The city of Ann Arbor has a new downtown historical marker. It honors Jones School, a public elementary and middle school that closed 60 years ago.
All these years later, the school still holds special memories for Jennifer Brown, who attended Jones Elementary in the late 1950s.
“This means everything to me — to see this school and this neighborhood recognized — because we’ve lost a lot of our history,” she said.
One building, two schools
The marker sits on a sidewalk in front of Ann Arbor’s Community High School, which opened in the former Jones School building in 1972. Four or five years ago, one of Community’s counselors, Brian Williams, was thinking about history. Community was approaching its 50th anniversary. Williams knew the school building was much older, so he started doing some research.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh. We're coming up on 100 years of this building.’ And I know that it's not always been Community High School. And I didn't really know what was there before Community High School. So I just started, I went right in and immediately looked and I was like, 'This was an elementary school,'" Williams said.
"And I'm seeing these photos and these images, and it's all Black Ann Arbor community members and students.”
The Jones School originally opened in 1923 with grades K through 9. For most of its history, the student body was predominantly Black. Williams and a few of his colleagues did more research — and got help from some students. The group reached out to Jones alums, welcomed them to discussions at the high school, and during the 2022-2023 school year held a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the opening of Jones School.
But the historical marker took a little longer.
Honoring more than a school
For three years, a committee raised money and chose the photos and language to include on the display. Then on May 15, on a sunny, hot, afternoon, it was time to reveal the results.
Students from the Community High School jazz program played on the school’s front lawn near large tents where a few dozen Jones alumni and family members were chatting before the unveiling ceremony. Janelle Johnson welcomed the audience. Johnson teaches at Community and is one of the members of the historical marker committee.
“This has been a labor of love. This has definitely been something that we feel like, let me just be quite honest with you or quite frank with you all, it's about time. Right, it's about time that the Jones School alumni, and Black Ann Arbor be recognized," she said, drawing applause and cheers.
The marker honors Jones School, but it also celebrates the proud, majority-Black neighborhood that grew around it from the 1930s through the 1960s. This area on the city’s West Side was once known as the Old Neighborhood or North-Central Ann Arbor. Today, it’s called Kerrytown. The famous Zingerman’s Deli is here along with other popular local businesses.
All the Jones School alumni I spoke with reminisced about growing up in a close-knit neighborhood where people looked out for each other. But Jones alum and historical marker committee member Paul Harrison reminded the audience that in those days, invisible boundaries created by de facto redlining practices forced many Black families to live nearby.
“Segregation was not a coincidence. Segregation was a carefully thought-out, planned, and executed activity. That's what it was. It wasn't just like, ‘Well, we just naturally fell into these neighborhoods like this.’"
The closing of Jones School
In the 1960s, as many American school systems were integrating, the city focused on Jones. A history published by the Ann Arbor District Library notes that in 1964, more than 75% of Jones students were Black compared to just 6% of the total Ann Arbor student population. In 1965, the city closed everything but the Jones preschool and sent the rest of the students — about 175 total — to several other public schools that were almost entirely white.
Diana McKnight-Morton, who is Black, had attended Jones years before. She loved the school and remembers having her first Black teacher there. When she heard it was closing, it bothered her.
"By that time I was in my 20s. You know, I was really hurt by it, she said. "I just couldn't believe that it would close down because the school had so much to offer. The teachers were just awesome. It just ... it didn't make sense."
Meanwhile, some Black families were being pushed out of the neighborhood by gentrification, and others lost their homes when the city bought properties and leveled houses for an urban renewal traffic bypass project that was later abandoned. In addition to the new marker at the school, those seismic changes have also been the subject of some recent documentary films. Harrison welcomes all of it.
"I think that the efforts, you know, for all of these activities was this courageous thing of like looking into: What is our history? How did we get here? It wasn't a coincidence," Harrison told the audience.
"We're not responsible for the actions of the people that did that stuff back then. But we are responsible to look at the reality of how we got here. And to maybe try to do something about it."
The unveiling
When the speakers finished, everyone walked across the high school lawn to gather around the marker which was hidden under black cloth tied with a gold ribbon. After a drum roll from the jazz band, the cloth was pulled away and a loud cheer went up.
The marker is about eight feet tall, two-sided, and framed in gray metal. Former Jones students and their families circled it, smiling and pointing out people they knew — or even themselves — in photos. Many told me they hope the Jones School marker will lead to more documentation of African-American life in Ann Arbor. Some suggested a marker for an adjacent West Side neighborhood that was once majority Black and is now known as Water Hill.
“They need to acknowledge that this was a Black neighborhood ... and people owned their homes and did well. They were good people. They were decent people. They raised their kids and sent them to the local schools and went to church and worked hard," Jennifer Brown told me after the unveiling.
"I don't mind things changing. But remembering what it used to be is what's important. And that's why this has been so important to me.”
