Effie Neal Jones

Mrs. Jones, born in Fairmont, North Carolina, received her education from the Public Schools of Robeson County, North Carolina. A self-made woman, she had very little formal school training. At age 14, she assumed all the motherly duties for her 11 siblings, after their mother's death. Effie and her siblings worked alongside their father as sharecroppers. In 1946 Mrs. Jones, like many other blacks of the time period, was a member of the Great Migration (African American). During the Great Migration of 1916-1930, over one million blacks moved from the south to the north in search of better lives. It is conservatively estimated that 400,000 left the South during the two-year period of 1916-1918 to take advantage of a labor shortage created in the wake of the First World War.[1] Mrs. Jones migrated north to escape racial discrimination, and poverty. She sought employment opportunities and became a source of income for her sharecropper parents and her children. Reluctantly, she commuted between North Carolina and New Jersey to ensure a better life for her family.[2]

Mrs. Jones migrated north to Newark, New Jersey in 1952 and took a job as a live-in housekeeper for a very prominent, liberal doctor. While living in Newark, Mrs. Jones was very active in the Civil Rights Movement. She joined the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the Order of the Eastern Star and the United Order of Tents.[3][4] She helped register black voters and build community organizations that could win a share of political power in the state. In 1964, due to the terminal illness of her father, she took her northern learned wisdom back to the south, to her home state of North Carolina, where she joined a well-known statewide civil rights and political activist, Dr (Rev) H. E. Edwards, a member of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in organizing black community events such as political fund raisers and voter registration drives. Their efforts were met with racist repression from state and local lawmen, White Citizens' Councils, and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) resulting in family harassment, threats, arson and other criminal acts. It was during this time (1968) that she, along with Dr Edwards and others, begin what would be her lifelong endeavor of helping young children.

In 1940 Mrs. Jones married Mr. Forest Jones, a decorated US Army World War II veteran and Master Mechanic, she was the mother to nine children, daughter: Rosemary Gordon and sons: Roger Jones, Carlton Bouldin, Perry Jones, Willie Jones, Colonel Jones, George Jones, Patrick Jones, and Michael Barton. Her offspring produced 29 grandchildren, and 37 great grandchildren at the time of her death.

Effie Neal Jones died on April 30, 2002, at Moore Regional Hospital, Pinehurst, North Carolina of Heart Failure.