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Keeper of the Dream, Instrument of Change: Katherine Butler Jones ’57

Published in Spring 2008 issue under Features, Alumnae Profiles
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By Leanna James Blackwell

It was a warm Sunday in August 1953, and Katherine Butler Jones ’57 (above) had one more person to visit before leaving her childhood home in Harlem for college. A family friend, Aunt Ida, was expecting her. Aunt Ida cooked her meals on a hot plate and worked in service, spending her small savings on gifts for others. Five-dollar bills were slipped quietly into Jones’s hand during every visit. But this time, when Jones arrived at the familiar brownstone, Aunt Ida had another surprise. It was a carefully folded hundred-dollar bill, enough for transportation to and spending money at Mount Holyoke.

It was the biggest bill she had ever seen. Jones’s first-year tuition, room, and board were covered by her mother’s cashed-in life insurance policy. These sacrifices represented, she knew, years of hard work and the belief of a community in the power of education to change lives.

That belief is the frame around everything Jones has achieved since, as professor, activist, historian, and writer. After Mount Holyoke, Jones earned a master’s in education from Simmons College and a doctorate in educational administration from Harvard. She settled in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, Hubert Eugene “Hubey” Jones. together they raised eight children, an achievement Jones calls “a political act” for its “power to shape the future.”

One of the first black families in the neighborhood (they were initially denied mortgages and prevailed against a petition to prevent them moving into their chosen home), the Joneses became community leaders, spearheading numerous efforts to improve educational opportunities for children in the greater Boston area.

When the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunities began in 1965 to address racial imbalance in Boston-area schools, Jones joined the executive committee and wrote the guidelines used by suburban schools that voluntarily educate urban children of color. Jones directed the Newton METCO program for a decade before being elected to four terms on the Newton School Committee. She continued to promote hiring minority staff and a curriculum including African American history.

“When I began teaching in Boston, in 1957, there were no pictures of black people in textbooks, and few teachers of color,” Jones says. “I was formally educated with little knowledge of black history—except slavery.” The need for curriculum reform was made explicitly clear to Jones in 1966, when one daughter requested an apron to bring to school. She needed it for her role as a maid in the fourth-grade play. “The apron did not go to school, but mother did,” says Jones.

Strong bonds between generations is a recurring theme in Jones’s life and career. That theme is reflected in her commitment to honoring role models from her mother and Aunt Ida to her distant ancestors, free landowners about whom she writes in her memoir, Deep Roots. It is also seen in her efforts to educate the next generation about the contributions of women and people of color by teaching that history at Simmons College and Boston university. For years, she and Hubey held an annual African American history contest in their home. Each child would present research, recite a poem, or write a short biography about an important African American. The entire family remembers when seven-year-old tanya wrote directly to Roots author Alex Haley and received a personal letter in return. That novel inspired Jones to search her own family history, and brought her to Africa.

Jones’s influence is also deeply felt at Mount Holyoke. The second black alumna trustee, she was instrumental in creating MHC’s Black Alumnae Conference. In her 1994 keynote speech, Jones addressed an audience of 150, all holding candles whose flickering light, she says, illuminated “many shades of faces.” Looking at each with pride, Jones concluded, “We are keepers of the dream, the prophets of the future, and the instruments of change.” Jones was talking about change not only in the world but also at her own alma mater. As an alumna trustee, she joined with students and alumnae to urge the board to divest its holdings from companies in racially segregated South Africa. Beginning in 1985, Mount Holyoke terminated those investments.

Jones’s career as a writer is also a case study in the individual as an instrument of change. A chapter from Deep Roots won the 1996 New England PEN Writer Discovery award. It tracks Jones’s upbringing in Harlem and details her journey to find her family’s roots. Her search was spurred by discovering her great-grandparents’ marriage certificate in an old box. That yellowed piece of paper led Jones to a trove of historical records telling the story of landowning ancestors. Her relatives founded the first church for African Americans in troy, New York. Some helped escaped slaves get to Canada. Jones’s research also fueled her first dramatic play, which had its premiere last April in Boston.

The play, 409 Edgecombe Avenue: The House on Sugar Hill, draws on the history of the Harlem apartment building in which Jones was raised. “I grew up in a place where I was supported and cared for, where I came in contact with all kinds of people,” Jones says. Thurgood Marshall, the first African American U.S. Supreme Court justice, lived in 9E. W. E. B. Du Bois lived in the building, as did Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, and Eunice Carter, the first black woman appointed assistant district attorney in New York state.

But the resident who most captivated Jones’s imagination was Madame Stephanie St. Clair. The millionaire businesswoman ran the Harlem numbers racket in the ’30s, holding her own against the notorious Dutch Schultz. Yet she was also a civic activist who “built immigration centers where new arrivals could learn English, and wrote a weekly column in the local press,” according to Jones. She made St. Clair the centerpiece of a play depicting the “thirteen-story vertical community” in which Jones and her spiritual ancestors came of age.

A commitment to honoring the “spiritual ancestry” of her people may be the best way to describe Jones’s passion for educating the next generation about African American history. Fifty years from now, members of the class of 2007 will open a “time capsule” given to them at graduation by the class of 1957. In it, they will find memorabilia from 1953 to 1957, and a chapter from Jones’s memoir and a 409 playbill. In 2057, students will hear about life at Mount Holyoke a hundred years ago. They will learn about a gifted economics and sociology student who was one of two African Americans in her first-year class, a girl from Harlem who went on to accomplish great things, and made great things possible for others.

Photo by Paul Schnaittacher

Learn More:

Katherine Butler Jones provided the following links for those interested in learning more about her life and work. 

• April 9, 2007, WBUR radio interview about Jones's play, 409 Edgecombe Avenue: The House on Sugar Hill. The site also includes preproduction photos from the play.
• April 4, 2007, Boston Globe article on Jones's play.
• The Harlem Reader, an anthology with a chapter written by Jones on 409 Edgecombe Avenue: The House on Sugar Hill.
• Web site of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunities (METCO) Program.
• Teen Voices—written for and about teenage and young adult women.  The magazine is honoring Jones at an April event