Draft:Patrice E. Jones

Patrice E. Jones is an American educator, TikToker, model, and historical preservationist. She has served as an adjunct English instructor on the faculty at the University of Holy Cross, Delgado Community College, and the University of New Orleans.

Jones is the descendent of Mississippi Supreme Court justice Ephraim G. Peyton and a woman enslaved by him. She is an advocate for reparations for slavery in the United States. She advocates for reparations for Black people on TikTok and was featured on Dr. Phil, where she talked about how reparations helped her family. She is a trustee of Handy Heights, her family's 116-acre farm in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, which was given to her formerly enslaved great-great-grandmother from her white father. Jones documents her historic preservation projects at Handy Heights on her TikTok account, which has received millions of views.

Family
Jones is the daughter of Tisch Jones (née Patricia Rhone) a theatre artist, civil rights activist, and scholar. and Anthony Jones, an economist. She is the granddaughter of Geneva Handy Southall, a musicologist and professor who was the first woman to earn a doctorate degree in piano performance. Jones is a grandniece of the flautist D. Antoinette Handy and of Methodist bishop William Talbot Handy, Jr. Her great-grandfather was Rev. William Talbot Handy, a choirmember of the Tuskeegee University Quartet and a Methodist minister who sang at the funeral of Booker T. Washington. Jones’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was Ephraim G. Peyton, a slaveowner and justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi. Peyton's son, Ephraim G. Peyton Jr, had a daughter, Florence Geneva Handy, with one of his father's house slaves. Florence Geneva Handy, Jones's great-great-grandmother, was born enslaved but obtained her freedom soon after due to the Emancipation Proclamation. In the 1880s, Florence Geneva Handy and her husband, Emanuel Handy, Jr. (son of Emanuel Handy). , were given money from her father to purchase Handy Heights, a 40-acre farm in Hazlehurst, Mississippi that later grew to 116 acres. In the 1970s, Jones’s great-grandmother, Dorothy Pauline Pleasant Handy, set up a trust to maintain the upkeep of Handy Heights, which was passed down through generations of women in the Handy family.

Education and career
Jones earned a Bachelor of Arts in English language and literature from the University of New Orleans in 2016. In 2018, she earned a Master of Arts degree in English language and literature with a concentration in American literature from the university. She wrote her Master’s thesis on New Orleans-born early 20th-century writer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. She has worked as an English instructor at Delgado Community College, the University of Holy Cross, and at the University of New Orleans.

Jones became a trustee of Handy Heights in 2020, a role she shares with two other family members. She has worked on renovating her great-grandparents' house at Handy Heights, the largest of the buildings on the property. The other three houses on the property, craftsman-style homes, built in the early 1900s, were used by Jones's great-uncles, who lived at Handy Heights until the 1980s.

As of 2024, Jones has over 111,000 followers on TikTok under the username @thecreoleo. She posts about her family history, her activism work for civil rights and reparations, and her renovation and historic preservation projects on her social media accounts. She has received millions of views on her videos about Handy Heights.

She advocates for reparations for black people. In April 2023, Jones was interviewed by Phil McGraw on the talk show Dr. Phil to discuss reparations and how owning land helped members of her family produce income and receive education.

Patrice has been represented by the FT45 modeling agency since 2017.