Early Life and Education
Fayette County, Tennessee: located in the southwest corner of the state and bordering Mississippi and the Deep South. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Early Life
Curley Cleveland Jones was born on February 23, 1941 to Mr. Cleve Jones and Mrs. Susie Palmer Jones. He had ten sisters and four brothers and, as one of the eldest children, became a supporter and provider for many of his siblings throughout their lives.1 The family lived in Rossville, a small town in Fayette County, Tennessee. In the 1960s-70s, Fayette County was made up of about 60% African Americans, most of whom were sharecroppers.2 Curley grew up splitting his time between working in the fields to support his family and developing an education.
He attended elementary school at Stinson Chapel Christian Methodist Church, before attending Fayette County Training High School and graduating from Mount Pisgah High School in 1960.3 Curley's final years of school would have been filled with political tension and unrest due to the trial of Burton Dodson, a Black man accused of killing a white man, in 1959. This trial inspired many African Americans to register to vote for the first time, upsetting the white power structure.4
Fayette County didn't integrate schools until 1965-67, twelve years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision requiring the desegregation of schools and over half a decade after Curley's graduation. In a time where many African Americans weren't able to receive more than an 8th grade education, Curley worked hard to stay in school and obtain a high school diploma.5
Recommended reading: Robert Hamburger's Our Portion of Hell: Fayette County, Tennessee: An Oral History of the Struggle for Civil Rights, University Press of Mississippi, 2022.
A Mississippi Freedom Trail marker honoring Tougaloo College's involvement in the Jackson Civil Rights Movement. Image credits: 2C2K Photography via Flickr
Education
Curley moved to Mississippi to continue his post-secondary education. Early 1960s Mississippi was a hotbed of civil rights activity, led by Tougaloo College students and the Youth Councils of the local NAACP chapters, which may have drawn Curley to the area.6 In 1963, he began attending Saints Jr. College, an all Black private school in Lexington, Mississippi.7 He graduated in 1965 with an Associate of Arts degree. He then attended Tougaloo College, a private historically black school in Jackson, Mississippi. Here he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in History, graduating in 1969.8 Curley then headed to the State University of New York College at Genesco, NY, a prestigious liberal arts college. From 1969-1971, he took library science and education courses and worked as a teacher's intern in urban education in Rochester, NY. He received his Master in Library Science degree in August 1971.9
In 1970, only an estimated 31.4% of Black Americans age 25 and over held a high school diploma. While this was up from 7.7% in 1940, it was still drastically below the white percentage, estimated to be 54.5% in 1970. Looking at higher education, only 4.4% of Black Americans 25 years and over held Bachelor's degrees in 1970, compared to 11.3% of white Americans.10 Upon obtaining his Master's, Curley would have been one of a very small population of African Americans holding a graduate degree.