The Rev. William A. Jones, Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 71
The Home Going service for Dr. William Augustus Jones will be held on Friday, February 10, 2006 at 12 noon at Bethany Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor will preach the eulogy. May God bless the memory of Dr. William Augustus Jones.
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: February 8, 2006
The Rev. William A. Jones, who marshaled his golden voice and forceful personality to exert influence far beyond his Brooklyn pulpit in support of local and national civil rights causes, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 71.
David Lee/Bethany Baptist Church
The Rev. William A. Jones.
The cause was complications of kidney disease, said Carolyn McClair, publicist for Bethany Baptist Church, where Dr. Jones served for 43 years until his retirement last September.
Dr. Jones, a son and grandson of Baptist ministers, was renowned as a lyrical, deep-voiced preacher heard weekly in 400 cities on television and radio in a program called "Bethany Hour," as well as in his 5,000-member church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. In an interview with The New York Times in 1997, he called good preaching "a divine symphony played upon the instrument of a human tongue."
His concept of religion centered on helping the poor and dispossessed. He led campaigns to integrate building trade unions, organized boycotts to force A.&P. and other supermarket chains to hire more minority workers, and opened a banquet hall and cafeteria to serve residents of his overwhelmingly poor neighborhood.
"You can't talk religion to a hungry man," he said in an interview with The Times in 1963.
At the national level, he joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1961 to split from conservative Baptists and form the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which now has more than 2,000 churches and 2.5 million members. Its avowed purpose: "To redeem thesoul of America." Dr. Jones later served as president of the convention.
In 1979, he helped found the National Black Pastors Conference, a group of 3,000 Protestant and Roman Catholic black priests and ministers, and later led the organization. He said he believed that black churches, banded together, could be a strong political force, one not as dependent on white benefactors as many civil rights organizations were.
"We have our finger on all the black churches in this country," Dr. Jones said in an interview with The Times in 1980. "Just imagine 12,000 black churches saying, 'Go out and vote.' We could change the nation and change the world."
After serving as the New York chairman of Operation Breadbasket, the economic development arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he succeeded the Rev. Jesse Jackson as the national chairman.
Dr. Jones did not play things safe. When Rudolph W. Giuliani was running for mayor in 1993, he said, "Elements that can best be described as fascist seem to have grown up and flowered around Mr. Giuliani."
Mayor David N. Dinkins, who was standing by Dr. Jones's side at a rally at Bethany when he made the remark, quickly disavowed it.
In 1988, when a black girl, Tawana Brawley, contended that she had been beaten and raped by white racists, Dr. Jones came to her aid. He housed her mother, Glenda, in his church for 40 days so she could avoid testifying under oath. (A state grand jury later ruled that Tawana's accusations were lies.)
Dr. Jones provided platforms for controversial black speakers like Leonard Jeffries, a professor at the City College of New York who has been widely criticized for anti-Semitic statements.When Alton H. Maddox Jr., one of Tawana Brawley's lawyers, was ordered to appear before a grievance committee questioning his conduct, he took Dr. Jones with him.
Mr. Maddox said in a speech reprinted in The Amsterdam News in 1993 that he had chosen Dr. Jones because he was "big enough and bad enough."
Dr. Jones said the Rev. Al Sharpton's mother asked him to look after her son when he was a boy; he later recruited Mr. Sharpton as a youth leader in Operation Breadbasket. In 1994, Mr. Sharpton, a Pentecostal minister from the age of 10, went to Dr. Jones's church to be baptized as a Baptist.
"Reverend Jones has always been an anchor to my family," Mr. Sharpton told The Times.
William Augustus Jones Jr. was born on Feb. 24, 1934, in Louisville, Ky. He graduated with honors in sociology from the University of Kentucky, where he regretted that he could not play basketball because blacks were then barred from the team.
He graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary, near Chester, Pa., the same seminary attended by King. He later earned a doctorate from the school, now part of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School.
He enlisted in the Army in 1954 as a private and was discharged in 1956 as a first lieutenant. He was called to the ministry of the First Baptist Church of Paschal in Philadelphia.
He joined Bethany in September 1962 and within 10 months was leading 75 ministers in a protest at the State University of New York's Health Science Center at Brooklyn, charging discriminatory hiring practices by unions. More than 700 people were arrested, including Dr. Jones's own children; in the aftermath, blacks increased their participation in the building trades.
The A.&P. protest, which involved raucous demonstrations at the company's headquarters in Manhattan, also resulted in changing some hiring and buying practices.
In 1969, Dr. Jones became the first African-American to run for Brooklyn borough president, finishing third in a field of four.
Dr. Jones is survived by his wife, the former Natalie Barkley Brown; a son, William Augustus III of Lexington, Ky.; three daughters, Elsa Elisabeth Jones of Rocky Hill, Conn., and Lesley-Diann Jones and Jennifer Jones Austin, both of Brooklyn; three brothers, the Rev. Lamont Jones Sr. of Lexington, the Rev. Henry Wise Jones of Atlanta and Byron Timothy Jones of Frankfort, Ky.; two sisters, Phyllis Jones Meade and Sylvia Jones Harris, both of Atlanta; and eight grandchildren.
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