Anna H. Jones

1855 – 1932
Anna H. Jones was born in Canada 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 Wilberforce University, a historically Black university in Ohio, before moving to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1892 to teach at Lincoln High School. She 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.