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Jones, Amanda  

Joshunda Sanders

centenarian and symbol of racial progress, was the daughter of Emmanuel Alfred Roberts, emancipated from slavery in 1865, and Moriah Josephine Washington, farmers on Alum Creek, east of Austin, Texas. Jones gained widespread recognition as a symbol of America's racial progress when, at age 109, she voted for Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) for President in November 2008. She was one of the oldest registered active voters in Texas at the time.

Amanda Jones was a deeply religious woman who had for most of her life been a stay at home mother of ten in rural Central Texas. She resided along a rural highway in central Texas for most of her life. Her granddaughter, Brenda Baker said she lived to be 110 because of her religious faith which was evident in the scriptures and photographs of her in her Sunday best which decorated the walls of ...

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Rhinelander, Alice Jones  

Angelita D. Reyes

cause célèbre, was born Alice Beatrice Jones, the daughter of a white mother and supposedly “black” father, both of whom had emigrated from England to the United States in 1891. While the race of her mother Elizabeth Jones was familiar and recognizable enough for Americans to classify as white, the racial background of George Jones, her father, was not as clearly determined. While general references considered him to be British of West Indian descent, he was distinctly not African American according to an array of witnesses and census documentation in the United States.

Various newspapers of the period described Alice Jones as “dusky,” “a tropical beauty,” or of a “Spanish complexion” (Lewis and Ardizzone, 63–66, 163). Not considering herself black in the American rhetorical denotation of race, Alice Jones Rhinelander affirmed during the annulment trial of the interracial marriage to Leonard Rhinelander (1903 ...

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Shabazz, Hajj Bahiyah “Betty”  

James Lance Taylor

activist, was born Betty Dean Sanders in Pinehurst, Georgia (though she later claimed Detroit, Michigan), to Shelman “Juju” Sandlin, a Philadelphia steelworker, and Ollie Mae Sanders, who conceived her out of wedlock as a teenager. Rumors of maternal neglect (Sandlin was an absent father) landed Betty in Detroit, Michigan, with her devout Catholic foster parents Helen Lowe, a grammar school teacher, and Lorenzo Don Malloy a shoemaker and proprietor. She was their only child.

Growing up with the Malloys, young Betty witnessed Helen Malloy's activism in social uplift causes through a Detroit affiliate of the National Housewives League the National Council of Negro Women and the then militant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Betty participated in the Detroit League s youth program where she competed in debutant contests studied Negro history and affiliated with the well regarded Del Sprites social club Long ...