At 100 years old, Inez Davenport Jones doesn’t mince words.
In 1951, she was in her second year of teaching at a segregated school in Farmville when she helped the students organize a protest. The children were fed up with the dilapidated building and outdated classroom materials at Moton High, the only school for Black students in Prince Edward County.
Jones didn’t confide in anyone about the students’ plans — not even her husband, the school principal. The actions from that April afternoon led to the Virginia lawsuit, which was consolidated with four others to become Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education was unconstitutional.
“When you think about it, that was really, really stupid,” Jones said matter-of-factly recently in her former Virginia Beach home that now belongs to her son, Eric Jones.
“Nooooo, Mom!” Charlene Marchant responded, looking aghast. “Just naïve! I would say you were innocent. Not stupid.”
Jones waved her daughter off. Now an Atlanta resident, Jones flew to Virginia last week to celebrate her 100th birthday among 74 friends at a bash at Aberdeen Barn. Jones, looking lovely in a tiara and wearing royal blue with matching sparkling nail polish, quipped to her well-wishers that the secret to living so long is, “Just don’t die!”
The 1951 student strike, Jones thought at the time, surely would draw enough attention to make the all-white school board address the inequities at Robert Russa Moton High School. White high school students could attend two schools, including the state-of-the-art Farmville High down the road. Moton had been built for 180 students but was overcrowded with more than 450 in 1951; students studied in the cramped brick building and tar-paper-covered classrooms alongside it.
“That was stupid,” Jones repeated. “I had thought when they went on strike, the school board would be so impressed, we would automatically get a new school. It didn’t work that way. It made things worse.”
Many who attended Jones’ party on Aug. 19 knew of her role in history, even if she isn’t one to boast about it.
Jones was frustrated, too, with the separate and unequal school. She had to buy her own record player for her classroom. The roof leaked every time it rained and students used umbrellas during class. Potbellied wood stoves weren’t sufficient for heat. The students near them got too warm. Those farther away had to wear hats, coats and scarves during the coldest weather. Smoke often filled the room, making people sick and causing coughing jags.
One day, a 16-year-old junior named Barbara Johns approached Jones to say she was tired of the inadequacies; Jones responded, "Why don’t you do something about it?”
Johns had the idea for a student strike.
“Will you help me?” she asked Jones, who answered, “Sure.”
Their communications were secret. Jones knew she couldn’t confide in her husband, Boyd. Nor could she risk news of the idea spreading to other teachers. She and Johns developed a way to communicate privately.
“I’d write a note and stick it in a music book, and she’d take it home. Then she’d bring the book back and put it on my desk with an answer,” Jones recalled.
Boyd Jones and the Parent Teacher Association had approached the school board again and again about a new school. Progress never came.
Months-long plans led to a carefully selected date of April 23 — close enough to graduation that Jones and Johns felt the school board would be compelled to act.
Getting Boyd Jones out of the school so the students could be organized was critical; it was accomplished by a prank phone call saying two Moton students were causing trouble downtown.
Inez Jones heard Boyd’s office door slam as he bustled out of the building. A note went around to all the teachers calling for an emergency assembly.
Johns emerged from behind the stage curtain, stunning the students and teachers who were expecting to see the principal. She delivered a fiery speech to mobilize the students to leave. Realizing he had been duped, Boyd Jones returned and found the students in the auditorium. He tried to assure them that progress toward a new school was being made.
“The students got up and started walking out,” Jones said. “My husband tried to tell them, ‘You have to get back.’ But they kept right on going.”
News stations picked up the story and it went national. The superintendent ordered the teachers to demand the students return.
They didn't. The NAACP filed a petition with the school board two weeks after the strike began, demanding integration. After that was rejected, the NAACP filed a lawsuit in federal court.
A newspaper editorial mocked the students. A cross was burned in front of the high school. All the teachers were fired.
Boyd Jones’ contract was not renewed while his wife was pregnant with Charlene, their first child.
“No place in Virginia would hire him,” she said.
Boyd Jones was stunned years later when his wife revealed that she had been behind the strike.
The Virginia lawsuit was joined by others from Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C., to form the Brown case, which ruled that segregated facilities deprived individuals of equal protection under the 14th Amendment.
The Jones family moved to different states as Boyd Jones worked and Inez Jones became a stay-at-home mother to her four children. After the children were grown, Jones and her husband moved to Virginia Beach and she taught in Norfolk Public Schools. Boyd Jones earned his doctorate from Cornell and taught math at several universities, including Norfolk State.
Marchant has nothing but pride in reflecting on her mother’s legacy, which also includes mentoring generations of students in music.
“I think she was incredibly brave,” Marchant said. “To challenge this young girl and to be brave enough to slip the notes with her, to share the notes. It was just amazing."
Jones’ granddaughter Natalie Marchant flew from London with her two young sons for the 100th birthday party. Her grandparents inspired her to go into education.
“I feel a sense of responsibility to live up to what it is that they did and achieved in their time,” said Natalie, an associate professor at University College London and previous chair of the university’s equality, diversity and inclusion committee.
At the party, watching her mother interact with so many friends and admirers, Charlene Marchant smiled, thinking, “My mom really belongs to the world. She belongs to everybody now. She’s not just my mom.”
Robert Russa Moton High School is now a National Historic Landmark and museum, recognized as the birthplace of America’s student-led civil rights revolution.