Courtesy of Brenda Perry and Carolyn Bennett at the Louisiana Black History Hall of Fame.
Attorney Johnnie Jones, Representative of The United Defense League Legal Team for The 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott Event Induction into The Louisiana Black History Hall of Fame stands in front of The Lincoln Theater, one of the former locations of the UDL Office.
For years, whenever Mada McDonald would get on the phone with her godfather, Johnnie A. Jones, she’d do so with a notepad in hand. “Because I knew that there was going to be some information that he was going to share with me, something important that he was going to talk about. I have it all documented to this day.”
In the wake of Jones’ recent passing on April 23—Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the nation as a whole collectively recall the remarkable legacy the civil rights trailblazer leaves behind. Over the course of his long life (he died at the age of 102), Jones survived the persecution of the Ku Klux Klan, bombing on the shores of Normandy, and years of violent resistance towards his efforts at equality as an attorney in Baton Rouge. As McDonald noted, he had many, many stories to tell.
It all began at Rosemound Plantation in Laurel Hill, where Jones was raised with his seven siblings until persistent racial violence and lack of opportunities for African Americans forced his family to leave in pursuit of a better life. They ended up in Baton Rouge, where Jones and his siblings were able to acquire a better education through the Southern University Demonstration School (today’s Southern University Laboratory School). He graduated with honors and attended Southern University until he was drafted for service in World War II during his third semester. This was in 1942.
Years later, when he was honorably discharged from the Army after the war ended, Jones was marked down as a white man. The clerks who completed his paperwork couldn’t believe that a Black man could have achieved all that he had. He was the first Black soldier to test for and be assigned the then-new position of Warrant Officer, and went on to take part in several major World War II battles, including Operation Overlord on D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge.
During the Normandy landings, he was very nearly killed when a mine exploded beneath his boat—“The man standing next to him did not survive,” said MacDonald—and then again on Omaha Beach as he came under German sniper fire. He would not receive national recognition for his service until 2021, at the age of 101, when he was bestowed a Purple Heart in a special ceremony at the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge.
Upon return from nearly sacrificing his life for his country, Jones was deeply disappointed to discover that in Louisiana, he was still—in the eyes of many—only a Black man, a second-class citizen. He faced racial prejudice everywhere he went in the form of segregation, and was even beaten ruthlessly by a white police officer on one occasion. “Johnnie was most concerned about how people were able to live in the society in which we are,” said his cousin “John John” Jones. “That’s why he took it personally when he came back from the military and things were not what he thought he went to Europe to fight for.”
He decided he would do something about it. After completing his degree in psychology and philosophy at Southern University, he enrolled in Southern Law School. On an interview recorded for the Count Time Podcast just last year, Jones said it had originally been his mother’s idea: “Mama always said I would be a lawyer. Everybody else said I would be a preacher, but it was Mama who said, ‘No, you gonna be a lawyer.’”
The defining achievement of Jones’s career came merely two weeks after his graduation from law school in 1953, when Reverend T.J. Jemison recruited him to serve as the attorney for organizers of the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, an eight-day protest in which local activists organized city-wide carpools to avoid use of the segregated city bus system. The initiative succeeded in achieving partial desegregation of busses in Baton Rouge; and served as the prototype for the more famous Montgomery bus boycott, organized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., two years later. Jones himself helped advise Dr. King when he visited Baton Rouge.
Having dove straight into the civil rights movement of the time, Jones quickly became involved in various legal initiatives dealing with racial equality. He became the very first Black member of the Baton Rouge Bar Association and was involved in the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality. He frequently represented demonstrators engaging in civil rights protests, including the 1960 Baton Rouge Sit-Ins that led to the landmark case successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court by then-lawyer Thurgood Marshall. In the wake of the fallout of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, Jones personally accompanied Black elementary children to their new school. Twice his car was bombed in an effort to assassinate him for these efforts.
“He always said that civil rights are not a choice,” Jones’s nephew George Jones told me. “You are born with your civil rights. He just wanted everybody to be treated equally, regardless of skin color or ethnic background.”
In the Count Time Podcast, Jones articulated the injustice of segregation that so fueled his dedication to equality: “You can go to the best school in the world, and you still gotta sit in the back of the bus. You can’t sit down… people just accepted that. And all they had to do was stand up and fight.”
Beyond his public life, Jones also strongly valued his family. “The main thing that hits home is his love for family, which was so important,” said McDonald. Having outlived all of his children, Jones spent the final years of his life very close to his remaining family, which include many grandchildren, cousins, nephews and nieces, and friends. McDonald, “John John”, and George each possess treasured memories spent in his company—visiting him in his apartment, attending various celebrations in his name, eating at the Golden Corral or at the Broken Egg Café, driving him to speaking events at Southern University and elsewhere. “When he passed,” said George, who lost his father, Jones’s brother, in 2017, “it was like losing a second dad. I’m certainly going to miss him.”
When discussing his work in civil rights on the Count Time Podcast, Jones told his interviewer, LD Azobra: “I was fighting for the generations to come. It wasn’t for myself…I’m still fighting.”
