User:FloNight/Mattie Jones

Mattie Jones (1933—) is an African American civil rights activist from Louisville, Kentucky. For more than sixty years, Jones has worked to achieve "peace, justice and equality." Jones is a founding member of National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Jones is an inductee in Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame. In 2020 she was awarded the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Award.

Early life and education
Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1933. Her parents were Tommy Johnson, a construction worker, and Mattie Johnson, a domestic worker. She moved to Louisville when she was in second grade after her father took a job with Quartermaster Depot across the Ohio River in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Louisville was segregated during her childhood. She walked past five white schools to get to the black high school she attended.

Jones graduated from Louisville Central High School in 1951, and enrolled in Indiana University where she encounter an unsafe and unwelcoming environment because of racism. She transferred to University of Louisville but left the school after she was denied a work-study job because of her race. Angry at the discrimination, Jones joined the Black Workers Coalition to fight for equality in employment.

In 1955, she married Turner Harris Jones, a teacher. During their marriage, she worked as a cook at local hotels. At the invitation of Georgia Davis Powers, Kentucky's first African American state senator, Jones attended a meeting in the late 1950s with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Louisville and heard him speak about using nonviolent methods to end racism.

Her husband made it possible for her to become involved with the civil rights movement by caring for their children while she was organizing and participating in demonstrations and boycotts.

Civil rights
Jones has been arrested dozens of times while demonstrating and protesting for civil rights. Jones marched in the “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march on March 7, 1965 over the Edmund Pettus Bridge between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. With Rev. Louis Coleman ,Jones founded the Justice Resource Center in Louisville. In the 1980s, Jones was a staff member for the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice.

In 1991, Jones took the position of Coordinator of Racial and Economic Justice with Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) USA in Nyack, New York. In 1999, Jones focused her work back in Louisville with the Justice Resource Center.

Environmental justice
Over the decades, Jones activism has involved to include environmental justice issues. She has advocated for clean up toxic pollutants in the air near Rubbertown plants in Louisville's West End.

Police accountability
Police accountability.

Louisville issues
Dixie Highway school's physical restraint practices, where teachers were locking special needs children in time-out rooms. Black businesses to be awarded more government contracts.

Honors and awards
Mattie Jones was the recipient of the 1983 Peace and Justice Award of the Catholic Peace and Justice. In 2018, two blocks of River Park Drive were honorarily designated as Mattie Jones Way.

Jones is an inductee in Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame. In 2020 she was awarded the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Award.