Signature: Johnnie Anderson Jones Sr.

The other guests at President Barack Obama’s inauguration may have taken casual notice of the nearly 90-year-old practicing lawyer in their midst, but few could grasp the lifetime of battles he’s fought.

Jones is a decorated veteran of World War II who assaulted Omaha Beach on D-Day and later fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war he returned to Baton Rouge and graduated from law school only to find himself routinely arrested by racist judges merely because he was a black man practicing law in the white Old South.

A few months out of law school, Jones was hired by Rev. T.J. Jemison to fight on the legal front of the Baton Rouge bus boycott. Jones’ legal work eventually helped and became part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s history-making Birmingham bus boycott. “The brief I wrote for the Baton Rouge boycott ended up in the Birmingham boycott pleadings,” Jones says.

In 1960, when Southern University students were arrested at a sit-in to integrate the lunch counter at the Kress store downtown, they called Jones. Again, he showed no fear and plunged into the battle. At a time when the U.S. Supreme Court was refusing sit-in cases, Jones was confident the justices would take the Kress case.

AGE: 89

HOMETOWN: Laurel Hill, La.

OCCUPATION: Attorney

Jones developed a new legal tactic and defended it against objections from civil rights attorneys with other theories. Jones mixed bluff and bluster before others agreed to his tactics. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously for the students.

In 1972, Jones became one of five African-American members of the state House of Representatives, but he lost his re-election bid. “I was too independent,” he says.

He remains soft-spoken and humble, not bitter. Witnessing the election of a black president elated him. “It was something that we set out to do in the ’60s. I expected it would happen, I just didn’t think I would be alive,” Jones says.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu made sure to invite Jones to the historic inauguration.

“I thought I might get invited (to the inauguration), but I was just talking out of the blue,” he says.

Jones is still spry, still sharp, and still pleading cases even in his 90th year. His trip to Washington is a sweet reward for a lifetime of standing up and fighting for what he believes is right. “I’m proud,” he says, “that we didn’t make all those sacrifices in vain.”

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