PHOTO BY SCOTT EISEN
Carol Jones, a former Civil Rights activist from Lynn during an interview with The Item at her home on Friday.
Editor’s note: This is the third of several profiles of Lynn residents the Item will publish during Black History month.
By BRIDGET TURCOTTE
LYNN — Half a century after Carol Jones, 76, marched in the fight against discrimination and racial injustice, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are continuing her work.
Jones stood up with Clarance W. Jones, 78, former president the North Shore Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Abner Darby, a local leader in activism, to march through Lynn around the time of the 1963 Civil Rights march on Washington D.C.
The mission of the NAACP is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.
In the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she remembers the local anguish that caused teenagers to want to burn down Union Street in its entirety, echoing the riots in Detroit and other cities across the country. But she and her fellow activists knew violence wasn’t the appropriate cure for violence, she said.
“They wanted to destroy everything,” she said. “We had a march in Lynn. It started at City Hall. These kids were marching with us. At the time, people were burning things down because of the unfairness of the way they were being treated. Clarance Jones talked to the kids and said that’s not the way to do it.”
Jones said she was disheartened that decades later, some protesters are making the same mistakes and choosing to riot.
“They’re bad choices,” she said.
But she said that the need to fight for a change is still very much prevailing.
“All the lynchings and killings in the ’60s, really it’s still happening in 2017, but they’re doing it with bullets,” she said. “ It’s still happening from the ’50s and ’60s and even before that. Prejudice is still alive today.”
Jones said as a child, she doesn’t remember feeling the direct effects of racism in Lynn, which was comprised of immigrants of several nationalities and was more accepting of people of all races than Boston, she said. Though seeing the violence and segregation so close to home brought fear and unease to the community.
“I grew up with all white people — they were all nice,” she said. “I remember them going back to my house to have dinner and I would go to their houses to have dinner. That was back when the Lynnway was a two-way street. The only thing I remember there was the Donut Hole and Howard Johnson’s.”
She said that as a child, the black community gathered for regular celebrations and softball games. By the time she was raising her three children, she felt that sense of unity was gone. In the 1990s, while driving home from visiting her a friend who lived on Kimball Road, Jones took a wrong turn off of a one-way side street and quickly found herself lost.
“A police officer asked me what I was doing down there and he was very nasty to me,” she said. “He scared me. It was 11:30 at night. He pulled a gun on me. I put my hands on the steering wheel and told him I was visiting my friend. I gave him her name and everything.”
She drove home, shaken, and tucked the negative memory away, she said.
“It wasn’t as bad for us here in Lynn,” said her daughter Darlene Coleman. “But we got the tension from that in school.”
Coleman said those who came from the south brought the mentality of segregation and racism with them. She and her siblings learned more about black history from a program at the Community Minority Culture Center than they did in their classrooms, she said.
Her daughter Raven Coleman helped organize a March last year in the wake of a series of attacks on black men by law enforcement.
“Her statement was that black lives matter,” Jones said. “She was disgusted with policemen who were killing black men. She had seen so much on TV, she felt maybe she could do something.”
Raven Coleman contacted police and assured them that the protest would be peaceful and that organizers had no intention to spread violence. At the event, Jones’ 18-year-old great-granddaughter Arianna Jones spoke about ending racial injustice.
“I’m proud,” said Carol Jones. “It’s good — It’s a positive thing for my children. They’re not the ones to be fighting and burning things down. They do it in their own way.”
Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.