James Oscar Jones

## Overview

James Oscar Jones was the former director for the Arkansas project in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC) from 1963 to 1966. James was an activist who worked for two prominent civil rights organizations, The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and SNCC, working with their organizer Bill Hansen who appointed James to director of the Arkansas Project to help with issues such as black voter suppression and integration.

## Early Life

James Oscar Jones was born in Willisville, Arkansas, in 1943. James lived with his two parents Ernest and Vick Jones, along with his nine other siblings, five of whom were children from another dad. James was raised on his family farm that his dad bought when he was only 13 years old, which was rare for a black man to have, it was the only black-owned farm in Willisville at the time according to Jones himself.

#### Education

James's parents valued education even if they only had seventh-grade education themselves. Compared to the other black kids in the area who eventually stopped going to school to work on sharecropping farms, James would wake up at 4 am with his siblings to do farm work and then go to school every day from kindergarten to twelfth grade. His parents saw potential and pushed him as much as they could. They would go to his teachers and talk to them to tell them to challenge James more and more due to their belief in their son's potential. Due to this influence, James participated in many different school-related events.

#### Church

James's parents also had James go to church as it was a vital part of their lives. Vick, James's mom, was a good singer and would sing for multiple churches so on Sundays no farm work was done but instead it was a day for church and not just a one-hour service but a whole day's worth of church.

## Activism

James was not oblivious to the world he lived in he had a mother who was a member of the NAACP and a father who listened to the radio for any vital information about politics and other farming business. But it was these major events heard through a radio that informed James about the country before he would later see it in person when he went off to college in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It was a bigger city than the small town of Willisville at the time James saw just how organized the segregation was in the city. At his college, he was exceptional compared to the average country kids who tended to have poorer education. Due to his high school's connections with teachers at the University of Arkansas. pushed in the direction of a Dr. Hayine who knew James's father who then directed him to another professor Dr. Marshall who suggested he meet up with some civil right activist Bill Hansen and Ben Grinage who talked about coming to Pine Bluff to work on the city after their work in Little Rock and during those conversations, it became abundantly clear that James's parents had instilled the activism spirit into him with his ideal to always do what his mama said "Don't you ever go through no white doors, no back doors. You go through the front- if there's a front door and white people go through it, you go through it, too." With this attitude in life, James continued doing protests and sit-ins with no fear and confidence in what he believed in. He had some trouble involving these protests and would eventually be expelled due to this continued activism in the community but this only pushed him further into the activism world becoming a full-fledged SNCC organizer. James went on to organize many more protests and sit-ins like one in a Mcdonalds' where tear gas was used and a armed angry mob was formed outside with only the locking of Jones and his fellow activist inside protecting them from serious injury.

## Refrences and Sources

Student Non-violent Coordinationg Committee website

NAACP website

James Jones SNCC page

SNCC Arkansas Project

C-SPAN interview