[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 73 (Tuesday, May 3, 2022)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E448]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF DR. JOHNNIE ANDERSON JONES, SR., ESQ.

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. TROY A. CARTER

                              of louisiana

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 3, 2022

  Mr. CARTER of Louisiana. Madam Speaker, today, I want to recognize 
the extraordinary life of Dr. Johnnie Anderson Jones, Sr., Esq. of 
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a Civil Rights Lawyer, and World War II 
Veteran, at the tender age of 102 on April 23, 2022.
  Dr. Jones was born November 30, 1919, in Laurel Hill, Louisiana and 
raised on Rosemound Plantation by his parents, who farmed 73 acres of 
land but insisted that their son get an education. He attended a two-
room schoolhouse and became interested in the law, he said, when a 
teacher gave him a book by Charles Evans Hughes, then the Chief Justice 
of the United States.
  ``While we were out in the fields picking cotton, I would be thinking 
about what I read in that book,'' Mr. Jones told the Advocate of Baton 
Rouge. ``I couldn't stand the sight of people picking cotton . . . . 
Everything it represented.''
  Mr. Jones enrolled at Southern University and A&M College in Baton 
Rouge, planning to major in industrial education. He was 24 years old, 
a future civil rights lawyer not yet graduated from college, when he 
landed on the beaches of Normandy in the D-Day invasion of 1944. He was 
tasked with unloading equipment during the Normandy invasion.
  He became the Army's first African-American warrant officer. He was 
assigned to a unit responsible for unloading equipment and supplies 
onto Normandy.
  He nearly died before his ship reached the shore, when the explosion 
of a mine sent him flying ``sky high into the air,'' he recalled, and 
onto an upper deck. He again almost died when he came under German 
sniper fire on Omaha Beach.
  When Mr. Jones returned home to Louisiana, he was greeted not with a 
hero's welcome, but rather with all the indignities of segregation in 
the Jim Crow South.
  Riding a bus with fellow U.S. servicemembers, Mr. Jones, who was 
African American, was forced to sit in the back of the coach. He was 
driving to New Orleans to have shrapnel removed from his neck when a 
White police officer, entirely unprovoked, pulled him over and began 
assaulting him.
  ``He knocked me down and started kicking me,'' he said. ``Things 
weren't right. `Separate but equal' was unconstitutional, and I wanted 
to fight it and make it better.''
  Mr. Jones did so by enrolling in law school and becoming a lawyer in 
the early years of the civil rights movement. Mr. Jones was credited 
with fighting legal battles on multiple fronts of the movement for 
racial equality.
  He worked with voter leagues and with civil rights organizations; 
including the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He 
assisted demonstrators who participated in lunch-counter sit-ins. 
During that time, his car was bombed on two separate occasions.
  After the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, 
which outlawed segregation in public schools, he helped accompany about 
30 Black children to a White elementary school in Baton Rouge, 
historian Adam Fairclough wrote in the volume ``Race and Democracy: The 
Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972.''
  But Mr. Jones played perhaps his most significant role in the 1953 
Baton Rouge bus boycott, a long-overlooked event that helped inspire 
the landmark boycott two years later in Montgomery, Ala., prompted by 
the arrest of Rosa Parks. Mr. Jones was only two weeks out of law 
school in June 1953 when the Rev. T.J. Jemison, a founding member of 
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, invited him to represent 
the organizers of the effort in Baton Rouge.
  ``I told him, `That's an awfully big suit to fill,' '' Mr. Jones 
recalled to a reporter in 2015. ``But he said, `Nonsense, Brother 
Jones, you can do it.' ''
  The Baton Rouge demonstration was touched off when Martha White, an 
African-American housekeeper, ignited a controversy by taking a seat in 
a section of a public bus reserved for White riders. During the eight-
day boycott that followed, activists organized carpools that allowed 
participants to travel to and from work without riding city buses. 
Eighty percent of the city's bus ridership at the time was African 
American. The boycott ended with the partial desegregation of city 
buses, with the front two rows of seats reserved for White people and 
the last two rows for Black people. While some protesters had hoped for 
a more dramatic outcome, historians today describe the Baton Rouge 
boycott as a prototype of others to come.
  ``Almost unnoticed at the time,'' the Baton Rouge protest ``was a 
direct precursor of the Montgomery bus boycott,'' Fairclough wrote, 
``and an event of major significance in the evolution of the civil 
rights movement.''
  Upon his return to the United States, he resumed his studies and 
changed his major to psychology, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1949. 
He received a law degree, also from Southern University, in 1953.
  Mr. Jones served briefly in the Louisiana House of Representatives in 
the 1970s. He continued practicing law into his 90s.
  Mr. Jones was predeceased by his four children, Johnnie A. Jones Jr., 
Adal Jones, Adair Jones and Ann Jones. Survivors include many 
grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
  During his service in World War II, Mr. Jones sustained shrapnel 
wounds that he would bear for the rest of his life.
  ``The doctor told me it would really hurt in 75 years, but I wouldn't 
have to worry about that,'' he bravely discussed. ``I fooled him. It 
hurts, and I'm still picking it out of my head and arm. A piece came 
out just above my left eye yesterday.''
  He waited nearly eight decades for his service to be recognized with 
a Purple Heart, receiving the award only last year. The long delay was 
symbolic of what he saw as the slow move toward justice in the civil 
rights movement.
  His heroism will be forever marked in our lives. I am proud to say 
the life he lived paved the way for me to enjoy the accomplishments I 
have endured following his footsteps. I will continue to work for the 
citizens of Louisiana, as Dr. Jones did, always striving to make life 
better in our community.

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