Edward Allen Jones
*The birth of Edward Allen Jones is celebrated on this date in 1903. He was a Black linguist, scholar, author, and diplomat.
E.A. Jones was born to George and Carrie Jones of Indianola, Mississippi. In 1918, at age fifteen, he entered a prep academy and began studying Latin and Greek. Jones received his bachelor's degree from Morehouse College in 1926 as valedictorian. In 1929, Jones studied at Grenoble University in France, receiving a Certificate d'Etudes Francais (with special mention). The General Education Board granted Jones a fellowship to study at Middlebury University the following year.
In the fall of 1941, he married Virginia Lacy, a GED Fellow at the University of Illinois and the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in Library Science. He received his master's degree from Middlebury College in 1930 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1943. Jones began his forty-year teaching career at Edward Waters College. He was a French professor and the Modern Foreign Languages department chair at Morehouse College.
As a researcher, Jones received the Corson French Prize at Cornell University in 1942 and was a Romance Language and Literature Scholar at Cornell from 1942 to 1943. In 1944, he was elected into the Phi Kappa Phi chapter. In 1968, Jones received the Ford Foundation Sabbatical Research fellowship, during which he published several books and articles. He was a Phi Beta Kappa in 1960 and one of America's Outstanding Educators in 1972. In 1970, he was the honorary Consul to Senegal, and in 1977, he became the College Language Association Journal (CLA) editor.
Edward Allen Jones, who died in 1981, is best known for his book A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College.
