Black History Month Profile Series: Elaine Jones

This month, DPIC cel­e­brates Black History Month with week­ly pro­files of notable Black Americans whose work affect­ed the mod­ern death penal­ty era. The fourth and final entry in this series is lawyer and civ­il rights activist Elaine Jones, for­mer pres­i­dent and direc­tor-coun­sel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and coun­sel of record in Furman v. Georgia.

Elaine Jones was born in Norfolk, Virginia on March 2, 1944, the daugh­ter of a rail­road porter and a school teacher. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1965 and a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1970, becom­ing the first African-American woman to grad­u­ate from that school. Her life and career was defined by a series of ​“firsts.” She was one of the first Black women to defend death row pris­on­ers, the first African American to serve on the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association, and the first woman to lead the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). 

Ms. Jones was deter­mined to pur­sue civ­il rights and equal jus­tice since child­hood, when she expe­ri­enced the racism of the Jim Crow South, includ­ing being forced to ride in the back of the bus and see­ing how the all-white police force treat­ed her com­mu­ni­ty. She told The Washington Post in 2003, ​“You’re a lit­tle girl, but you can see. There was a fear that per­vad­ed the African American com­mu­ni­ty, and I knew it was wrong.”

Elaine Jones joined LDF upon grad­u­at­ing law school in 1970, turn­ing down a job at a pres­ti­gious Wall Street firm in favor of pur­su­ing civ­il rights work. During her ear­ly years at the LDF, Ms. Jones defend­ed sev­er­al death row inmates. In a C‑SPAN inter­view con­duct­ed by civ­il rights leader Julian Bond, she said that author­i­ties in the South, where most of her work took place, ​“couldn’t believe it” when she intro­duced her­self as the lawyer on the case. 
 

Only 2 years into her career at LDF in 1972, Elaine Jones became the coun­sel of record for the U.S. Supreme Court case that would sus­pend the death penal­ty in the United States, Furman v. Georgia. The Court ruled in Furman that the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty was unconstitutionally arbitrary. 

After the Furman deci­sion, Ms. Jones took on sev­er­al employ­ment dis­crim­i­na­tion cas­es, rep­re­sent­ing those who claimed to have been harmed by racial bias in their work­place. Some of these includ­ed Patterson v. American Tobacco Co. and Swint v. Pullman Standard, excep­tion­al­ly high-pro­file cas­es involv­ing some of the nation’s largest employers. 

In 1993, Elaine Jones became the first woman to be appoint­ed as pres­i­dent and direc­tor-coun­sel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. This posi­tion allowed her to expand the LDF’s reach into sev­er­al realms, includ­ing envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice and health care. Anthony Amsterdam, a law pro­fes­sor at New York University who worked with Ms. Jones through­out her career at LDF and argued Furman v. Georgia at the U.S. Supreme Court, said, ​“She has a remark­able com­bi­na­tion of legal tal­ent, a pow­er­ful moral com­pass and a ded­i­ca­tion and will­ing­ness to give of her­self.… She was born for this kind of work.” She was pre­sent­ed the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 2000 by President Bill Clinton, as well as the Jefferson Medal of Freedom from the University of Virginia.