Barbara Ann Posey Jones | |
---|---|
Born | Barbara Ann Posey 1943 (age 80–81) |
Nationality | American |
Citizenship | USA |
Alma mater | University of Oklahoma, A.B. 1963 University of Illinois, A.M. 1966 Georgia State University, PhD 1973 |
Known for | leadership of sit-ins at lunch counters in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1958-1959 |
Spouse | Mack H. Jones. |
Children | 3, including Bomani Jones and Tayari Jones |
Awards | 2021 Suzan Shown Harjo Systemic Social Justice Award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Economics |
Institutions | Clark College, Prairie View A&M, Alabama A&M University |
Barbara Ann Posey Jones (born 1943) is an American economist who was a leader of the 1958 Katz Drug Store sit-in as a high school student.[1] Since 1971, she has been a professor of economics, department head, and Dean at several historically Black Colleges and Universities in the American South. She is a past president of the National Economic Association.[2]
In 2021, she was awarded the Suzan Shown Harjo Systemic Social Justice Award from the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education.[3]
Jones joined the youth council of the Oklahoma City NAACP at the age of 14, and on a visit to a freedom rally in New York City, ate at a lunch counter for the first time. On her return home, she became one of the spokespeople for the youth Oklahoma lunch counter sit-ins of 1958–1959. The Chi Zeta Chapter of Zeta Phi Zeta Sorority named her "Girl of the Year" of 1958,[4] Datebook magazine published her article, "Why I Sit In"[5] in 1960, and she gave a speech entitled "My America" at the 51st Annual NAACP Convention in June 1960.[6] She graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1963, and completed a master's degree in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1966. There, she met her husband, political scientist Mack Jones, at a 1962 NAACP meeting.[7] She completed a PhD in economics at Georgia State University in 1973.
Jones began her career at Texas Southern University[8] and then continued work as an economics professor at Clark College (which became Clark Atlanta University), serving as department chair even before she finished her PhD.[1] She taught there from 1971 to 1987, winning numerous teaching awards. She joined Prairie View A&M as department chair in 1987, quickly becoming Dean of the College of Business from 1989 to 1997. In 1997, she became Dean of the School of Business at Alabama A&M University, where she served as a professor of Economics until her retirement in 2016.[9][10]