Mary Jane Richardson Jones

Born Mary Jane Richardson in Memphis, Tennessee, Jones was from a free black family, the daughter of a blacksmith named Elijah Richardson.[1][2] In the 1830s, she moved with her family to Alton in Madison County, Illinois.[1] As a teenager, she experienced the riots surrounding the murder of anti-slavery newspaperman and campaigner Elijah Parish Lovejoy in Alton. Lovejoy's funeral passed by her father's house, an event which she "vividly" remembered years later.[3]

In 1844, she married John Jones, a free black man originally from North Carolina, whom she had first met in Tennessee and who moved to Alton to woo her.[2][4] The young couple moved to Chicago in 1845, only eight years after the city's incorporation. On the way, they were suspected of being runaway slaves and detained, but were freed on the appeal of their stagecoach driver.[4]

Once in Chicago, the Joneses, along with their daughter Lavinia, became members of a small community of African-Americans, which numbered only 140 people in the city at their arrival.[5][6] Along with three other women, Jones became a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, based at Quinn Chapel, and developed it into a well-trafficked stop on the Underground Railroad.[5][1][4]

While her husband's tailoring business prospered and he achieved political success, Jones managed the family home at 119 Dearborn Street as a center of black activism and resistance to the Black Codes and other restrictive laws like the Fugitive Slave Act.[4][6] Their friends included prominent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown.[6] Brown and his associates, described by Jones as "the roughest looking men I ever saw", stayed with the Joneses on their way east to their raid at Harpers Ferry. Jones provided new clothes for the radicals, including, as she recalled in her memoir, the garb Brown was hanged in six months later.[7]

Together with her husband, Jones assisted hundreds of slaves fleeing north to Canada at a time when such actions were illegal, standing guard at the door during meetings of abolitionists.[8] Writing in 1905, their daughter Lavinia Jones Lee recalled her mother personally loading fugitives onto trains north at a station on Sherman Street while slave catchers watched, kept away by a restless anti-slavery crowd.[7] Jones kept track of those she had assisted, writing letters to many former fugitives and forming a network of aid centered on her and her husband.[9]

Cabinet photograph of Jones taken in 1883

When the Civil War began in 1861, Jones began to recruit for the United States Colored Troops. Along with other activists like Sattira Douglas, she also led the founding of the Chicago Colored Ladies Freeman's Aid Society, which provided direct aid to former slaves as well as providing a forum for political action.[10]

Following her husband's death in 1879, Jones became independently wealthy, and dedicated her fortune to political activism.[1][6][11] Her husband's estate was valued at over $70,000; he had been one of the city's wealthiest men.[3][12] She contributed significantly to Hull House, the Phylis Wheatley Club in Chicago, and Provident Hospital.[13]

Moving to 29th Street, her stately new home reflected her "economic status and social prominence" in the city, according to the historian Christopher Robert Reed.[14] Jones was considered the most prominent of the "old guard" African-American community that had arrived in the city before the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.[8] Historian Wanda A. Hendricks describes her as a wealthy "aristocratic matriarch, presiding over the [city's] black elite for two decades."[8]

As a prominent black suffragist, Jones hosted Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt and others at her home for meetings.[1][6] She died in 1910 and is buried alongside her husband at Graceland Cemetery under a tombstone which reads "Grandma Jonesie".[4][6]