Everyday Heroes: Teacher Della Jones’ dedication, diligence left lasting legacy


This story is reprinted from Steve Flairty’s 2008 book, Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes. Della Jones died in 2009 at age 106.

By Steve Flairty
KyForward columnist

Williamstown’s Della Jones has experienced more history than many of us have studied in books.

When she was born on July 7, 1903. Women in the U.S. didn’t have the right to vote. World War I was still more than a decade away. Her own African-American race, still suffering from the remnants of slavery, was treated as second-class citizens. There were no television sets, no commercial airplane flights and no modern air conditioning to make homes more comfortable.

But times have changed, and Jones is a true witness of the fact. And, for Jones, much of her perspective comes from the lenses of being a professional educator in Kentucky’s public schools.

Della Jones (Photo provided)
Della Jones (Photo provided)

In 1922, Jones graduated from the noted Lincoln Institute, a high school for blacks in Shelby County. The school’s president, Whitney Young, was the father of national civil rights activist and National Urban League director Whitney Young Jr., who Della Jones “held as a baby in my hands many times.”

Jones realized early that she wanted to be a teacher. At age 19, she passed an exam that allowed her to gain a teaching position in rural Wayne County.

“I finished the school term there, about three months. It was grades one to eight, and I had 29 students all together. Then I went to Kentucky State College, in Frankfort (now Kentucky State University) to summer school and got a teaching certificate that would be good for four years.”

Jones parlayed her new teaching certificate into a position at an all-black school in rural Boone County, near Burlington. “It was a good teaching experience,” she said, “and there were very few discipline problems. I can’t understand how today there are so many.”

Along about the time her four-year certificate expired, Jones got married and decided to take a break from being an educator for a while. Her hiatus from teaching lasted much longer than expected, however. “In 1929, the state legislature passed a law that married women could not teach,” she said, “and I was out of teaching for 13 years. I had always wanted to go back to college and get my degree, though.”

The law concerning married women in education was changed, and Jones soon resumed her teaching career, this time in a small school in the small town of New Liberty in Owen County. Dividing her residences between there and her home in Williamstown, she had to travel a circuitous path to her job “every month or two.” Jones reminisced about her challenge in getting to work, “I first had to go to Walton to catch a train to Worthville. Then I would stay all night there, get up early and ride a mail bus to New Liberty.”

Her dream of a college degree continued to be intense, so late into her 30s, the determined Jones returned to KSU to take summer classes. Besides doing correspondence and some extension work at Georgetown College, Jones attended summer school at Kentucky State for an amazing 17 years. In the early summers, she “put my little girl in a training school while I was in classes there.”

Finally, in 1957, Della Jones proudly accepted her bachelor’s degree diploma in education from Kentucky State in Frankfort – and heard an inspirational commencement address from a relatively unknown young civil rights activist and minister by the name of Martin Luther King Jr.

In the late ’50s, Jones became a librarian at a Northern Kentucky high school which was by now racially integrated. When pressed to talk about any experiences of racism directed toward her, the gracious centurion remarked, “I don’t like to say bad things about people, but I had a principal who was as biased as could be.“ She told of a Shakespearean play performance at the school. Teachers were allowed to attend, but the principal directed her to “go back to the library where you can supervise the students who didn’t go to the play.”

When Jones returned to the library, she found there were no students not attending the performance. That, along with many other instances of the principal’s abuse, ripened things to a head on one particular day. “Some students of mine saw how the principal was treating me, and they actually booed him. In time, he did soften some, but not too much,” she said.

Until her death at age 103 in 2006, Della Jones lived by herself in the home in Williamstown where her parents raised her. Her husband died in 1969. She was an avid fan of the Kentucky Wildcats basketball team, and her small house’s walls were adorned with many photos, including one with former basketball coach Tubby Smith. She seldom missed a game on TV. She often got special visitors, too. “I have a lot of wonderful friends,” she said at the time, eyes sparkling, “and my students come by and bring their grandchildren. I was a dedicated teacher.”

Few would doubt Della Jones’s dedication. She has a long, long legacy of history to prove it.

Steve Flairty is a lifelong Kentuckian, teacher, public speaker and an author of five books: a biography of Kentucky Afield host Tim Farmer and four in the Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes series, including a kids’ version. He is currently working on “Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes #4,” due to be released in spring 2015. Steve is a senior correspondent for Kentucky Monthly, a weekly KyForward columnist and a member of the Kentucky Humanities Council Speakers Bureau. Read his KyForward columns for excerpts from all his books. Contact him at sflairty2001@yahoo.com or visit his Facebook page, “Kentucky in Common: Word Sketches in Tribute.” (Steve’s photo by Ernie Stamper)


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