Lewis Wade Jones

Who was Lewis Wade Jones?

Lewis Wade Jones was a sociologist and educator. He was born in Cuero, Texas, the son of Wade E. and Lucynthia McDade Jones. A member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, he received his A.B. degree from Fisk University in 1931, and followed it with postgraduate study as a Social Science Research Council Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1931-1932.

Jones returned to Fisk, where he continued to work closely with Charles S. Johnson, as a research assistant, supervisor of field studies, and instructor in the Department of Social Sciences from 1932 to 1942. In 1949 the two co-wrote A Statistical Analysis of Southern Counties; Shifts in the Negro Population of Alabama.

Jones was a Julius Rosenwald Foundation Fund Fellow at Columbia University, where he was awarded an M.A. degree in 1939 with the thesis "Occupational Stratification Among Rural and Small Town Negroes before the Civil War and Today." He earned his Ph.D. in 1955.

Before the recording project at Fort Valley, where he was a member of the summer faculty, Jones, along with Johnson and John W. Work III collaborated with the Archive of American Folk Song on the Library of Congress/Fisk University Mississippi Delta Collection. This project was a two-year joint field study conducted by the Library of Congress and Fisk University during the summers of 1941 and 1942. The goal of the partnership was to carry out an intensive field study documenting the folk culture of a specific community of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta region. The rapidly urbanizing commercial area of Coahoma County, Mississippi, with its county seat in Clarksdale, became the geographical focus of the study.