Salt Spring Island Archives
John Craven Jones and his wife Almira Scott1 became progenitors of a long line of distinguished educators and professionals.
Their daughter Madge became head of Guilford County Negro Schools, in North Carolina, USA.2
Madge Jones married H.H. Falkner, a North Carolina Senator before Reconstruction. H.H. Falkner was also one of six original teachers at the all-Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T 3) in Greensboro, a city close to Tarboro, where John Craven Jones and his wife Almira taught for 20 years, after he left Salt Spring Island in the later 1870’s.
Madge’s son, Waldo C. Falkner, was the second African American to be elected to the Greensboro City Council.
Waldo’s wife, Margaret Evans, acted as co-chair for Shirley Chisolm’s campaign for Presidency in 1972. Margaret also taught English at A&T College. 4
Footnoted research by Usha Rautenbach; updated 2012
John Craven Jones and his wife Almira Scott
Accession number: 2005005001
John Craven Jones and his wife Almira Scott
Accession number: 2005005002
John Craven Jones and his wife Almira Scott
Accession number: 2005005003
John Craven Jones and his wife Almira Scott
Accession number: 2005005004
1 married 1882 (source: C. Rudolph Knight, Historian Columnist for the Daily Southerner)
2 North Carolina continued to maintain totally segregated schools until the 1950s; by 1965, all of the schools in the county were desegregated.
3 North Carolina "mandated a separate college for the colored race" - it first opened in 1893 as The North Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical College For the Colored Race.
4 (A&T was elevated to University status in 1967) One of Margaret Evans’ students was Jesse Jackson, the African American civil rights activist and Baptist Minister; Dr. Martin Luther King became Jackson’s mentor, and Jackson, in turn, became one of King’s closest co-workers; in 1984 and again in 1988 Jesse Jackson was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
2005005001.jpg
2005005002.jpg
2005005003.jpg
2005005004.jpg