In 1919 Johnnie Jones was born into a farming family in Laurel Hill, West Feliciana Parish, just a few miles south of the Mississippi line. Jone’s grandmother was born into slavery. His father rented his 75 acre farm. His father did not have a formal education, which is perhaps why he valued education as much as he did.
When Jones was a child, most black children like him went to work in the field; they did not go to school. He went to school for the normal period of three months. His father would hire the teacher for an additional two or three months of teaching, paying him with food, not cash. He had seven siblings, but only six lived past childhood. But they all went to college.
After sixth grade, Jones found employment as a clerk for the Ransom Lumber Company. He was intelligent and industrious. Because of this, white resentment from mill workers and customers grew. Fearing for his son’s safety, his father decided to send Jones to Southern University High School down in Baton Rouge. For the first few months he stayed with an uncle in Scotlandville. Then his father gave up the farm and moved the whole family to Scotlandville just so that Jones could live with them and go to school.
In 1942 he was drafted into the Army after only a year and a half of college at Southern University. He entered the Army as an enlisted man. Eventually he took and passed a qualification test, and became the second African American warrant officer in the U.S. Army. On June 6, 1944 he was in the third wave of landings on Omaha Beach. Injured, he received a purple heart for a shrapnel wound. After the war, he came back to finish college. Dissatisfied with the types of jobs then available to a black man, he entered and graduated from the Southern University Law Center.
