Johnnie Jones fought for his country and then his people

It took 77 years for Johnnie Jones to be awarded his Purple Heart, but by then he had won the hearts and minds of most Americans.

Johnnie A. Jones finally received a Purple Heart last year. Picture: Heather Mcclelland

Johnnie A. Jones Sr Lawyer.

Born Baton Rouge, Louisiana, November 30, 1919; died Jackson, Louisiana, April 23, aged 102.

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Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a 19th-century minstrel who, in blackface, entertained the people of the American south and sang a popular song called Jump Jim Crow. He hadn’t written it; it emerged from fields of slavery along with other songs we know well – Michael, Row The Boat Ashore and Jimmy Crack Corn.

Rice mocked the slaves by exaggerating their speech patterns and ridiculing their lifestyles. When southern American states introduced legal codes to enforce racial segregation they became known as Jim Crow laws.

Louisiana had some of the most absurd: there had to be two ticket booths at circuses – “that shall not be less than 25 feet apart” – one for blacks, the other for whites. You could be jailed for renting a room to a black person. Even homes for the blind were segregated. It took a century to dismantle it all.

Alabama’s Rosa Parks became famous in 1955 when she refused to surrender her seat for a white passenger. She was arrested and the defence of her case and subsequent challenge to that law was the making of a then little known Baptist minister, Martin Luther King.

And while that appears to be the cardinal moment in the civil rights movement King led, his was the second bus off the rank. The first campaign to seek equality, at least when it came to bus seats, was handled by World War II veteran Johnnie Jones. Jones knew all about the rules of the south – not long after returning from Europe he was bashed by a traffic policeman while driving to a doctor to get German shrapnel removed from his neck.

He studied law and a fortnight after graduating was asked to oversee the case of the protesters who had defied the bus laws in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital, and had been arrested. The council ignored the city’s 40 black bus operators to award an exclusive contract to a white-owned fleet. On these buses, blacks could sit only on designated seats with whites up the front. Should whites fill those, blacks would yield their seats for more passengers. That rarely happened; 75 per cent of bus passengers were black. But it meant whites-only seats remained vacant as others stood at the rear.

Leaders of the black community agreed on a plan of action – a boycott. Blacks would wait at bus stops but when a bus turned up they would turn their backs on it. Locals who owned cars, meanwhile, ferried these people free of charge to their places of employment or education. It worked so well the bus company appealed for help. It was going broke. At one point Jones’s car was blocked on a railroad crossing by white drivers, but as a train approached they let him drive on. He had been warned.

To defuse the situation, an ordinance was passed, a sometimes derided compromise: whites would have the first two rows set aside, blacks the long back seat. Buses then were filled on a first come, first served basis from the back to the front and from the front to the back until they met in the middle. This was reported in The New York Times and King read it. He adapted the idea to Montgomery, Alabama, where locals also pooled cars to move black workers and schoolchildren around while they refused to use the bus system.

The civil rights protests that would lead to justice, and to King’s assassination a dozen years later, were in full flight. Jones never wavered in his belief in the equality of all Americans, so much so the Ku Klux Klan twice bombed his car, once coming close to killing him.

But he had become used to near-death situations. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he was part of the landings on what we know as Omaha Beach where the US forces took the heaviest casualties. More than 2000 US soldiers were killed that day. Jones was there and came under fire. He could see the German firing at him. He returned fire. “I still see him. I see him every night,” he said three years ago. Then his ship hit a landmine and Jones was blown into the sky. On the beach he suffered shrapnel wounds when, he said, he was too slow to hit the ground.

Yet he couldn’t sit at the front of the Baton Rouge bus with colleagues he’d fought alongside. Two years ago the French government awarded him its Legion of Honour for his service. Then, last June, 77 years too late, his country awarded him a Purple Heart. He was 101.