Mary Jane Richardson Jones (c. 1819 – December 26, 1909) was an American abolitionist, philanthropist, and suffragist. Born in Tennessee to free African-American parents, Jones and her family moved to Illinois. With her husband, John, she was a leading African-American figure in the early history of Chicago. The Jones household was a stop on the Underground Railroad and a center of abolitionist activity in the pre-Civil War era, helping hundreds of fugitive slaves flee slavery.

After her husband's death in 1879, Jones continued to support African-American civil rights and advancement in Chicago, and became a suffragist. Jones was active in the women's club movement and mentored a new generation of younger black leaders, such as Fannie Barrier Williams and Ida B. Wells. Historian Wanda A. Hendricks has described her as a wealthy "aristocratic matriarch, presiding over the [city's] black elite for two decades."^[1]

Mary Jane Richardson was born in 1819 in Memphis, Tennessee,^[1] to a free black family; her parents were Elijah and Diza^{[lower-alpha 1]} Richardson.^[3][4][5] Her father was a blacksmith, and her mother was a homemaker.^[3][6] Richardson was one of the middle children among nine born to the Richardsons between 1810 and 1845.^[3] In their 1945 book They Seek A City, Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy described Richardson as a light-skinned woman "whose queenly beauty became a legend in later years."^[7]

In the 1830s, Richardson moved with her family to the Mississippi River port of Alton, Illinois.^[8] As a teenager, she witnessed the riots in Alton surrounding the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an anti-slavery newspaperman. Lovejoy's funeral passed by Richardson's father's house, an event which she "vividly" remembered years later.^[9]

The Joneses became members of a small community of African Americans in Chicago, comprising 140 people at the time of their arrival.^[10] Along with three other women, Jones became a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church based at Quinn Chapel, and developed it into a well-trafficked stop on the Underground Railroad.^[8][10][11] The Joneses joined the Liberty Party and made their family home Chicago's second stop on the Underground Railroad.^[2]

While John's tailoring business prospered, Jones managed their home as a center of black activism, organizing resistance to the Black Codes and other restrictive laws like the Fugitive Slave Act.^[5][11] Their friends included prominent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, who introduced them to John Brown.^[2][4] Brown and his associates, described by Jones as "the roughest looking men I ever saw", stayed with the Joneses on their way east to their raid on Harpers Ferry. Jones provided new clothes for the radicals, including, as she recalled in an account given years later, the garb Brown was hanged in six months later.^[13] The Joneses were not militant, despite their anti-slavery views, and did not support Brown's plan for a violent slave uprising.^[2]

Together with her husband, Jones assisted hundreds of enslaved people fleeing north to Canada at a time when such actions were illegal, standing guard at the door during meetings of abolitionists.^[1][2] Writing in 1905, their daughter Lavinia Jones Lee recalled her mother personally loading fugitives onto trains north at the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad station on Sherman Street while slave catchers watched, kept away by a restless anti-slavery crowd.^[4][13] Jones kept track of those she had assisted, writing letters to many former fugitives and forming a network of aid centered on her and John.^[10][14]

In 1861, the Joneses helped found Olivet Baptist Church, which contained the first library open to black Chicagoans.^[2] Jones, along with three other women, established an aid group called Workers for the King through the church in 1871.^[2] During the Civil War in 1861, Jones recruited for the United States Colored Troops. Along with fellow activists like Sattira Douglas, she led the founding of the Chicago Colored Ladies Freeman's Aid Society, which allocated direct aid to former slaves as well as providing a forum for political action.^[15]

Jones, described by historian Richard Junger as a woman of strong "convictions and abilities", continued to advocate for integration and civil rights after the war ended. In 1867, Theodore Tilton, a New York journalist, planned a visit to Crosby's Opera House in Chicago to give a lecture. Jones wrote to warn him that the audience was to be segregated. Upset by this disclosure, Tilton successfully pressed the Opera House to integrate its seating for his talk and presented tickets to Jones, reading the letter she had written to him to the audience.^[4]

In 1871, John was elected as a Cook County Commissioner, the first African American to be elected to public office in Illinois.^[16] The same year, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed both the Jones family's home and John's four-story tailoring business, together valued at $85,000 (equivalent to $2.2 million in 2023^[12]). The family built a new house near Prairie Avenue, while John's tailoring business was also restarted at a new location; he continued to work until retiring in 1873.^[4]

In 2004, the City of Chicago designated the site of the John and Mary Jones House as a Chicago Landmark.^[23] In addition, a Chicago park was named in Mary Jones' honor in 2005.^[24]