Member-only story
On Voting, Amanda Jones & What We Owe Our Ancestors
A little over a decade ago, I received one of the best assignments of my newspaper journalism career: At 109, Amanda Jones was likely the oldest active voter in Central Texas.
The middle child of a black family of 13 kids, Jones had several children of her own and 33 grandchildren. She had been a housewife for 72 years. For well over ten years she worked as a maid for $20 a month.
Her family also was a part of a long history of Black Texas that usually goes untold. Part of this is that Texas is not quite the South, though it truly is. Nonetheless, her family goes back five generations in Central Texas; at some point her family had owned 100 acres of land.
But first, her father was a slave. Amanda Jones, the daughter of a slave, was encouraged as soon as she was able to exercise her right to vote. By her formerly enslaved father.
She did so, despite having to pay poll taxes. The first time she voted, and paid for it, was for Franklin Roosevelt.
So it was with a special thrill that her granddaughters, in their sixties and seventies then, informed her that she could now vote not only for the…
