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Youngstown native receives top NAACP award
By MARK CURNETTE
CINCINNATI
Nathaniel R. Jones’ magical year continued this week.
The Youngstown native, former federal judge and lifelong civil-rights advocate, received the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s greatest honor Wednesday night.
Anthony Foxx, U.S secretary of transportation, presented Jones with the medal at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Freedom Fund Dinner.
“At every point when his country needed him, Nathaniel Jones answered the call,” said Foxx, a former law clerk for Jones.
Jones read from prepared remarks.
“I am reminded how my life’s work has been shaped by the mission of this organization,” he said. “Being a lawyer was my calling, and that calling is the work for equal opportunity and justice for all our nation’s citizens.”
This year, Jones celebrated his 90th birthday, received the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s highest award and published his memoir.
Jones, a Youngstown South High School graduate, has lived in Cincinnati since being appointed in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals.
The Spingarn Medal has been given annually since 1915, with only a few exceptions, to one individual. The distinguished list of recipients includes George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr.
The medal is presented to a man or woman of African descent “who shall have made the highest achievement in any honorable field of endeavor during the preceding year or years.”
Admitted to the bar in 1957, he was, in 1962, the first African-American appointed assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. He went on to serve as assistant general counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission), in 1967-68.
He worked from 1969-79 as general counsel for the national NAACP and argued school-desegregation cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He sat on the federal bench from 1979 through his retirement in 2002.
Jones traveled three times to South Africa. In 1993, he and his wife, Lillian, had dinner with Nelson Mandela. Jones returned to serve as an official election observer and helped to craft the country’s new constitution. His wife is deceased. They have five children.
Jones is senior counsel at the Blank Rome law firm’s Cincinnati office.
Jones’ 416-page memoir, “Answering the Call: An Autobiography of the Modern Struggle to End Racial Discrimination in America,” was published in May by the New Press. He said the book was 10 years in the making.
“I hope it is an informative and practical discussion,” Jones said of his book. “I was intent on seeing things in real time and in context.”