page_title: Mona Hinton
section_title: Life in Queens, NY
hierarchical_section_title: Mona Hinton / Life in Queens, NY
caption_attribution_description: English: Mona Hinton's AFM card, 1980s
context_page_description: Edmonia "Mona" Caesar Clayton Hinton was an educator, music contractor, and bookkeeper, as well as a business partner and advisor for her husband, the bassist and photographer Milt Hinton.
context_section_description: After relocating to Queens, Mona continued to play a critical role in Milt's life and career. In addition to caring for their daughter, she handled all of the family's finances, and her attention to detail ensured the couple's financial security later in life. When Milt left the Calloway Orchestra in the early 1950s and began freelance work as a musician in New York, Mona kept track of Milt's work, scheduled interviews, coordinated public relations events, and often drove him back and forth to gigs (Milt never drove as an adult, due in part to a major car accident he was involved in as a teenager in Chicago).  While waiting for Milt's late-night gigs to end, she would regularly socialize with musicians’ wives, most of whom were white due to the structural racism that was prominent in recording studios through much of the 1960s. She was known as being smart, articulate, and sophisticated and was able to find common ground with people from diverse backgrounds, putting everyone at ease.
  In 1958, at her husband's request, Mona took the celebrated home movie footage (the only movie in existence) of the Esquire Magazine photo shoot on a Harlem brownstone stoop that was memorialized in Jean Bach's 1995 film, A Great Day in Harlem.
  Although for many years Mona had made it a practice to enroll in occasional college-level courses, it was in the mid 1960s that she completed both a bachelor's and a master's degree from Queens College.  She then taught remedial reading at two Queens elementary schools for eight years.  As she recalled, “Every time I would feel mentally stagnant, I would just go take a course at Hunter or . . . any school downtown. And I loved anthropology, I took a lot of courses in that; I loved psychology and I took a lot of courses in that; anything that I felt like that I wanted to do. So it was not until later years that one of the teachers at Queens College talked me into matriculating. And I’m glad he did because when I did graduate, I graduated magna cum laude.”
  While working as a public school teacher, Mona would often invite students to her home on the weekends who were having difficulty with the topics. As she put it, this was “to introduce them to the concepts for the next week so they could cope.  Milton would serve some milk and cookies and play music for them.  It made such a difference in the lives of a lot of those children.”  Mona credits her parents with helping her understand the value of education for improving one's life, noting, “My parents always believed in education and I mean they made it a very, very important part of our lives.”
  She retired from teaching in 1977 to begin traveling with Milt again and was regularly invited to join him at the jazz parties and festivals where he performed during that time.  She traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, and attended multiple events at the White House.  At the same time, she was active as a music contractor for Lena Horne, Quincy Jones, Sammy Davis Jr, the Mills Brothers, and others.  She also continued in the field of education as a substitute teacher into the 1980s.
caption: Mona Hinton's AFM Card (1982-83), from the Milton J. and Mona C. Hinton Collection, Oberlin Conservatory Library special collections
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1060", "Image ImageLength": "1418", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2016:09:23 14:21:44", "Image ExifOffset": "252", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "390", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8757", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1060", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1418"}