that the nudity was the entire point of the piece. “In this polarized, sexually very confused city,” he told the New York Times, “can we stand up as a group and not be ashamed of our nakedness?” (4 Nov. 1990). Even more controversial was Still/Here (1994), a work that addressed the subject of death and dying. The performance incorporated videotaped testimonies of a diverse range of people with terminal illnesses that Jones had collected at “Survival Workshops” that he had organized in several American cities. The New Yorker’s Arlene Croce dismissed the work as “victim art” and refused to attend the performance, provoking a firestorm of debate among Jones’s many admirers and detractors.

The clearest answer to Jones’s critics has been the steady flow of awards that he and his company continue to receive. These honors include a MacArthur Foundation award in 1994, a Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance and Best New Dance Production for We Set Out Early . . . Visibility Was Poor (1999), a second Izzy for Fantasy in C-Major (2001), and a third Bessie for The Table Project and The Breathing Show (2001). In addition to choreographing more than fifty works for his own company, Jones has also received commissions for works for, among others, the Boston Ballet, the Berlin Opera Ballet, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Glyndebourne Festival in England. In 1995 Jones teamed up with the legendary jazz drummer Max Roach and the Nobel Prize-winning author TONI MORRISON to produce Degga, a collaboration of dance, percussion, and spoken word at the Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival. Perhaps the most significant and fitting of Jones’s awards came in 2002, however, when the Dance Heritage Coalition of America named him an “Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”

JONES, EUGENE KINCKLE

(30 July 1885–11 Jan. 1954), social welfare reformer, was the son of Joseph Endom Jones and Rosa Daniel Kinckle, a fairly comfortable and prominent middle-class black couple in Richmond, Virginia. Both his parents were college educated. Jones grew to maturity at a period in American history when the federal government turned its back on providing full citizenship rights to African Americans. Although the Civil War had ended slavery and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution had guaranteed blacks equal rights, state governments in the South began to erode those rights following the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Jones grew up in Richmond at a time of racial polarization, and he watched as African American men and women struggled to hold on to the gains that some had acquired during Reconstruction. Like others in W. E. B. Du BoiS’s “talented tenth,” he saw education as the best means of improving his own life and of helping others, and he graduated from Richmond’s Virginia Union University in 1905. He then moved to Ithaca, New York, to attend Cornell University, where, in 1906, he was a founding member of the nation’s first black Greek lettered fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. He later helped found two other chapters at Howard University and at his alma mater, Virginia Union. He graduated from Cornell with a master’s degree in 1908 and taught high school in Louisville, Kentucky, until 1911. In 1909 he married Blanche Ruby Watson, with whom he went on to have two children.

In 1911 Jones began working as the first field secretary for the National Urban League (NUL), a social service agency for blacks that had been founded in New York City in 1910. By the 1920s he had superimposed the philosophy and organization of Alpha Phi Alpha upon the league, which was by that time dealing with the problems of poverty, poor housing, ill health, and crime that emerged during the first great black migration from the rural South to the urban North. He worked diligently to establish as many local branches as possible, believing that the concept of local branches would further the NUL’s national agenda. Jones also placed key individuals in the directorships of local branches, which enabled him to be informed at all times of the conditions in black urban areas. In addition, he established fellowship programs to ensure that a larger pool of African American social workers would be available to tackle the problems that rural migrants faced in the burgeoning inner cities of the North. In 1923, along with the NUL’s research director, the sociologist CHARLES S. JOHNSON, Jones helped launch Opportunity, a journal that addressed the problems faced by urban blacks but which also provided an outlet for a new generation of African American writers and artists, including AARON DOUGLAS and LANGSTON HUGHES.

In 1915 Jones and a group of other black social reformers founded the Social Work Club to address the concerns of African American social workers. This organization was short-lived, for by 1921 black social workers had become actively involved with the American Association of Social Workers. In 1925 the National Conference of Social Work elected Jones treasurer, making him the first African American on its executive board. Jones went on to serve the organization until 1933, by which time he had risen to the position of vice president of the National Conference of Social Work (NCSW). This post put him in a position of importance within the national structure of the social work profession. During Jones’s tenure as an executive officer of the NCSW, he worked with other black social workers to make white reformers aware—often for the first time—of the urban problems particular to African Americans.

In 1933 Jones became one of the leading black figures in Washington, D.C., when he took a position with the Department of Commerce as an adviser on Negro Affairs. Perhaps no single person matched Jones’s efforts in delivering to African American communities the opportunities that became available to them through the federal government’s newly initiated relief programs. While in Washington, he also served as the voice of the black community through the NUL and its local branches. In so doing, Jones came to personify the NUL in the 1930s, while he served along with MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, ROBERT WEAVER, and WILLIAM HENRY HASTIE as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s so-called Black Cabinet.

By the time of Jones’s retirement in 1940, the NUL had become a relatively conservative organization. A younger generation was rising to prominence, and many African Americans were no longer willing to wait as patiently for justice and their full citizenship rights as Jones and his contemporaries had been willing to do. However, Jones’s handpicked successor, Lester B. Granger, continued in the more conservative style of leadership embraced by Jones. The NUL therefore did not engage in the direct methods of the modern civil rights movement until 1960, when WHITNEY YOUNG was appointed executive secretary. Jones died in New York after a short illness in January 1954.

Like other middle-class blacks, Jones felt a strong sense of responsibility for uplifting less fortunate members of his race. In that regard, his social views conformed with other turn-of-the-century African American social reformers, such as Du Bois, CARTER G. WOODSON, JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT, and MARY CHURCH TERRELL. The accomplishments of these progressive era reformers have historically been ignored compared with those of their white counterparts, such as the settlement house leader Jane Addams. Scholars have recently begun to acknowledge, however, that African American middle-class activists like Jones led the early-twentieth-century social reform movement in black America, even though the middle-class ethos of these reformers did not exactly mirror that of the larger white society. Above all, Jones’s tenure as executive secretary of the NUL showcases the achievements of early black social reformers. He also helped make the league an African American, and an American, institution.

JONES, JAMES EARL

(17 Jan. 1931—), actor, was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, the only child of Robert Earl Jones, a prizefighter and actor, and Ruth Williams Connoly, a seamstress. James’s parents parted ways in search of work before their son was born, and he was raised by his mother’s parents, John and Maggie Connoly. He grew up on their farm, alongside seven children and two other grandchildren. From an early age James was put to work beside his aunts, uncles, and cousins, tending the livestock, hunting, and helping with harvests. At night Maggie Connoly would regale the family with lurid bedtime stories—tales of lynchings, hurricanes, and rapes. The Connolys knew that Mississippi schools offered their children little, and in 1936 they planned a move to Dublin, Michigan. Before the family left, John Connoly took James to his paternal grandmother’s house in Memphis, but James refused to leave the car. He followed the family north later that year.

Soon after the move to Michigan, James began to stutter; he spoke only to his family, to the farm animals, and to himself. In grammar school he managed to get by on written work, and it was not until high school that someone sought to help him. An English teacher, Donald Crouch, pushed James to join the debate team. With practice, James proved a captivating orator and, by the end of high school, managed to overcome his stuttering in conversation, too. As he regained his powers of speech, he took to the classics Crouch taught and spent many an afternoon reading Shakespeare aloud in the fields.

At this time James’s father was living in New York City and trying his hand at theater. When James announced to his uncle Randy that he, too, would be an actor, John Connoly pounced on his grandson and struck him in the back of the head. In 1949 James entered the University of Michigan on a Regents Scholarship and enrolled in premed classes, but the pull of the theater proved too strong; he began taking roles in school plays and spending his holidays in summer-stock productions.

Jones had joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps to help fund his education, and he abandoned school in 1953, just before graduation, convinced that he would shortly be killed in the Korean War. But the conflict cooled off that summer, and Jones spent his two years of service at the Cold Weather Training Command in Colorado. He enjoyed the strenuous work and the solitude of the Rockies, but when he told his commanding officer that he wanted to be an actor, he was urged to pursue theater before committing to military life. Jones finished his BA through an extension program and moved in with his father in New York. He enrolled in acting workshops at the American Theatre Wing, paying his way with funds from the GI Bill.

After twenty-four years of separation, Jones and his father did not get along well, and during one argument they nearly came to blows. But if the two did not bond as father and son, they came together over their shared passion. late into the night, they would recite scenes from Othello. After six months Jones moved to the Lower East Side and continued his austere routine of workshops, auditions, and menial jobs. In 1957 he landed his first Broadway role as an understudy to Lloyd Richards in The Egghead. That same year he found more substantial work in Ted Pollock’s play Wedding in Japan.

In the early 1960s off-Broadway theater offered a heady cocktail of new talent, edgy scripts, and rundown venues. Jones entered the fray as Deodatus Village in the 1961 production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, a savage and absurdist allegory of race relations written for an all-black cast. Critics at the Village Voice and the New Yorker swooned, and both singled Jones out for praise from a cast that included Cicely Tyson, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett, and MAYA ANGELOU. Given the charged political climate and the play’s violent language, performances were hard on audiences and performers alike, and Jones left the cast, to recover, some six times during the play’s two-year run. In 1962 Jones earned several awards for his performances in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl and won an Obie as Best Actor in Off Broadway Theater for his work in Clandestine on the Morning Line. Throughout the 1960s Jones built a name for himself at the New York Shakespeare Festival and his 1964 title role in Othello won a Drama Desk Award for Best Performance. The following year, he received two Obies for his work in Othello and in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal.

No role propelled his career, however, like his 1967 portrayal of Jack Jefferson, a character based on JACK JOHNSON, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, in Howard Sackler’s play The Great White Hope. To prepare for the audition he began a brutal exercise regimen. Six feet, two inches tall, slimmed down to two hundred pounds, his head shaved and shiny, Jones landed the part, which earned him his first Tony Award and another Drama Desk Award. The play, which challenged and titillated audiences with its interracial love story, moved from the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., to Broadway in 1968. Jones reprised the role two years later in Martin Ritt’s film adaptation of the play, which costarred Jane Alexander and earned Jones an Oscar nomination.

SIDNEY POITIER urged Jones to avoid the stock parts film and television typically offered black actors. For several years Jones heeded the advice, but in 1964 he took a small part as a pilot in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove. Jones also began to make inroads into the small screen. A 1965 stint on As the World Turns made him the first African American with a continuing role in a daytime soap opera. In 1967 Jones married Julienne Marie Hendricks, who had played Desdemona to his Othello in 1964. But Jones’s growing success brought a new measure of instability to his life, and the marriage did not last.

On stage in 1970 Jones appeared in LORRAINE HANSBERRY’s play Les Blancs and costarred with RUBY DEE in Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena. He continued working in film and television throughout the early and mid 1970s. Highlights included playing the title role in King Lear on television in 1974 and appearing as the big screen’s first African American president of the United States in The Man in 1972. In 1977 Jones was cast as PAUL ROBESON in the one-man show based on the life of the actor, singer, and activist who had once been feted for his magnetic stage presence, but wound up blacklisted as a result of his politics. Robeson died in 1976, and the play was meant to honor his career, but it, too, fell victim to censorship. Rallied by the actor’s son, Paul Robeson Jr., the Ad Hoc Committee to End the Crimes against Paul Robeson charged that the play distorted Robeson’s life. Theater after theater was picketed. After one of the last performances, Jones delivered a blistering indictment of the committee’s antics. In 1979 Jones starred in the play’s film adaptation directed by Lloyd Richards.

Jones, who continued his stage work in such plays as Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys and Of Mice and Men, has been known to stop mid-performance to shush members of the crew and the audience or to ask them in his round, resonant basso to “stop popping that fucking bubble gum!” (Jones, 334). His relationships with directors and writers have also been strained at times. In 1981 while preparing for a new production of Othello, Jones accused the director Peter Coe of turning Shakespeare’s tragedy into a farce. In 1987’s Fences, a father-son play about a poor black family, Jones butted heads with the playwright AUGUST WILSON. In spite of these clashes—or perhaps because of them—both plays won critical acclaim. Othello received a Tony for Best Revival, while Fences won Jones both a Tony and a Drama Desk for his performance.

In early 1982 Jones married Cecilia Hart. That December their son, Flynn Earl Jones, was born. To support his new family, Jones chose to spend more time in the unglamorous world of made-for-TV movies, bit parts, and voice-overs. The last came in droves after Jones lent his voice to the role of the archvillain Darth Vader in George Lucas’s Star Wars films released in 1977, 1980, and 1983. Asked why he had agreed to provide the film’s most evil character with a black voice, Jones replied that the work took two hours and paid seven thousand dollars.

Following Fences, Jones decided that he no longer had the energy for leading roles on the stage, which may account for his increased presence on the screen. In addition to his many featured roles on television, Jones appeared in a variety of films, including John Sayles’s Matewan (1987), about coal miners struggling to form a union in Mingo County, West Virginia, in 1920. Jones worked in comedy as well, in such films as Soul Man (1986) and the Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America (1988). In 1989 he appeared as the reclusive, misanthropic writer in Field of Dreams, one the year’s most popular films. Throughout the 1990s Jones appeared in films and on television at an astounding rate. He played Admiral Greer in the highly popular films The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger, based on the novels by Tom Clancy. Notable leading roles included the title role in the television series Gabriel’s Fire, in which he starred for two seasons, and a priest accused of murder in the 1995 film version of Alan Paton’s novel about South Africa, Cry the Beloved Country.

More and more, however, Jones is in demand simply as himself, as a host, presenter, and narrator. He voiced the animated characters King Mufasa in Disney’s The Lion King (1994) and the long-silent Maggie on The Simpsons. A popular commercial pitchman, Jones and his distinctive voice have become part of American daily life, telling television viewers that they are watching CNN or thanking callers for using a Verizon pay phone. Instead of asking for autographs, fans beg Jones to record their answering machine messages. Over the last half century Jones has appeared in over two hundred films and television shows. For his work as an actor, Jones has won four Emmy awards, two Tony awards, two Obie awards, five Drama Desk awards, a Golden Globe award and a Grammy. A presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts from 1970 to 1976, Jones has received five honorary doctorates and the NAACP Hall of Fame Image Award. In 1992 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George Bush. While Jones’s career displays a boundless range, depth, and energy, most of his fans see his legacy in more grandiose terms; he is, quite simply, the voice of America.

JONES, LEROI.

See Baraka, Amiri.

JONES, LOÏS MAILOU

(3 Nov. 1905–9 June 1998), artist and teacher, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the second of two children of Carolyn Dorinda Adams, a beautician, and Thomas Vreeland Jones, a building superintendent. Loïs’s father became a lawyer at age forty, and she credited him with inspiring her by example: “Much of my drive surely comes from my father—wanting to be someone, to have an ambition” (Benjamin, 4). While majoring in art at the High School of Practical Arts, Lois spent afternoons in a drawing program at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. On weekends she apprenticed with Grace Ripley, a prominent designer of theatrical masks and costumes. From 1923 to 1927 she studied design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and became one of the school’s first African American graduates. Upon graduation, Lois, who had earned a teaching certificate from the Boston Normal Art School, received a one-year scholarship to the Designers Art School of Boston, where she studied with the internationally known textile designer Ludwig Frank. The following summer, while attending Harvard University, she designed textiles for companies in Boston and New York. She soon learned, however, that designers toiled in anonymity, and so, seeking recognition for her creations, she decided to pursue a career as a fine artist.

The Jones family spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard, the beauty of which inspired Lois to paint as a child and where her first solo exhibitions, at age seventeen and twenty-three, were held. A retreat for generations of African American intellectuals, Martha’s Vineyard exposed the young artist to career encouragement from the sculptor META WARRICK FULLER, the composer HARRY BURLEIGH, and Jonas Lie, president of the National Academy of Design. When she applied for a teaching job at the Museum of Fine Arts, administrators patronizingly told her to “go South and help your people.” Jones did go to the South in 1928, but at the behest of CHARLOTTE HAWKINS BROWN, who offered her a position developing an art department at the Palmer Memorial Institute, an African American school in North Carolina. Two years later Jones was recruited by Howard University and remained on the faculty until her retirement in 1977.

For forty-seven years she taught design and watercolor (which was considered more appropriate to her gender than oil painting) to generations of students, including ELIZABETH CATLETT. “I loved my students,” Jones told the Washington Post when she was asked about teaching. “Also it gave me a certain prestige, a certain dignity. And it saved me from being trampled upon by the outside” (1 Mar. 1978). Jones emphasized craftsmanship and encouraged each student’s choice of medium and mode of expression. As a former student, Akili Ron Anderson, recalled, “Loïs Jones would punish you like a parent . . . but when you met her standards, when you progressed, she loved you like your mother” (Washington Post, 26 Dec. 1995).

Jones remained committed to her own work and education, and she received a BA in Art Education magna cum laude from Howard University in 1945. In the 1930s she was a regular exhibitor at the Harmon Foundation, and from 1936 to 1965 she illustrated books and periodicals, including African Heroes and Heroines (1938) and the Journal of Negro History, for her friend CARTER G. WOODSON. After receiving a scholarship to study in Paris in 1937, Jones took a studio overlooking the Eiffel Tower, enrolled at the Académie Julien, and switched her focus from design and illustration to painting. France also precipitated a shift in her attitude. Feeling self-confident and liberated for the first time, she adopted the plein air method of painting, taking her large canvases outdoors onto the streets of Paris and the hills of the French countryside. With the African American expatriate artist Albert Smith and the French painter Emile Bernard as mentors, she produced more than forty paintings in just nine months. Jones’s streetscapes, still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, typified by Rue St. Michel (1938) and Les Pommes Vertes (1938), illustrate a sophisticated interpretation of impressionist and post-impressionist style and sensibility.

African art and culture were all the rage during Jones’s visit to Paris. Sketching African masks on display in Parisian galleries prepared her for what would become her best-known work, Les Fétiches (1938), a cubist-inspired painting of African masks that foreshadowed Jones’s embrace of African themes and styles in her later work. In 1990, when the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., acquired Les Fétiches, Jones responded: “I am very pleased but it is long overdue . . . . I can’t help but think this is an honor that is 45 years late” (Washington Post, 7 Oct. 1994).

Even while the Robert Vose Gallery in Boston exhibited her Parisian paintings shortly after her return to the United States, Jones longed for the racial tolerance she had experienced in France. When she met Alain Locke upon her return to Howard, he challenged her to concentrate on African American subjects. And so began what Jones later called her Locke period. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s she continued to paint in a semi-impressionist style but increasingly depicted African American subjects, as in the character studies Jennie (1943), a portrait of a black girl cleaning fish; Mob Victim (1944), a study of a man about to be lynched; and The Pink Tablecloth (1944).

Jones began exhibiting more extensively, primarily in African American venues such as the Chicago Negro Exposition of 1940 and the black-owned Barnett Aden Gallery, although traditionally white venues also included her work. On occasion, Jones masked her race by entering competitions by mail or by sending her white friend Celine Tabary to deliver her work. Such was the case in 1941 when her painting Indian Shops, Gay Head (1940) won the Corcoran Gallery’s Robert Wood Bliss Award. It was several years before the Corcoran knew that the painting was the product of a black artist.

In 1953 Jones married Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël, a Haitian artist she had met at Columbia University summer school in 1934. The couple, who had no children, maintained homes in Washington, Martha’s Vineyard, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, until Pierre-Noël’s death in 1982. Shortly after their wedding Jones taught briefly at Haiti’s Centre d’Art and the Foyer des Arts Plastiques. Haiti proved to be the next great influence on Jones’s work. “Going to Haiti changed my art, changed my feelings, changed me” (Callaloo, Spring 1989). Character studies and renderings of the picturesque elements of island life soon gave way to more expressive works that fused abstraction and decorative elements with naturalism. Drawing on the palette and the diverse religious life and culture of Haiti, Jones incorporated voodoo gods, abstract decorative patterns, bright colors, and African elements into her paintings. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s she used strong color and flat, abstract shapes in a diverse range of works, including Bazar du Quai (1961), VeVe Voodou III (1963), and Paris Rooftops (1965).

In 1970–1971 Jones took a sabbatical from Howard and traveled through eleven countries in Africa, interviewing artists, photographing their work, and lecturing on African American artists. Jones, who had spent the previous summer interviewing contemporary Haitian artists, used these materials to complete her documentary project “The Black Visual Arts.” The bold, graphic beauty of African textiles, leatherwork, and masks resonated with her early fabric designs and provided a new vocabulary for her work, which now included collage as well as painting and watercolor. Once again, Jones visited museums and sketched African masks and fetishes, items increasingly significant in pieces like Moon Masque (1971) and Guli Mask (1972).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by Haiti and Africa and by the Black Arts Movement in the United States, Jones’s work centered on African themes and styles.

Jones, who finally returned to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1973 for a retrospective exhibition, had more than fifty solo shows. She received numerous awards and honorary degrees, including citations from the Haitian government in 1955 and from U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 1980. In 1988 Jones’s artistic life came full circle when she opened the Lois Mailou Jones Studio Gallery in Edgartown, Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard. At age eighty-four Jones assessed the key influences on her work: “So now . . . in the sixtieth year of my career, I can look back on my work and be inspired by France, Haiti, Africa, the Black experience, and Martha’s Vineyard (where it all began) and admit: There is no end to creative expression” (Callaloo, Spring 1989). Lois Mailou Jones died at age ninety-two at her home in Washington, D.C.

JONES, MADAME SISSIERETTA JOYNER

(5 Jan. 1869–24 June 1933), classical prima donna and musical comedy performer, was born Matilda Sissieretta Joyner in Portsmouth, Virginia, less than four years after the abolition of slavery. Jones was the only surviving child of Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, an ex-slave and pastor of the Afro-Methodist Church in Portsmouth, and Henrietta B. Joyner, a singer in the church choir. Thus, she was exposed to music during her formative years. When she was six years old her family moved to Rhode Island where Sissieretta began singing in the church choir, which her father directed. Her school classmates were mesmerized by her sweet, melodic, soprano voice and nicknamed her “Sissy.”

She began studying voice as a teenager at the prestigious Providence Academy of Music with Ada, Baroness Lacombe, an Italian prima donna. Not long afterwards, in 1883, when she was only fourteen, Sissieretta met and married David Richard Jones, a newspaperman who also served as her manager during her early years on stage. She also received more vocal training at both the New England Conservatory and the Boston Conservatory. After her first concert performance with the Academy of Music on 8 May 1888, the New York Age reported that Jones’s “voice is sweet, sympathetic and clear, and her enunciation a positive charm. She was recalled after each number” (The Black Perspective in Music, 192). In an attempt to make her more palatable to white audiences, David Jones, who was himself of a mixed race background, took his wife to Europe to have her skin lightened and to have some of her features altered.

Lauded in Europe and America, but barred from singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York because of her race, Madame Sissieretta Jones became the star of her own musical comedy troupe. Library of Congress

Jones made her New York City debut in a private concert at the Wallack Theatre on 1 August 1888. She was already being compared to the Italian prima donna Adelina Patti, who was adored by audiences throughout the world. As a result, Jones was dubbed “Black Patti.” She wanted her own identity but was forced to accept the nickname, which remained with her throughout her more than thirty-year career (Daughtry, 133).

In the early 1890s discussions ensued about possible appearances by Jones at the New York City Metropolitan Opera. She wanted very much to sing in a full-length opera at the Met. In the meantime, in 1891, she set out on a tour of the West Indies, where she was honored with numerous medals for her dynamic voice. After she returned to the United States, Jones appeared at Madison Square Garden in New York City in what was billed as an African Jubilee Spectacle and Cakewalk. Thousands listened to Jones, who was fluent in both Italian and French, sing selections from grand operas like Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable as well as her popular signature piece, “Swanee River.” By 1892 she had already appeared at the White House three times as well as before European royalty. After performances at the Pittsburgh Exposition in 1893 and 1894, Jones became the highest paid black performer of her day.

Jones emerged as a celebrity and wanted to control her career. However, when she made this groundbreaking attempt in 1892, her manager, Major Pond, took her to court. There the judge ruled that she was ungrateful because she failed to appreciate how Pond was largely responsible for her accomplishments on the concert stage.

In New York City, Jones joined famed Czech composer Antonin Dvorak and his students from the National Conservatory of Music for a benefit concert in 1894. A New York Herald reporter said of the January concert, “Mme. Jones was an enormous success with the audience. To those who heard her for the first time she came in the light of a revelation, singing high C’s with as little apparent effort as her namesake, the white Patti” (The Black Perspective in Music, 199). Both the white and the black press continued to laud her as the “greatest singer of her race.” Nevertheless, the opportunity to sing at the Metropolitan Opera was still denied to Jones because of her ethnicity. These racist restrictions inspired her to leave the concert stage behind.

At the turn of the century, black musical comedies, which were first called coon shows, drew huge crowds into the theaters. Black female performers entered musical theater around 1885. During the height of popularity for musical comedies, managers were in control and dictated what performers would do. Managers Rudolph Voelckel and John J. Nolan, who are often credited along with David Jones for luring “Black Patti” to musical theater, planned to make the former concert stage prima donna the star of her own musical black touring company.

On 26 September 1896 Black Patti’s Troubadours made their debut in a mini-musical called “At Jolly Coon-ey Island: A Merry Musical Farce,” cowritten by Bob Cole and William Johnson. “At Jolly Coon-ey Island” contained almost no plot. Rather, it was a revue that included classical music, vaudeville, burlesque, and skits performed by an enormous group of fifty dancers, singers, tumblers, and comedians. Black Patti’s Troubadours were unique. Unlike other black companies, the Troubadours omitted the cakewalk, a popular, high-stepping dance, from their finale. Instead, an operatic kaleidoscope featuring Black Patti concluded the show. The Troubadours placed the spotlight on Black Patti, who stylishly appeared in tiaras, long satin gowns, and white gloves to perform selections from the operatic composers Balfe, Verdi, Wagner, and Gounod.

Black Patti’s Troubadours, billed as the “greatest colored show on earth,” was based in New York City but toured throughout the United States and abroad. Advertisements claimed the group traveled thousands of miles in the United States in a train car called “Black Patti, America’s Finest Show Car.” Jones was the central attraction in productions like A Ragtime Frolic at Rasbury Park (1899–1900) and A Darktown Frolic at the Rialto (1900–1901). Although it is unclear how much of Jones’s actual earnings went to Voelckel and Nolan, two years after the establishment of Black Patti’s Troubadours, The Colored American reported that Jones commanded a salary of five hundred dollars per week. However, her husband was allegedly a gambler. His gambling, drinking, and misuse of their money led to the couple’s divorce in 1899.

By 1900 Black Patti’s Troubadours was solidly recognized as one of the most popular companies on the American stage. It helped to launch the careers of women like Ida Forsyne, Aida Overton Walker, and Stella Wiley. Many black performers, who began their careers with Black Patti, went on to experience success on their own. One might argue that their association with Jones, a highly respected, even revered performer, contributed to their later success.

As America’s tastes began to change, the Troubadours adopted the name Black Patti Musical Comedy Company. Blacks began to view black musical comedies as negative depictions of their race, while whites began to turn their attention to other forms of entertainment. Some of the troupe’s later productions were set in an African jungle. Jones played the queen in a 1907 production called Trip to Africa. She was included in the action of the comedy in a skit called “In the Jungles” for the first time in 1911. From 1914 to 1915 the operatic kaleidoscope no longer appeared in the Troubadours’ program.

Jones made her final performance at New York City’s Lafayette Theater in 1915. As the mother of two adopted sons, she moved back to Providence, Rhode Island, where she also cared for her ailing mother. When Jones became ill and fell into obscurity, she was forced to rely on assistance from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Sissieretta Jones died on 24 June 1933 at Rhode Island Hospital. She remains one of the most celebrated black performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

JONES, QUINCY

(14 Mar. 1933–), jazz musician, composer, and record, television, and film producer, was born Quincy Delight Jones Jr. on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, the son of Sarah (maiden name unknown) and Quincy Jones Sr., a carpenter who worked for a black gangster ring that ran the Chicago ghetto. When Quincy Sr.’s mentally ill wife was institutionalized, he sent their sons, Quincy Jr. and Lloyd, to live in the South with their grandmother. In his autobiography Jones writes of growing up so poor that his grandmother served them fried rats to eat. By the age of ten he was living with Lloyd and their father in Seattle, Washington. “My stepbrother, my brother, and myself, and my cousin . . . we burned down stores, we stole, whatever you had to do,” Jones said (CNN Online, “Q and A: A Talk with Quincy Jones,” 11 Dec. 2001).

Modern jazz was Jones’s way out. Inspired by the now legendary jazzmen who passed through Seattle in the 1940s, Jones began studying trumpet in junior high school. When COUNT BASIE brought a group to Seattle in 1950, Jones, then a teenager, approached one band member, Clark Terry, an acclaimed trumpeter, for lessons. “He’s the type of cat, anything he wanted to do, he could’ve done,” Terry said later in his autobiography.

Jones showed enough musical promise to win a scholarship to Schillinger House in Boston (now the Berklee School of Music), but he dropped out after a year to accept a place in the trumpet section of Lionel Hampton’s band. In 1951, Hampton made a record of Jones’s “Kingfish” and gave the teenager his first recorded composition. Thereafter, Jones settled in New York City, where he found work as an arranger for some of the biggest stars in jazz, including Count Basie, Cannonball Adderley, and Dinah Washington. In 1956 he hired an array of top musicians for his first album, This Is How I Feel about Jazz. “His writing is not exploratory,” writes jazz critic Leonard Feather. He wrote in his New Encyclopedia of Jazz about Jones’s musical compositions, “Unlike many of the younger writers who have experimented with atonality and extended forms, he has remained within the classic jazz framework; his reputation rests mainly on brief compositions that combine the swinging big band feel of the better orchestras of the ’30s with the harmonic developments of the ’40s.”

In May 1956 Jones joined the DIZZY GILLESPIE orchestra on a State Department-sponsored tour of the Middle East and South America. A year later he moved to Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, a conductor and composition teacher known for her illustrious expatriate pupils, including Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. Modern jazz was blossoming in Paris, and Jones became a producer-arranger for Disques Barclay, France’s premier jazz label. In the fall of 1959 he became musical director of Free and Easy, a touring blues opera by Harold Arlen. Jones had assembled a big band for the show, and in September 1959 he took it on a European tour. The enterprise proved much too costly, and in 1960 it fell apart, leaving Jones deeply in debt.

Returning to New York, Jones was hired in May 1961 as an A&R (“Artist and Repertory”) man at Mercury Records. After producing a number-one hit—Lesley Gore’s teenage pop lament “It’s My Party”—and other artistic and creative successes, he became vice president of the company in November 1964. It was reportedly the first time a black man had held such a high position in the U.S. record business. In addition to arranging and conducting for Frank Sinatra, Basie, SARAH VAUGHAN, and Peggy Lee, Jones was writing and recording his own albums.

Beginning with Sidney Lumet’s Pawnbroker in 1964, Jones began composing film music, collaborating with many of the decade’s seminal filmmakers, including Lumet, Sidney Pollack, Norman Jewison, Richard Brooks, and Paul Mazursky. He also teamed with the actor SIDNEY POITIER for six films during the 1960s and early 1970s. Jones’s scores for such films as The Pawnbroker, In Cold Blood (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Cactus Flower (1969), and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) introduced jazz, soul, and, later, funk into films, contributing to the increased sophistication and interrelatedness of music to popular film. Jones also played a part in bringing a new sound to TV with his scores for Ironside (1967–1975); The Bill Cosby Show (1969); Sanford and Son (1972–1977), starring REDD FOXX; and the miniseries Roots (1977), based on the book by ALEX HALEY and for which Jones won an Emmy.

Jones’s affairs with a string of women, including Dinah Washington and Peggy Lee, had put a severe strain on his marriage to Jeri Caldwell, his white high-school sweetheart and the mother of his first child, Jolie. Married in 1957, the couple divorced nine years later. Jones quickly entered into a brief marriage with Ulla Andersson, a blonde model. In 1974 he married Peggy Lipton, star of TV’s Mod Squad. The couple had two children and divorced in 1989.

In 1969 Jones moved to A&M, by which time he had made a nearly full-time shift toward commercial pop. The trumpeter MILES DAVIS had plunged into fusion, a new style of electric jazz-rock and Jones did the same in Walking in Space (1974), his first of several hit records that combined jazz, fusion, and funk. Jones continued his work as orchestrator, arranging the strings for Paul Simon’s foray into pop-gospel and rhythm and blues, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973). But Jones remained loyal to the jazz musicians he loved and filled his orchestras with them. In 1973 he began a career in TV production with a gala special on the CBS network called DUKE ELLINGTON . . . WE LOVE YOU MADLY, featuring a cast that included Vaughan, Lee, Joe Williams, and Jones’s boyhood friend RAY CHARLES, along with newer stars like Roberta Flack and ARETHA FRANKLIN.

Jones, who had worked on behalf of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s Operation Breadbasket, helped organize Chicago’s Black EXPO, an offshoot of Operation PUSH, with JESSE JACKSON in 1972. He later served on the board of PUSH and, much later, produced a talk show with Jackson, The Jesse Jackson Show (1990). Jones, who had begun seriously educating himself about black and African music, became increasingly committed to the historical preservation of African American music. He helped establish the annual Black Arts Festival in Chicago and the Institute for Black American Music, which donated funds toward the establishment of a national library of African American art and music.

Jones’s workaholic tendencies caught up with him in August 1974 when he suffered a near fatal brain aneurysm and underwent two major neurological surgeries. Once recovered, he returned to his career with the same fervor. In 1979 he produced MICHAEL JACKSON’s solo album Off the Wall, which yielded four top-ten hits. In 1981 Jones left A&M and established the Qwest label at Warner Bros. Although he made his initial mark as a jazz arranger, producer, and bandleader, Jones became a household name by producing Jackson’s next album, 1982’s Thriller, which sold fifty million albums and became the biggest-selling album of all time. Jackson and Jones remained a team for years, working on Bad (1987) and other projects.

Apart from his work with Michael Jackson, Jones’s greatest commercial triumph came in 1985, with the slick all-star album USA for Africa, which featured the song “We Are the World.” Written by Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and performed by forty-six music stars, including Bruce Springsteen and DIANA Ross, the single sold seven and a half million copies, raised fifty million dollars for famine relief in Africa, and won Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

Jones showed his ingenuity for mixing pop with traditional genres with The Dude (1980), a pop-soul extravaganza with Jackson, STEVIE WONDER, Herbie Hancock, the jazz harmonica and guitar player Toots Thielemans, and two of Jones’s protégés, the singers Patti Austin and James Ingram. He continued this pattern in 1989 with Back on the Block, an album that mingled Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, ELLA FITZGERALD, and Sarah Vaughan with the rappers Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane. “I’ll Be Good to You,” a top-twenty single from that album, paired Ray Charles with the pop-soul belter Chaka Khan.

After his successful turn in 1985 as coproducer of the Steven Spielberg film adaptation of ALICE WALKER’s The Color Purple, Jones expanded his empire into film and television production. Through Quincy Jones Entertainment, Inc. (QJE), a joint enterprise with Time Warner formed in 1990, Jones created The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (1990–1996), the TV series that launched actor Will Smith, and the long-running comedy show Mad TV. Jones’s other producing projects include the multipart History of Rock and Roll (1995) and the 2002 documentary TUPAC SHAKUR: Thug Angel. The founder of Quincy Jones Music Publishing, Jones also owns Qwest Broadcasting, which, with the Tribune Company, owns television stations in Atlanta and New Orleans. In 1990 Jones established a magazine, Vibe, which focused on black pop music. The next year he persuaded the ailing Miles Davis to revisit classic work of the 1950s in a concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Davis hated looking back; only Jones could persuade him to do so. Davis died two months later.

The recipient of countless awards, Jones has earned seventy-seven Grammy nominations and won twenty-six times. He is a six-time Oscar nominee, and at the 1995 Academy Awards he won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. In 1990 Warner Bros, released a documentary based on his life, Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones. Eleven years later he received a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement. As awards showered down on him in the 1980s and 1990s, some critics thought Jones outrageously overhyped. There is little disagreement, however, about his abilities in combining talent in the studio to dazzling effect. Throughout his career he showed a shrewd business sense, earning millions of dollars, riding almost every new musical trend, including fusion and rap. While he will not be remembered as an exceptional trumpeter, Jones remains one of the most celebrated and charismatic figures in the pop music business. He has also allied himself with the biggest names in jazz, pop, and film to a point where he has been absorbed into their ranks.

JONES, SCIPIO AFRICANUS

(1863–28 Mar. 1943), lawyer, was born in Dallas County, Arkansas, the son of a white father, whose identity remains uncertain, and Jemmima, a slave who belonged to Dr. Sanford Reamey, a physician and landowner. After emancipation, Jemmima and her freedman husband, Horace, became farmers and adopted the surname of Jones, in memory of Dr. Adolphus Jones, a previous owner. Scipio Jones attended rural black schools in Tulip, Arkansas, and moved to Little Rock in 1881 to pursue a college preparatory course at Bethel University. He then entered Shorter College, from which he graduated in 1885 with a bachelor’s degree in Education. When the University of Arkansas Law School denied him admission because of his race, he read law with several white attorneys in Little Rock and was admitted to the bar in 1889. His marriage to Carrie Edwards in 1896 ended in his wife’s early death and left him with a daughter to raise. In 1917 he married Lillie M. Jackson of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

By the turn of the century Jones had become the leading black practitioner in Little Rock. His clients, who were drawn exclusively from the African American community, included several large, fraternal organizations, such as the Mosaic Templars of America. He also played an active role in Republican politics, supporting the efforts of the “Black and Tan” faction to wrest control of the state party from the “Lily Whites.” In 1902 he promoted a slate of black Republicans to challenge the party regulars and the Democrats in a local election, and in 1920 he made an unsuccessful bid for the post of Republican national committeeman. The struggle to secure equal treatment for African Americans within the party lasted from the late 1880s to the 1930s and resulted in a compromise that guaranteed black representation on the Republican state central committee. As a sign of changing times, Jones was elected as a delegate to the Republican National Conventions of 1928 and 1940. Despite the existence of poll taxes that disfranchised most black voters, he also won election as a special judge of the Little Rock municipal court in 1915, at a time when few African Americans held judicial office anywhere in the country.

Jones’s lifelong commitment to protecting the civil rights of blacks led to his involvement in the greatest legal battle of his career: the defense of twelve tenant farmers who were sentenced to death for alleged murders committed during the bloody Elaine, Arkansas, race riot of October 1919. The violence grew out of black efforts to establish a farmers’ union and white fears that a dangerous conspiracy was being plotted at their secret meetings. When two white men were reportedly shot near a black church, the white community engaged in murderous reprisals that left more than two hundred blacks and five whites dead. An all-white grand jury quickly indicted 122 blacks, and because most of the defendants were indigent, the court appointed defense counsel for them. These white lawyers did not interview their clients, request a change of venue, or object to all-white trial juries. The trials themselves lasted less than an hour, and it took juries only five or six minutes to return guilty verdicts. Several defendants and witnesses later claimed that they had been tortured, and an angry white mob surrounded the courthouse during the trials. Besides the twelve men who were sentenced to death, sixty-seven others received long prison terms.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People retained Jones and George W. Murphy, a white Little Rock attorney, to appeal the convictions. Jones became the senior defense counsel after Murphy died in October 1920, and he tirelessly pursued every avenue of relief under state law, risking his life on several occasions by his courtroom appearances in the hostile community of Helena. Jones’s arguments impressed the Arkansas Supreme Court, which twice ordered new trials for six defendants. In the first instance Jones pointed to technical defects in the form of the verdicts. On the second appeal he contended that the trial judge’s rejection of evidence pointing to racial discrimination in the selection of jurors had deprived his clients of their equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. To prevent the impending executions of the remaining six defendants, Jones turned to the federal courts. Arguing that the prisoners had been deprived of their constitutional right to a fair trial, he sought their release through a habeas corpus proceeding. Eventually the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where it resulted in a landmark decision, Moore v. Dempsey (1923). By looking behind the formal state record for the first time, the Court overturned the convictions and held that the defendants had been denied due process, since their original trial had been little more than a legalized lynching bee. Although Jones did not participate in the final argument of the case, his strategy had guided the litigation process from the beginning. In the aftermath of Moore v. Dempsey, he secured an order from the Arkansas Supreme Court for the discharge of six prisoners in June 1923. He then negotiated with state authorities to secure commutation of sentences and parole for all of the remaining Elaine “rioters” by January 1925.

In his later years Jones continued to attack racially discriminatory laws and practices in Arkansas. He was instrumental in obtaining legislation that granted out-of-state tuition payments to black students who could not enter the state’s all-white professional schools. He died in Little Rock. To commemorate his community leadership, the all-white school board of North Little Rock named the black high school in his memory.

JOPLIN, SCOTT

(24 Nov. 1868?–1 Apr. 1917), ragtime composer and pianist, was born in or near Texarkana, Texas, one of six children of Giles Joplin, reportedly a former slave from North Carolina, and Florence Givens, a free woman from Kentucky. Many aspects of Joplin’s early life are shrouded in mystery. At a crucial time in his youth, Scott’s father left the family, and Florence was forced to raise him as a single parent. She made arrangements for her son to receive piano lessons in exchange for her domestic services, and he was allowed to practice piano where she worked. A precocious child whose talent was noticed by the time he was seven years old, Scott had undoubtedly inherited talent from his parents, as Giles had played violin and Florence sang and played the banjo. His own experimentations at the piano and his basic music training with local teachers contributed to his advancement. Scott attended Orr Elementary School in Texarkana and then traveled to Sedalia, Missouri, perhaps residing with relatives while studying at Lincoln High School.

Joplin built an early reputation as a pianist and gained fame as a composer of piano ragtime during the Gay Nineties, plying his trade concurrently with composers such as WILL MARION COOK and HARRY BURLEIGH. Joplin was essential in the articulation of a distinctly American style of music. Minstrelsy was still in vogue when Joplin was a teenager performing in vaudeville shows with the Texas Medley Quartette, a group he founded with his brothers. Joplin reportedly arrived in St. Louis by 1885, landing a job as a pianist at John Turpin’s Silver Dollar Saloon. In 1894 he was hired at Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Cafe. As musicians flocked to the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893, Joplin was among them, playing at nightspots close to the fair. Afterward, he returned to Sedalia, the “Cradle of Ragtime,” accompanied by the pianist Otis Saunders.

Scott Joplin, “The King of Ragtime,” c. 1911. Schomburg Center

Although he was playing piano in various cities, Joplin still found time to blow the cornet in Sedalia’s Queen City Band. In 1895 he continued playing with the Quartette and toured as far as Syracuse, New York, where some businessmen were sufficiently impressed with his talents to publish his first vocal songs. Additionally, Joplin was hired as a pianist at Sedalia’s famous Maple Leaf Club. He also taught piano, banjo, and mandolin, claiming among his students the pianists Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden, and Sanford B. Campbell. By 1896 Joplin had settled in Sedalia and matriculated at the George Smith College for Negroes. With the confidence and ambition fostered by this formal training, he approached the Fuller-Smith and Carl Hoffman Companies, which published some of his piano rags. It was also in Sedalia that he met John Stark, who became his friend and the publisher of Joplin’s celebrated “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899).

In 1900 Joplin began a three year relationship with Belle Hayden, which produced a child who soon died. He then married Freddie Alexander in 1904, but her death that same year sent him wandering about for at least a year, returning at times to Sedalia and St. Louis. In 1905 he went to Chicago, and by 1907 he had followed John Stark to New York and married Lottie Stokes, who remained with him until his death. In the years after the turn of the century, the piano replaced the violin in popularity. Playing ragtime on the parlor piano became “all the rage” in both the United States and Europe. Although there were ragtime bands and ragtime songs, classic rag soon became defined as an instrumental form, especially for the piano. Many Joplin rags consist of a left-hand part that jumps registers in eighth-note rhythms set against tricky syncopated sixteenths in the right hand. Joplin was both prolific and successful in writing rags for the piano, and he came to be billed as “the King of Ragtime.”

Ragtime or Rag—from “ragged time”—is a genre that blends elements from marches, jigs, quadrilles, and bamboulas with blues, spirituals, minstrel ballads, and “coon songs.” (“Coon songs” were highly stereotyped comic songs, popular from the 1880s to the 1920s, written in a pseudo-dialect purporting to record African-American vernacular speech.) Ragtime is an infectious and stimulating music, usually in 2/4 meter, with a marchlike sway and a proud, sharp, in-your-face joviality. Its defining rhythm, based on the African bamboula dance pattern, renamed “cakewalk” in America, is a three-note figuration of sixteenth-eighth-sixteenth notes, which is also heard in earlier spirituals, such as “I Got a Home in-a That Kingdom” and “Ain-a That Good News!”

A predecessor of jazz, ragtime was correlated with the “African jig” because of its foot stamps, shuffles, and shouts, “where hands clap out intricate and varying rhythmic patterns. . . and the foot is not marking straight time, but what Negroes call ‘stop time,’ or what the books call ‘syncopation’” (JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, The Book of American Spirituals [1925], 31). Joplin alludes to these influences in his “Stoptime Rag,” where the word “stamp” is marked on every quarter beat. Joplin admonished pianists to play ragtime slowly, even though his tempo for “Stoptime” is marked “Fast or slow.” Campbell most revealingly wrote that rag was played variously in “march time, fast ragtime, slow, and the ragtime blues style” (Fisk University, Special Collections).

Vera Brodsky Lawrence’s Complete Works of Scott Joplin lists forty-five rags, waltzes, marches, and other piano pieces that Joplin composed himself. In addition, he collaborated on a number of rags, including “Swipesy” with Arthur Marshall, “Sunflower Slow Drag,” “Something Doing,” “Felicity Rag,” “Kismet Rag” with Scott Hayden, and “Heliotrope Bouquet” with Louis Chauvin. There are also various unpublished pieces and some that were stolen, lost, sold, or destroyed.

The most popular of Joplin’s works, and one that brought continuous acclaim, is undoubtedly the “Maple Leaf Rag.” No matter the studied care of “Gladiolus Rag” or the majesty of “Magnetic Rag,” with its blue-note features, and no matter the catchiness of “The Entertainer,” “Maple Leaf’ beckons more. Over and above its engaging melodies and syncopations, the technical challenges alone are more than enough to induce an ambitious pianist to tackle “Maple Leaf.” Whatever its ingredients, “Maple Leaf Rag” garnered a respect for ragtime that has lasted for decades. Numerous musicians have recorded it, and it has been arranged for instruments from guitar to oboe and for band and orchestra.

Joplin also composed small and large vocal forms, both original and arranged. A few of his nonsyncopated songs are related to the Tin Pan Alley types of the day, and at least two are influenced by “coon songs.” He choreographed dance steps and wrote words for the “Ragtime Dance Song,” and in a few cases he either wrote lyrics or arranged music for others. Joplin composed two operas, the first of which is lost. The second, Treemonisha, whose libretto Joplin also wrote, is an ambitious work containing twenty-seven numbers, and requiring three sopranos, three tenors, one high baritone, four basses, and a chorus. Set “on a plantation somewhere in the State of Arkansas, Northeast of the Town of Texarkana and three or four miles from the Red River,” the opera presents education as the key to success.

Throughout Joplin’s preface to Treemonisha, one cannot help but note the parallelism of dates and geographic locations in the opera to those of his own past. The preface tells the tale of a young baby who was found under a tree, adopted, and named “Treemonisha” by Ned and Monisha. At age seven, she is educated by a white family in return for Monisha’s domestic services. The opera opens with eighteen-year-old Treemonisha touting the value of education and campaigning against two conjurers who earn their livelihoods promoting superstition. After various episodes with kidnappers, wasps, bears, and cotton pickers, who sing the brilliant “Aunt Dinah Has Blowed de Horn,” Treemonisha is successful and joins the finale, singing “Marching Onward” to the tune of the “Real Slow Drag.”

Compositionally, syncopated music is used in Treemonisha only when the plot calls for it, with the musical themes and harmonies employing “crossover” alternations between classical and popular styles. However, Joplin’s intentions seem to have leaned more toward the classical. The basic harmonies are decorated with his favored diminished seventh chords and secondary dominants. Altered chords, chromatics, modulations, themes with mode changes, special effects to depict confusion, and even an example of seven key changes in “The Bag of Luck” all point toward Joplin’s training and musical aspirations.

Joplin accompanied the first performance of Treemonisha on the piano. When he sought sponsors, and when he asked Stark to publish the opera, he was refused. Tackling these jobs himself proved to be his undoing. As a result of stress and illness, Joplin lost his mental balance in early 1917 and was admitted to the New York State Hospital. A diagnosis signed by Dr. Philip Smith states that Joplin succumbed to “dementia paralytica—cerebral form about 9:10 o’clock p.m.,” that the duration of the mental illness was one year and six months, and that the “contributory causes were Syphilis [of an] unknown duration” (Bureau of Records, New York City).

Campbell wrote that Joplin’s funeral carriage bore names of his rag hits. Sadly, only the New York Age and a notice by John Stark carried his obituary. High society from New York to Paris had strutted the cakewalk accompanied by his rags since the late 1890s, but now he was forgotten. Perhaps World War I diverted people’s attention away from the exuberance of raggedy rags and thus from Joplin. He received accolades for his piano rags, but his most difficult vocal music was not appreciated in his lifetime. Sixty years after his death he began to receive numerous honors, including the National Music Award, a Pulitzer Prize in 1976, and a U.S. postage stamp in 1983.

Several articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times inspired a revival of Joplin’s music in the 1970s. Various films, especially The Sting (1973), and television productions have highlighted his work, and concerts and recordings by the finest of musicians have taken the music to new heights. Additionally, there have been several productions of Treemonisha. To be sure, rags were written before Joplin’s Original Rags was published in 1899, but he must be credited with defining the classic concept and construction of ragtime and with rendering dignity and respectability to the style.

Discography

Joplin, Scott. Classic Ragtime from Rare Piano Rolls (1989).

Rifkin, Joshua. Scott Joplin: Piano Rags (1987).

Zimmerman, Richard. Complete Works of Scott Joplin (1993).

—HILDRED ROACH

JORDAN, BARBARA

(21 Feb. 1936–17 Jan. 1996), lawyer, politician, and professor, was born Barbara Charline Jordan in Houston, Texas, the daughter of Benjamin M. Jordan and Arlyne Patten Jordan. Her father, a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, was a warehouse employee until 1949 when he became a minister at Houston’s Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church, in which his father’s family had long been active. Arlyne Jordan also became a frequent speaker at the church. The Jordans were always poor, and for many years Barbara and her two older sisters shared a bed, but their lives improved somewhat after their father became a minister. Barbara attended local segregated public schools and received good grades with little effort. She gave scant thought to her future, beyond forming a vague desire to become a pharmacist, until her senior year at Phillis Wheatley High School, when a black female lawyer spoke at the school’s career day assembly. Already a proficient orator who had won several competitions, she decided to put that skill to use as an attorney.

Representative Barbara Jordan addressing the Democratic National Convention, 1976. Library of Congress

Restricted in her choice of colleges by her poverty as well as segregation, Jordan entered Texas Southern University, an all-black institution in Houston, on a small scholarship in the fall of 1952. Majoring in political science and history, she also became a champion debater, leading the college team to several championships. She graduated magna cum laude in 1956 and went on to Boston University Law School, where she managed to excel despite rampant gender discrimination. Upon graduation she took the Massachusetts bar exam, intending to practice law in Boston, but ultimately decided to return to her parents’ home in Houston. She used the dining room as her office for several years before setting up a downtown office, and she also worked as an administrative assistant to a county judge until 1966.

Jordan’s first wholesale encounter with politics came during the 1960 national election campaign, when she became a volunteer for Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and his running mate, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson. She began at the Houston party headquarters by performing menial jobs but soon emerged as the head of a voting drive covering Houston’s predominantly black precincts. The Democratic victory that fall changed Jordan’s life in several ways: not only did it persuade her to enter politics; it also overturned her long-held sense that segregation was a way of life that had to be endured, and it convinced her that the lives of black people might be improved by political action.

Jordan began her political career by running for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives in 1962 and again two years later. She lost both elections but received an impressive number of votes. In 1966, following a Supreme Court-mandated electoral redistricting to allow fair representation for blacks and other minorities, Jordan won election to the Texas Senate from the newly created Eleventh District in Houston, becoming the first black state senator in Texas since 1883. Concerned that she might be branded a rabble-rousing liberal agitator, she determined to establish herself as a legislator working seriously for social change. She began by being an advocate for the ultimately successful passage of a bill establishing the state’s first Fair Employment Practices Commission, to fight discrimination in the workplace. She also fought for passage of the state’s first minimum wage law, for raises in workmen’s compensation payments, and for the creation of a department of community affairs to deal with the problems of the state’s rapidly growing urban areas. In addition, she blocked proposed legislation that would have made voter registration more difficult.

Named outstanding freshman senator during her first year in office, Jordan went on to reelection for two more terms, serving a total of six years and bringing to passage half of the bills she introduced. In March 1972 she became the first black woman in American history to preside over a legislative body when she was elected president pro tem of the Texas legislature. By that time she had decided to try for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from the state’s new Eighteenth District, which was 50 percent black and 15 percent Mexican American. After winning a hard-fought primary against a black male state legislator, she ran for election that fall as the Democratic candidate and easily defeated her Republican opponent. Upon taking the oath of office in January 1973, she and another new representative, ANDREW YOUNG of Georgia, became the first two African Americans in modern times to sit as elected members of the U.S. House. Thanks to the assistance of former president Lyndon Johnson, who had become a friend during Jordan’s years in the Texas legislature, she was appointed to a coveted seat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Jordan served three terms in the Congress, easily winning reelection in 1974 and 1976. She was a forceful presence, voting consistently for such liberal measures as increased federal aid to public schools and an extension of the guaranteed student loan program, legal aid for the poor, an increase in the minimum wage, and the continuation of the school lunch program. During her first term she also voted for several bills designed to limit U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and she voted against the construction of the Alaska oil pipeline because of concerns for the environment. But she first achieved a national presence in July 1974 as a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

On the opening day of the televised hearings held by the committee to consider articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon, Jordan delivered a preliminary statement that moved to their very bones almost all who heard it. Speaking slowly and deliberately in a powerful deep and solemn voice, Jordan declared that despite not having been considered among “We, the people” when the Constitution was adopted, “the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decisions” had now guaranteed her inclusion. “Today, I am an inquisitor,” she continued. “I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” Speaking with authority, Jordan then set forth her reasons for believing that Nixon should be impeached, concluding that if the committee did not vote to do so, then the Constitution was worthless and should be sent through a paper shredder. Although she projected great control, Jordan later revealed that she was shaking with nervousness throughout the proceedings, and after casting her vote she wept.

Following Nixon’s resignation not long afterward, Jordan’s opening remarks, as well as her penetrating questioning during the committee hearings, remained in the public mind, and she was talked about as a candidate for higher office. In 1976 she was called upon to be a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, along with Senator John H. Glenn Jr. of Ohio. Following Glenn’s unremarkable address, she electrified the convention with a speech delivered in a style part-William Jennings Bryan and part-hellfire Baptist preacher. Appealing for national unity, she declared that its achievement and the full realization of America’s destiny lay only through the Democratic Party.

In the 1976 fall presidential campaign, Jordan traveled the country, making speeches in support of the Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter. Upon his victory in November, Carter discussed appointing her to the cabinet, but she was only interested in becoming attorney general, a post Carter was not willing to offer her. A year later, in December 1977, she surprised supporters by announcing that she would not seek a fourth term in Congress the following year. Although she was rumored to have health problems, she denied this, saying only that she wanted to devote herself to other concerns back in Texas. After leaving the House in early 1979, she was appointed to the Lyndon B. Johnson Chair in National Policy at the Johnson School of Public Affairs, a part of the University of Texas in Austin. Teaching courses in policy development as well as political values and ethics, she became one of the university’s most popular professors, and students had to participate in a lottery to gain admission to her classes.

Jordan returned to the national political stage in 1988, when she delivered a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention seconding the nomination of Lloyd Bentsen as the vice-presidential candidate. By this time, however, her physical ailment could not be denied: she was now confined to a wheelchair, the consequence, she said, of a “neuromuscular disorder.” Later that summer she made national headlines again when she was found floating unconscious in the swimming pool at her home; she had gone into cardiac arrest while doing therapeutic exercises. She recovered, however, and by that fall was well enough to campaign for the national Democratic presidential ticket, headed by Michael Dukakis.

Jordan returned to the Democratic National Convention in 1992 as one of its keynote speakers, and again she riveted the audience with her call for support of presidential candidate Bill Clinton and his mandate for change. Although her health grew worse, she continued to teach at the university. She also served as chair of the Commission on Immigration Reform and in that capacity testified before Congress in 1995 on behalf of citizenship rights for children born in the United States to illegal immigrants.

Jordan, who never married, fiercely guarded her private life. Known to enjoy singing and playing the guitar, she was also a fan of the Lady Longhorns, the University of Texas women’s basketball team, whose games she frequently attended. Following her death from viral pneumonia, which occurred at her home in Austin, it was disclosed that she had suffered from both multiple sclerosis and leukemia.

JORDAN, JUNE

(9 July 1936–14 June 2002), poet, essayist, teacher, and activist, was born in Harlem, New York, the daughter of Jamaican-born parents, Mildred Maud Fisher, a nurse, and Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, a postal clerk. Mildred, who was half East Indian, was a quiet and religious woman who had given up a career as an artist to marry; she struggled with depression and eventually committed suicide in 1966. June’s father, who was half Chinese and a follower of the black nationalist MARCUS GARVEY, made no apologies for his dissatisfaction with his only child’s gender. He had wanted a boy and treated June as such. Referring to her as “he” and “the boy,” Granville subjected his young daughter to rigorous mental and physical training regimens that included camping, fishing, and boxing instruction; aggressive mathematical and literary testing; and often brutal physical beatings. Jordan describes her father’s abuse in her memoir: “Like a growling beast, the roll-away mahogany doors rumble open, and the light snaps on and a fist smashes into the side of my head and I am screaming awake: ‘Daddy! What did I do?!’” By her fifth birthday June had endured, and excelled at, memorizing and reciting selections from the Bible and the works of PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, Edgar Allan Poe, Zane Grey, Sinclair Lewis, and Shakespeare. Jordan began writing poetry at age seven. When schoolmates started to buy her verses, she realized that poetry could be both powerful and useful in connecting people.

The Jordans moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn when June was five years old. She was generally the only black student throughout her secondary school and college years. After one year at Midwood High School, she won a scholarship and transferred to the Northfield School for Girls, a private prep school in Massachusetts. Following graduation in 1953, she enrolled in Barnard College, where she met Michael Meyer, a white Columbia College student. The two married in 1955, and their son, Christopher, was born in 1958. Although she spent a year at the University of Chicago while her husband was in school there and another semester back at Barnard, she never received a college degree. Jordan later described her marriage, which at the time was illegal in forty-three states, as a “state criminalized relationship.” In her “Letter to Michael,” an essay in Civil Wars: Selected Essays 1963–1980 (1982), Jordan illuminates the difficulties of interracial marriage, factors that contributed to the dissolution of her own marriage. The couple divorced in 1965.

Considering a career in urban planning, Jordan studied urban design and architecture with Buckminster Fuller in the early 1960s. Her architectural redesign plan for Harlem was published in Esquire in 1965 and won the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design in 1970. Even though she ultimately decided against pursuing a career as an architect, space—literal and figurative—remained a significant theme in Jordan’s work.

After her divorce, Jordan struggled to support herself and her son as a teacher and freelance writer. She published short stories and poems under the name of June Meyer in a number of top magazines and journals. While Jordan’s artistic voice emerged as part of the civil rights, women’s rights, and antiwar movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, they did not define her. Her political consciousness developed according to her own rules.

A dedicated and engaged teacher, Jordan began her professorial career in 1967 as an English instructor at City College and poet in residence at the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, both in New York City. She taught English and literature at Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence College, Yale University, and SUNY Stony Brook, where she was awarded tenure in 1982. In 1989 she took a position at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching English, African American studies, and women’s studies. An extremely popular teacher, Jordan exhibited the same passion for teaching as she did for writing, challenging her students to be honest in their work and with themselves. While at Berkeley, Jordan founded Poetry for the People, a program that employs poetry as a tool of empowerment through workshops at high schools and prisons, marathon poetry readings, and the study of work by African Americans and Arabs that is generally overlooked in the classroom.

One of the nation’s most published African American authors, Jordan’s catalogue of work includes ten books of poetry, eight volumes of essays, children’s books, four plays, two librettos, a spoken-word album, several edited anthologies, and a memoir. Jordan’s writing career began in earnest with the 1969 publication of her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me, which ends with the plea “Who see the roof and corners of my pride / to be (as you are) free?/WHO LOOK AT ME?” After the publication of Some Changes (1971), which, like Who Look at Me, focused on issues relating to African American identity, Jordan’s poetry collections, including Things I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems (1977), Passion: New Poems 1977–1980 (1980), Living Room: New Poems 1980–1984 (1985), Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989), and Haruko Love Poems (1994), increasingly emphasized overtly political and international issues.

An early advocate of the use of black English, Jordan wrote a novel for young adults, His Own Where (1971), entirely in black vernacular. The book was nominated for a National Book Award. Jordan’s celebrated works for children and young adults began with The Voice of the Children (1970), an edited volume that grew out of a workshop for black and Hispanic readers, and continued with New Life: New Room (1975), Kimako’s Story (1981), and the 1972 biography of FANNIE LOU HAMER. Jordan maintained a presence on the national stage as a regular columnist for The Progressive and a contributor to a host of specialized and mainstream publications. Seeking a collaborative medium and an alternate venue for her work, Jordan wrote and produced several plays, including In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth (1979) and For the Arrow That Flies by Day (1981), and a guide to writing and teaching poetry entitled June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (1995).

At the core of these works Jordan battles injustice, repression, and oppression. “She is the bravest of us, the most outraged,” ALICE WALKER contends. “She feels for all. She is the universal poet.” From Oakland, California, to the Middle East and from Nicaragua to South Africa, Jordan’s work advocates for women, the poor, and the disenfranchised. According to TONI MORRISON, Jordan’s career was shaped by “forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fuelled by flawless art” (Guardian, 20 June 2002). Affirmative action, war crimes in the Balkans, the situation of women in Afghanistan, black women’s health, Palestinian rights—each of these topics and hundreds more made their way into Jordan’s work and classroom. ISHMAEL REED characterizes Jordan’s poetry as “straightforward, unadorned, in-your-face” (San Francisco Chronicle, 27 June 2002). This unflinching directness, always brave and sometimes heavy-handed, is exemplified by “Poem about Police Brutality”:

Tell me something

what you think would happen if

everytime they kill a black boy

then we kill a cop

everytime they kill a black man

Then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower

subsequently?

Autobiographical and interdisciplinary, Jordan’s work chronicles a life intent on breaking down the barriers between poetry and prose, between politics and art, and between the personal and the political. Jordan resisted being labeled and pigeonholed with regard to her writing, her politics, or her sexuality. For Jordan, who was openly bisexual, each element of life and work was part of a larger commitment to the principles of freedom and equality. “If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable,” she wrote in the Progressive.

Petite, warm, and elegant, yet tough, tenacious, and controversial, Jordan had a distinctive laugh and a sardonic sense of humor. She was a dramatic and charismatic reader who presented her work at the United Nations and the U.S. Congress, at innumerable colleges and universities, and on radio, television, and film. A resolute political activist, she served on the executive board of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Nicaraguan Culture Alliance. Jordan was the recipient of many fellowships, honors, and awards, including a Rockefeller grant in 1969; a PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award in 1991; and two journalism awards, one for international reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984 and a lifetime achievement award from the National Black Writers’ Conference in 1988. A three-year award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund facilitated the expansion of the Poetry for the People program and the completion of several writing projects, among them, Jordan’s 1995 libretto for the Opera director Peter Sellers, “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky,” and her poetry collection, Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991–1997 (1997).

Jordan’s last book, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002), was published posthumously and includes pieces from two earlier volumes, Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998) and Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union (1992), along with new essays on Islam, the terrorist events of 11 September 2001, and her experience of having been raped twice. June Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, in June 2002.

JORDAN, MICHAEL

(17 Feb. 1963–), basketball player, was born Michael Jeffrey Jordan in Brooklyn, New York, the fourth of five children of James Jordan and Deloris Peoples. The family soon relocated to Wilmington in the parents’ home state, North Carolina, where Jordan’s father rose to supervisor in a General Electric plant and his mother worked as a bank teller. James Jordan’s Air Force pension boosted the family into the middle class, and they instilled in their children a solid work ethic with an emphasis on loyalty and commitment.

Like his brothers and sisters, Jordan was a relatively short child—but exceptionally quick. He preferred baseball to basketball and pitched several no-hitters in Little League. Although he was initially a lazy child who bribed his siblings to do his chores, Jordan was invigorated by athletic competition. Regular one-on-one basketball games against his older brother Larry fueled a fiery competitiveness in him, since Larry was acknowledged to be more talented. When Michael entered Laney Wilmington High School in 1979 he was five feet, eight inches tall and determined to play varsity basketball. Following a year on the freshman team, the varsity coaches encouraged him to try out as a sophomore and then cut him. He was devastated, cried in his bedroom that afternoon, and then averaged twenty-five points per game on the junior varsity team. He made varsity the next year; grew to six feet, two inches tall and during his senior season at Laney, Jordan led the Buccaneers to a 19–4 record before matriculating at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1981. He had previously earned an invitation to summer camps at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the prestigious Five-Star Camp in Pittsburgh. At Chapel Hill he got his first exposure to “the system,” Coach Dean Smith’s storied method of running a high-caliber basketball program; Smith and his assistants were immediately impressed not only with Jordan’s athleticism but also with his determination to sneak into scrimmages when it was not his turn.

Much of Smith’s system involved teaching teamwork and humility. Although Jordan became increasingly cocky about his abilities, the system was the perfect antidote for his good-natured, though occasionally abrasive attitude. The Tar Heel upperclassmen did not appreciate the fast-talking, bright-eyed freshman who detailed how he would dunk on them in practice—and they harbored no small amount of spite when he quickly made good on his word. But they could take some solace in seeing Jordan fetch loose balls during practice and lug the film projector on road trips—and in winning more games. The Tar Heels went 32–2 and won the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament; a few weeks later, Jordan hit a seventeen-foot jumper to clinch the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship. At his full height of six feet, six inches, Jordan won Player of the Year honors for the next two seasons; after consulting his parents and Smith, he bypassed his senior year to enter the National Basketball Association (NBA) draft. In the interim, Jordan led the U.S. basketball team to the 1984 Olympic gold medal.

The ailing Chicago Bulls signed Jordan for five years at $800,000 per year. During his first two seasons Jordan became a phenomenon, boosting the Bulls’ ticket sales by almost 90 percent and triggering a similar spike in attendance at road games. He played all eighty-two games and averaged 28.2 points, almost six assists, and more than six rebounds per contest, securing Rookie of the Year honors. During All-Star weekend, Jordan competed for the first time in the popular Slam Dunk Contest. Donning a gold chain and his trademark baggy shorts (which allowed him to wear his North Carolina shorts underneath), Jordan electrified the crowd with a combination of tremendous leaping ability and graceful aerial control.

Early in the 1985–1986 campaign, Jordan broke his foot. Doctors advised him to sacrifice the rest of the season for treatment, but he returned with more than a dozen games remaining and drove the Bulls into the play-offs against the powerful Boston Celtics. Although the Celtics swept the Bulls, Jordan averaged 43.7 points for the series, scoring a record sixty-three in the second game, and prompted the Celtic star Larry Bird to quip that he had played against “God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

Jordan’s dramatic performances—such as scoring more than fifty points in eight separate games during the 1986–1987 season—catapulted him into the NBA’s highest echelon, and he signed lucrative endorsement deals for Wheaties cereal; McDonald’s restaurants; and, most important, Nike sportswear. These companies quickly realized that Jordan’s gracious public persona and clean-cut looks transcended the potential obstacle of his skin color; teenagers and children of all classes and races idolized him. Jordan hence became a crucial figure in the escalation of sports marketing into a multibillion-dollar industry. The only compensation he wanted when he originally signed with Nike was a car; in 1987 his contract guaranteed him eighteen million dollars over seven years, plus royalties from such products as the Air Jordan basketball shoe, thought to be more than twenty million dollars per year by the mid-1990s. In 1998 Forbes magazine estimated that Jordan had generated more than ten billion dollars in overall revenue for the NBA during his career.

The quintessential slow-motion image of Jordan came from the clinching dunk in the 1987 Slam Dunk Contest. Jordan ran from beyond half-court, leaped from the free-throw line, and glided through the air in a seemingly effortless manner—lifting the ball and then lowering it, contracting his legs and then spreading and extending them—finally dunking the ball fifteen feet later. His rumored forty-four-inch vertical leap was impressive, though by no means unprecedented; the mythical quality of his dunks derived more from the way he seemed to hang in midair as if through sheer will. Primarily known for his offensive abilities, Jordan relied on his defense to catalyze the rest of his game; crowds would anxiously anticipate the inevitable moment when he would intercept a pass, streak downcourt, and take flight for a beautifully thunderous dunk.

Despite regular appearances in television and print advertisements, as well as his 1989 marriage to Juanita Vanoy (with whom he has three children), Jordan did not allow any distractions to hinder his and the Bulls’ steady progress. For half a dozen seasons, Jordan had systematically improved every area of his game, becoming one of the most versatile players in the history of basketball. In 1988 Jordan won the first of five Most Valuable Player awards, as well as Defensive Player of the Year, becoming the first to win both in a single season. He would lead the NBA in scoring for ten seasons and was selected for the All-Defensive Team a record nine times. Originally considered a player who slashed toward the hoop and fired the occasional midrange jump shot, Jordan developed a deadly post game and extended his shooting range, increasing his three-point percentage by .100 to .376 in 1990. The determination reflected in these accomplishments appeared finally to inspire his teammates, and the Bulls defeated Magic Johnson’s Los Angeles Lakers for the 1991 NBA championship.

Later that year a Chicago sportswriter published The Jordan Rules, an exposé of the Bulls’ championship season, which portrayed Jordan as being mean-spirited toward his teammates in order to elicit better play. Nevertheless, the Bulls won their second championship in 1992, and Jordan and his teammate Scottie Pippen traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to play on the first U.S. Olympic basketball team to include professional players. This Dream Team won the gold medal with unprecedented ease.

As the Bulls hurtled toward their third consecutive championship in 1993, hints surfaced that Jordan routinely gambled enormous sums of money. A year earlier Jordan had weathered the first of such murmurings when a murdered man was found in possession of three checks, all written by Jordan and totaling $108,000, one of them made out to a convicted cocaine dealer. Jordan claimed the checks were gambling debts from golfing, a longtime hobby. When another purported gambling golfer asserted that Jordan owed him more than a million dollars, an NBA investigation ensued. Jordan was absolved of any violation, and on the heels of winning a third consecutive NBA title that spring, he decided to retire.

He was not, however, retiring from sports altogether; in 1994 he signed a free-agency baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox. The previous August, James Jordan had been found murdered in his car, and many reporters interpreted Jordan’s actions as a means of realizing the childhood dreams he had shared with his father of someday playing major league baseball. After one lackluster season in Chicago’s farm system with the AA Birmingham Barons (Jordan batted .202), and with a strike imminent for the 1995 baseball season, Jordan decided to rejoin the Bulls. He played a handful of games in the regular season and averaged more than thirty points in the play-offs before the Bulls lost in the second round. Again motivated by the sour taste of losing, he embarked upon a strict training regimen and bolstered his offensive arsenal with a fade-away jumper that he fired with amazing precision and that was nearly impossible to block.

The Bulls marched to three more consecutive NBA championships from 1996 to 1998, and Jordan never missed a game. His play-off performances were particularly memorable, as he continued to exhibit an uncanny ability to elevate his play during especially tense situations. He started every playoff game of his career, played more minutes in each game than in the regular season, grabbed more rebounds, gave more assists, and averaged 33.4 points per game—three points above his career regular season average. In the 1997 finals against the Utah Jazz, Jordan had a fever of 100 degrees and severe nausea before the fifth game. But he scored thirty-eight points—fifteen in the final period—and the Bulls came from behind to win. The next year Jordan sparked another comeback and made the series-clinching shot from twenty feet away to win his final championship.

The next season, after an NBA labor dispute was settled in January 1999, Jordan again retired, cagily asserting that he was “99.9 percent certain” he was retiring permanently. He assumed an executive position with the Washington Wizards a year later. In November 2001 Jordan once again took to the court, playing for the Wizards against the New York Knicks. Jordan had a chance to tie the game with a three-point shot in the waning seconds, but he missed. Although he averaged more than twenty points with Washington and was twice voted to the Ail-Star team, the Wizards failed to make the play-offs both seasons.

In April 2003 Jordan was summarily dismissed from the Wizards’ front office. Nevertheless, with his nearly obsessive drive for personal success, Michael Jordan established himself as the most influential African American in athletics since MUHAMMAD ALI. Both men were unparalleled masters of their respective crafts; where Ali’s career brought energy and a sense of pride to blacks during the civil rights era, Jordan’s avoided politics but brought the world of sports to Wall Street.

JORDAN, VERNON

(8 Aug. 1935–), lawyer, civil rights leader, and corporate executive, was born Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr. in Atlanta, the eldest of two sons of Vernon Jordan Sr., a postal clerk at Fort McPherson, Georgia, and Mary Belle Griggs, proprietor of a catering business, who had a child from a previous union. Jordan was descended from Georgia sharecroppers who had their roots in slavery. His maternal grandfather told young Vernon, “If I could have anything in the world, I’d want to be able to go to the bathroom indoors, in a warm place, one time before I die” (Jordan, 23).

Until the age of thirteen Jordan lived in Atlanta’s University Homes, the first public housing for black people built in the United States. His “project,” as such low-income structures would come to be known, derived its name from the black college campuses that surrounded it and provided an abundance of positive role models for the residents. Jordan’s success in school was strongly encouraged by his mother, who became president of the PTA at every school Vernon attended from elementary to high school. As an adult, his tall, athletic build greatly contributed to his distinguished presence, but as a young boy, his dark complexion was not viewed so favorably; even his diligence was mockingly seen as “acting white,” rather than as being black and highly motivated.

Jordan graduated from high school with honors in 1953 and opted to attend DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where there were only four other black students and no black women. In retrospect he wrote that “never once in my youth did I go to a school with enough resources to help its students compete on an equal basis with the average white student” (Jordan, 47). Yet Jordan persevered in his studies at DePauw and won several public-speaking contests.

Given his deep faith and exceptional oratorical skills, Jordan seriously considered entering the ministry, but his mother, a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, would not hear of it. Instead, Jordan entered Howard University Law School in 1957 and spent his summers driving a bus for the Chicago Transit Authority to augment his finances. After his parents’ divorce in 1958, Jordan decided to secure his relationship with Shirley Yarbrough, who had graduated from Howard the year before and returned to Atlanta, where she worked as a caseworker. The two were married during Jordan’s second year in law school but continued to live in separate cities until Jordan received his JD degree in 1960 and relocated to Atlanta to be with his wife and infant daughter, Vickee.

Back in Atlanta, Jordan became a law clerk for the civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell and was paid the lowly sum of thirty-five dollars a week. Together they fought discrimination cases, defended death-row prisoners, and won a landmark decision in Holmes v. Danner that allowed Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes to become the first black students to attend the University of Georgia in 1961. Within a few months of this victory, Jordan came to the attention of the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who appointed him field director for the state of Georgia. In this position he set a new recruitment record; led a seven-month boycott in Augusta, Georgia, against discriminatory businesses; and became a colleague of A. LEON HIGGINBOTHAM, THURGOOD MARSHALL, ROY WILKINS, and MEDGAR EVERS, his counterpart in Mississippi.

In 1964 Jordan was recruited by the Southern Regional Council, the oldest interracial organization in the South, where he became the executive assistant and the director of the Voter Education Project. In these positions Jordan began to cultivate his legendary skills as a behind-the-scenes negotiator as he distributed funds to organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the NAACP. As his reputation grew, invitations and opportunities multiplied. In 1965 he attended his first meeting at the White House when President Lyndon Johnson named him to serve along with MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., DOROTHY HEIGHT, and JOHN LEWIS on the White House Council to Fulfill These Rights. He also served on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Selective Service during the Vietnam War and became the first African American to hold a teaching fellowship at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, during the 1969–1970 academic year. Jordan acquired foreign-policy experience during his visit to Israel shortly before the Six-Day War, and he was part of an American delegation sent to discuss economic and cold war issues at the Bilderberg conference in Denmark in 1969. He later served on the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

Jordan planned to run for Congress in 1970 from the Fifth District of Georgia, but shortly after making his announcement he was offered the directorship of the United Negro College Fund. In his first year at the helm of that organization, previous fund-raising levels were surpassed by more than ten million dollars. Then, on 9 March 1971, WHITNEY YOUNG, the leader of the National Urban League, tragically drowned while in Lagos, Nigeria. Although he was only thirty-six years old, Jordan became Young’s successor. As president he restructured the organization; promoted a young staffer, RON BROWN, who would later head the Democratic National Committee and become secretary of commerce, to the newly created office of general counsel; and began issuing an annual report called The State of Black America.

During Jimmy Carter’s administration, Jordan attempted to mend the rift between African Americans and American Jews caused when ANDREW YOUNG, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and JESSE JACKSON met with representatives of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Some black leaders welcomed the schism as representing the independence of black leadership; Jordan countered by saying that rather than moving apart, both groups needed to affirm a “Declaration of Interdependence” (Jordan, 265). On 29 May 1980, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Jordan was shot in the back by an assailant using a hunting rifle. He recovered after a long convalescence, and Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist and serial killer, later confessed to the shooting. In 1982 Robert Strauss invited Jordan to become a partner in the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer, and Feld. Jordan, who had been one of the first African Americans to serve on the boards of such corporations as Xerox, American Express, and the Rockefeller Foundation, left the Urban League to accept this position because he believed that he had reached a point in his career where he could open more doors by working in the private sector.

In 1986 Jordan’s wife, Shirley, died after a twenty-year battle with multiple sclerosis. The following year he married Ann Dibble Cook, a professor at the University of Chicago. In 1992 Jordan, who had known Bill and Hillary Clinton for two decades, became chairman of the transition team for President-elect Clinton. Jordan declined to be considered for the position of attorney general, but he actively coaxed COLIN POWELL and others into the administration. His role in securing employment for Webster Hubbell and Monica Lewinsky with Revlon Consumer Products Corporation, a company on whose board he served, brought his actions under harsh scrutiny during the wide-ranging Whitewater investigations of President Clinton’s financial and personal affairs; however, Jordan’s accomplishments in the public sector, in the corporate world, and as a Washington powerbroker firmly established him as a major player in the high-stakes game of power and politics.

JULIAN, PERCY LAVON

(11 Apr. 1899–19 Apr. 1975), chemist, was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of James Sumner Julian, a railway mail clerk, and Elizabeth Lena Adams, a teacher. He received his AB from DePauw University in 1920, and for the next two years he taught chemistry at Fisk University. In 1922 he was awarded Harvard University’s Austin Fellowship in chemistry; he received his MA from that school in 1923. He remained at Harvard for three more years as a research assistant in biophysics and organic chemistry. In 1926 he joined the faculty at West Virginia State College, and in 1928 he became associate professor and head of the chemistry department at Howard University. The following year he was awarded a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board to pursue his doctorate at the University of Vienna in Austria, where he earned that degree in organic chemistry in 1931. After graduating he returned to Howard, but he left in 1932 to accept a position as chemistry professor and research fellow at DePauw.

Julian’s first major discovery involved physostigmine, a drug made from Calabar beans that is used to treat glaucoma and myasthenia gravis. In 1934, while he was preparing to publish his findings concerning d, 1-eserethole, the penultimate step in synthesizing physostigmine, Sir Robert Robinson, the eminent Oxford chemist, made public the results of his work on the synthesis of eserethole. Much to Julian’s surprise, the eserethole described in Robinson’s paper bore no resemblance to the compound he had developed. Despite the professional stature of Robinson, Julian published his own findings and detailed the differences between his results and Robinson’s. The next year, when Julian successfully synthesized physostigmine from his version of d, 1-eserethole, he clearly demonstrated that he, not Robinson, had been correct.

Julian’s next project involved the extraction from soybean oil of stigmasterol, a sterol used in the production of sex hormones, which in turn were used to treat a variety of medical conditions. However, he abandoned this line of research in 1936 when he was invited to join the Glidden Company of Chicago, Illinois, as director of research of the soya products division. His first task was to oversee the completion of a modern plant for extracting oil from soybeans; his second was to develop uses for the oil that the plant would produce. He soon devised a method for extracting from the oil vegetable protein, which he then developed into an inexpensive coating for paper. After he learned how to adjust the size of the soya protein molecule, Julian was able to create soya derivatives for use in textiles, paints, livestock and poultry feed, candy, ink, cosmetics, food additives, and “Aero Foam,” used by the U.S. Navy during World War II to put out oil and gasoline fires and known throughout the fleet as “bean soup.” Serendipitously, in 1940, when a large tank of soybean oil became contaminated with water and turned into an oily paste, Julian discovered that the paste was an excellent source from which to extract inexpensively sterols such as stigmasterol. Soon Glidden was producing in bulk quantity the female hormone progesterone, used to prevent miscarriages and to treat certain menstrual complications, and the male hormone testosterone, used in the therapy of certain types of breast cancer. In 1949, Julian developed a method for synthesizing cortisone—used to treat rheumatoid arthritis—from sterols.

The holder of ninety-four patents, chemist Percy Julian made important discoveries in the extraction and production of progesterone, testosterone, and cortisone. Schomburg Center

In 1954 Julian, having become more interested in steroid research than in soybeans, left Glidden to start Julian Laboratories in Oak Park, Illinois, with a factory and farms in Mexico. The Mexican branch of the operation harvested and processed the roots of Dioscorea, a wild Mexican yam, which Julian had discovered was an even better source than soybeans from which to synthesize cortisone and the sex hormones. In 1961 he sold the business to Smith, Kline and French, a pharmaceutical firm that was one of his best customers, but he remained as president until 1964, when he began the Julian Research Institute and Julian Associates, both in Franklin Park, Illinois. He continued to experiment with the production of synthetic drugs until his death.

Julian also played an active role in the civil rights movement. In 1956 he chaired the Council for Social Action of the Congregational Christian Churches, and in 1967 he became cochairman of a group of forty-seven prominent blacks recruited by the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to raise a million dollars for the purpose of financing lawsuits to enforce civil rights legislation.

In 1935 Julian married Anna Johnson; they had two children. Julian received a number of honors and awards, including the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal (1947) and nineteen honorary doctoral degrees. He was elected to membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Classroom buildings at MacMurray College, Coppin State College, and Illinois State University bear his name, as do elementary schools in Arizona and Louisiana and a high school in Chicago. He held ninety-four U.S. patents for methods of producing vegetable protein, sterols, and steroids and published his research in more than fifty scholarly articles. He died in Waukegan, Illinois.

Julian contributed to the advance of science in two ways. His pioneering research into the synthesization of hormones and other chemical substances made it possible for people of average means to obtain relief from such maladies as glaucoma and arthritis. His work with soybeans led to the development of a number of new and valuable products for industrial and agricultural applications.

JUST, ERNEST EVERETT

(14 Aug. 1883–27 Oct. 1941), zoologist, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Charles Fraser Just, a carpenter and wharf builder, and Mary Mathews Cooper. Following his father’s death in 1887, his mother moved the family to James Island, off the South Carolina coast. There she labored in phosphate mines, opened a church and a school, and mobilized farmers into a moss-curing enterprise. A dynamic community leader, she was the prime mover behind the establishment of a township—Maryville—named in her honor. Maryville served as a model for all-black town governments elsewhere.

Ernest attended his mother’s school, the Frederick Deming Jr. Industrial School, until the age of twelve. Under her influence, he entered the teacher-training program of the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College (now South Carolina State College) in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1896. After graduating in 1899, he attended Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire (1900–1903), before proceeding to Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth he majored in biology and minored in Greek and history. Under the guidance of two eminent zoologists, William Patten and John H. Gerould, he developed a passion for scientific research. Some of his work, on oral arches in frogs, was included in Patten’s classic book The Evolution of the Vertebrates and Their Kin (1912). Ernest graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth in 1907.

Zoologist and Howard University Professor Ernest Everett Just. Schomburg Center

Essentially, there were two career options available at the time to an African American with Just’s academic background: teaching in a black institution or preaching in a black church. Just chose the former, beginning his career in the fall of 1907 as instructor in English and rhetoric at Howard University. In 1909 he taught English and biology and a year later assumed a permanent full-time commitment in zoology as part of a general revitalization of the science curriculum at Howard. He also taught physiology in the medical school. A devoted teacher, he served as faculty adviser to a group that was trying to establish a nationwide fraternity of black students. The Alpha chapter of Omega Psi Phi was organized at Howard in 1911, and Just became its first honorary member. In 1912 he married a fellow Howard faculty member, Ethel Highwarden, with whom he later had three children.

Meanwhile, Just laid plans to pursue scientific research. Patten had placed him in touch with Frank Rattray Lillie, head of the zoology department at the University of Chicago and director of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Although both Patten and Lillie considered it impractical for a black to seek a scientific career (in the face of overwhelming odds against finding suitable employment), Just’s persistence and determination won them over. Lillie invited Just to the MBL as his research assistant in 1909. Their teacher-student relationship quickly blossomed into a full and equal scientific collaboration. By the time Just earned a PhD in Zoology at the University of Chicago in 1916, he had already coauthored a paper with Lillie and written several of his own.

The two worked on fertilization in marine animals. Just’s first paper, “The Relation of the First Cleavage Plane to the Entrance Point of the Sperm,” appeared in Biological Bulletin in 1912 and was cited frequently as a classic and authoritative study. Just went on to champion a theory—the fertilizin theory—first proposed by Lillie, who postulated the existence of a substance called fertilizin as the essential biochemical catalyst in the fertilization of the egg by the sperm. In 1915 Just was awarded the NAACP’s first Spingarn Medal in recognition of his scientific contributions and “foremost service to his race.”

As Patten and Lillie had predicted, no scientific positions opened up for Just. Science was for him a deeply felt avocation, an activity that he looked forward to doing each summer at the MBL as a welcome respite from his heavy teaching and administrative responsibilities at Howard. Under the circumstances, his productivity was extraordinary. Within ten years (1919–1928), he published thirty-five articles, mostly relating to his studies on fertilization. Though proud of his output, he yearned for a position or environment in which he could pursue his research full time.

The MBL, while serving in some respects as a haven of opportunity for Just, generated thinly disguised, occasionally overt racial tensions. Just was excluded from certain social gatherings and subjected to verbal slurs. A few of the more liberal scientists cultivated his acquaintance, protecting him at times from confrontations and embarrassment, but to Just this behavior seemed paternalistic. Further, while many MBL scientists relied on his technical expertise, some showed little regard for the intellectual or theoretical side of Just’s work. Others, citing a special duty to his race, urged him to abandon science in favor of teaching and more practical pursuits.

In 1928 Just received a substantial grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which allowed him a change of environment and longer stretches of time for his research. His first excursion, in 1929, took him to Italy, where he worked for seven months at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples. He traveled to Europe ten times over the course of the next decade, staying for periods ranging from three weeks to two years. He worked primarily at the Stazione Zoologica, the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Biologie in Berlin, and the Station Biologique in Roseoff, France. As the political turmoil in Europe grew, Just remained relatively unaffected and continued to be productive in his research. That he felt more comfortable there amid the rise of Nazism and Fascism suggests how dismal his outlook on life in America had become.

In Europe, Just worked on what he considered his magnum opus: a book synthesizing many of the scientific theories, philosophical ideas, and experimental results of his career. The book was published in 1939 under the title Biology of the Cell Surface. Its thesis, that the ectoplasm or cell surface has a fundamental role in development, did not receive much attention at the time but later became a focus of serious scientific investigation. Just was assisted in this work by a German, Maid Hedwig Schnetzler, whom he married in 1939 after divorcing his first wife. Also in 1939, he published a compendium of experimental advice under the title Basic Methods for Experiments on Eggs of Marine Animals. In 1940 Just was interned briefly in France following the German invasion, then was released to return to America, where he died of pancreatic cancer a year later in Washington, D.C.

FURTHER READING

JONES, ADDISON.

JONES, BILL T.

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JONES, EUGENE KINCKLE

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JONES, JAMES EARL

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JONES, LEROI.

JONES, LOÏS MAILOU

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JONES, MADAME SISSIERETTA JOYNER

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JONES, QUINCY

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JONES, SCIPIO AFRICANUS

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JOPLIN, SCOTT

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Discography

JORDAN, BARBARA

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JORDAN, JUNE

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JORDAN, MICHAEL

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JORDAN, VERNON

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JULIAN, PERCY LAVON

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JUST, ERNEST EVERETT

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