With a small cassette recorder, Anna Jones set out to tell the story of her father, North Carolina’s first black school board chairman.
Anna Jones set out with a little RadioShack cassette recorder in 2007 to document a few stories about her parents. When a mayor of a small North Carolina town told her, “Your father did more for Northampton County than anyone,” she recalls, “that was surprising to me. I wanted to know, what did he do?” Inspired by the film festival in her hometown of Durham, Jones enrolled in a documentary filmmaking program to tell his story. The result, Chairman Jones: An Improbable Leader, is an hourlong film following James Henry Jones’ journey from sharecropper to the first black school board chairman in the state. He fought to integrate schools, which – despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional – remained separate and inferior in many places. With only a seventh-grade education, James Jones “always mourned the loss of his education,” says his daughter, a member of the Rotary Club of Durham. “He wanted to make sure that anyone who wanted that opportunity, whether they were black or white or whatever, would get it.” Anna Jones’ adventure in cinema was funded through an ambitious online crowdfunding drive, grants, and contributions from family and friends. That assistance, combined with a daughter’s dogged determination, helped craft a resonant tribute to a man who strived to show that “cooperation is possible between races,” Jones says. – Brad Webber