John Jones (1817-1879), entrepreneur and activist. John Jones was born in Greene County, North Carolina, the son of a free black woman and a German immigrant father. Although he was born with his mother’s free status, she feared that his white relatives would try to enslave him anyway, so she sent him away to learn the tailoring trade. The Apprentices like Jones were required to fund their training by working for their teachers without pay for a certain number, and so he fulfilled this requirement under his original teacher and then another white tailor in Memphis who purchased the right to his labor. While in Tennessee, however, he learned that the relatives of his first teacher planned to sell him on the false pretense that he was a slave, and he had to travel back to North Carolina to prove in court that he had been born free. After running his own business in Memphis for several years, in 1841 he moved to Alton, Illinois (near St. Louis) to be closer to his future bride and her family. Like all Midwestern states, Illinois had “black laws” which banned African Americans from voting, attending public schools, testifying in court against whites, or living in the state at all unless they posted a $250 bond (the equivalent of $6300 today). In order to pay the bond, Jones uses his entire savings and went back to Memphis for three years to make more money, then returned to Alton, married, and went further north to a growing city on Lake Michigan. Chicago had been incorporated in 1836 and by the late 1840s had around 30,000 residents, including a black community of only 300 free-born people like him, former slaves who had purchased their freedom, and fugitive slaves. Arriving with only $2 to his name (the equivalent of $55) today, he rented a home in what is now the West Loop and used a loan from another black entrepreneur to set up his tailor shop nearby on the present-day site of the James R. Thompson Center. His business quickly proved successful, and he used his earning to purchase real estate, which became even more profitable as Chicago’s economy and population boomed. By 1860 he was worth somewhere between $85,000-$100,000 ($2.4-2.8 million today) and had become the city’s most prominent black citizen, not only because of his wealth but because of his desire to fight for the millions of blacks in slavery and the thousands more denied equality in the North. As one historian later wrote, “In his life’s story, the fears and expectations of all persons who had experienced bondage recognized the precariousness of their existence.”
He and his wife purchased a much larger home on Dearborn Avenue and made it into a center for black activism. Fugitive slaves took refuge there when they arrived in Chicago; one continued on to Canada but sent her daughter back to attend school and begin her teaching career. The Joneses also hosted civil rights leaders like Frederick Douglass and John Brown, and they established connections with local white liberals, one of who taught John to read and write. The state government, though, was dominated by downstate residents who wanted to strengthen the black laws. Jones responded through the printed word, the political system, and black community institutions. In 1847 he wrote The Black Laws of Illinois and a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed, distributing it in pamphlet form and by paying to have it printed in the newspaper. During the 1848 Illinois constitutional convention, Jones unsuccessfully argued that the black laws should be discontinued, saying that they violated the principles of democracy that blacks had fought for in the War of Independence. As African Americans began organizing conventions to collectively fight for equality, he served as vice president to a national meeting in New York State and as president of the first statewide meeting in Illinois. At one convention he called for black private schools, asserting “We want education and we want money. With these two potent instruments we have the [lever] with which we may turn the wicked institution of this country upside down, and pour Slavery into the pit below…Let us profit from the teachings of history until each one of us shall fully realize…that ‘Knowledge is power.’” One of his proposals endorsed the creation of an industrial school that would admit students regardless of race or gender; this idea was partly shaped by his own negative experiences as an apprentice and by the fact that many whites refused to take on black apprentices at all. Although the school was never built, Jones’ call for black industrial education and economic power was an early part of a movement that later grew more prominent under Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. In 1850, Jones helped organize Olivet Baptist Church, which was the first black church of its denomination in Chicago and eventually became the largest church in the nation.
That same year Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it easier for whites to recapture fugitives and to kidnap free blacks into slavery. In response, Jones declared that blacks would “stand by our liberty at the expense of our lives.” He also co-organized a rally of 300 black Chicagoans and composed a list of resolutions which proclaimed his community’s “strong, deep resolve to resist every attempt to bring back to bondage any black” and willingness to “defend ourselves at all hazards, even if it should be to the shedding of human blood.” Like other black communities throughout the North, Jones and the rest of black Chicago put these words into action through “vigilance committees” that policed their neighborhoods to keep out slave catchers and kidnappers. Their efforts became even more difficult in 1853 when the state legislature strengthened its black laws by completely banning black migration. In spite of these setbacks, Jones continued to fight against slavery and racism, lead black institutions, and grow his business interests. When the Civil War began in 1861, Chicago grew even larger (by 1870 it was the fifth-largest city in the country), and he used one of his officers as a recruitment office for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. The wartime efforts of these black troops and black civilians like Jones helped win the war and change racial attitudes. Early in 1865 Illinois repealed its black laws, and Jones led the celebrations in Springfield. Several months later the North won the war, but shortly thereafter President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Jones was selected as an honorary pallbearer and as part of the group that accompanied the president’s body from Chicago to its final resting place in Springfield.
The war had also encouraged massive growth in Chicago’s black population, and along with black men getting the right to vote in 1870, this created new opportunities for black political power. In 1869 the governor appointed Jones the first black notary public (someone given legal authority to serve as an impartial witness to the signing of important documents) in state history. That same year one of his many former mentees, Lloyd Wheeler, became the first African American to pass the Illinois bar exam, and the two later became business partners. Jones’ business interests suffered a significant setback in 1871 when many of his properties were destroyed in the Chicago Fire. This catastrophe was caused in part by city policies that underfunded the fire department, allowed most structures to be made of cheap wood, and enabled the dumping of waste in the river and the unsafe storage of flammable materials like coal and kerosene. In response, the Republicans reorganized as the Union Fire Proof Ticket. Their slate of candidates in the 1871 elections included Jones, who was seeking to fill a vacancy on the Cook County Board of Commissioners. When he won the election, he became the first African American elected to public office in Illinois. He was reelected in 1872 but then defeated several years later. At the same time, his advocacy helped lead to the desegregation of Chicago’s public schools in 1874. The man who had risen to wealth and power despite being denied the opportunity to attend school now donated land that was used for the Jones School (not related to the present-day Jones College Prep) and became the first African American on the Chicago school board. This service was among his final actions, as he died in 1879. John Jones did not live to see the Great Migration make Chicago a global center for black politics, economics, and culture (including many more who followed him by migrating from Tennessee), but his decades of leadership were essential in creating the path that led to this, as the city grew from a village to a metropolis and as African Americans transitioned from slavery and explicitly racist laws to emancipation and the promise, if not reality, of equality.
©David Brodnax, Sr.
