Anna H. Jones

Anna H. Jones was born in Canada before the American Civil War and graduated from Oberlin College, a private Ohio school noted for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit black students. She taught at historically black Wilberforce University in Ohio before moving to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1892 to teach at Lincoln High School and later become the first black woman to serve as a school principal, assuming leadership of Douglass School in 1911. Jones was a co-founder, with Josephine Silone Yates, of the Kansas City Colored Women’s League, led fundraising for the YWCA, and served as president of the Missouri Association of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1903-06. She retired from Lincoln High School in 1919 and moved to Monrovia, California.

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