“Abandon hope all ye who enter here” were the words written above the entrance to Dante’s hell. Befitting words, indeed, for the fate of Shandy Wesley Jones as he entered this world in Huntsville in 1816. He was born a slave, destined to spend a forgotten life as a field hand. His mother was a mulatto, and his father was believed to be one of his two older brothers. From this incestuous relationship came Shandy, who was probably three-quarters white, and could have passed for white. Nevertheless, legal race was determined by the mother. Thus, Shandy was born a Black slave, and likely would have remained one, except for the fact he was inexplicably freed while still a young child. From then on, he spent his entire life hoping, planning and working for the freedom of all people of color.
Before his 21st birthday, Shandy moved from Huntsville to Tuscaloosa, the capitol of Alabama at that time. As a port city on the Black Warrior River and the seat of government, Tuscaloosa was rapidly growing, offering opportunities for free Blacks to earn a living. Many came, working as farmers and teamsters. Others were artisans, such as brick masons and plaster workers needed for the building of the new structures in the city. In the antebellum South, many of the barber shops were owned and managed by free Blacks. In Mobile, for instance, half the barbers were Black men. Shandy began his career in Tuscaloosa working as an apprentice under a free colored barber named James Abbot.
In 1837, Jones married Evalina Love. She, too, was free, legally ensuring that their children would also be free. Like Jones, Evalina was light-skinned and probably of mixed race. About this time, Jones took over Abbot’s ownership of the shop, giving him the opportunity for financial security and raising a family, which eventually produced 14 children. For the next decade, he built a successful barbering business, pleasing his white customers with good haircuts and always paying them homage with compliments and flattery. All the while, he listened and learned, taking note of land to be sold at a bargain price. Putting that knowledge to work, by 1860, his real estate holdings were worth $7,000 dollars, a considerable amount at that time, especially for a Black man in Alabama. In addition to his lucrative barbering business and investments in real property, Shandy became an ordained Methodist minister in the AME Zion Church, helping establish the first Black church and school in Tuscaloosa.
Jones was clearly one of the three most successful free Blacks in the city and one of the richest in Alabama. However, notwithstanding success, his life was far from free. The lives of free Blacks were tightly controlled within Tuscaloosa and the rest of the South. Laws and ordinances required them to register, have papers and references to good character, pay special fees and obtain white guardians. White slaveholders did not trust them, and blamed them for any disturbance or variation from the “natural order.” They grew even more fearful that free Blacks might start an insurrection to liberate their slaves following the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, when 50 whites were murdered.
Years before the Civil War, Jones became involved in an organization which had been established decades earlier by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Randolph and other white luminaries. Named the American Colonization Society, to assist free Black Americans in moving to Liberia, a country on the west coast of Africa they created in 1821. They believed it would be best to return them to their ancestral homeland, where they could govern themselves, make their own laws, build towns and cities and live completely free. Many free Blacks embraced the idea of migrating to Liberia. So too did whites, including some slaveholders and abolitionists. Their reasons varied from benevolence to self-serving bigotry. Some felt slavery was wrong and sought liberty for all Blacks by returning them to their homeland. Some felt colonization would be a means of ridding America of Africans altogether, both free and slave. Others wanted to preserve slavery but saw colonization as a means of eliminating the free Blacks, believing them to be detrimental examples for enslaved Blacks. All of them, however, shared the common belief that colonization was necessary because whites and Blacks could not live together as social equals in America.
The African Repository was the official publication for the American Colonization Society, and during the 1850s, Jones wrote letters to the Repository, expressing his hope of achieving freedom in Liberia for persons of color. If the colonization proposal could be carried out, he was optimistic of the outcome: “I candidly believe that in 10 years from the date of the first trip there will not be a free man of color left in the southern or slave-holding states.” Jones soon became the leading proponent in Alabama for colonizing free Blacks in Liberia. His letters were read with excitement in churches and other places where free Blacks gathered, but the enthusiasm slowly faded, and nothing came of his efforts. Many free Blacks were in their second or third generation of living in America. It was the only home they had ever known. Rather than leave their friends, relatives, homes and business interests, most chose to stay. For these same reasons, Shandy Jones was among them.
As tensions increased in the years before the Civil War, fears of insurrection surged among southern whites. For them, free Blacks such as Shandy Jones epitomized a dreadful danger. His success was problematic. He was financially prosperous, a Methodist minister and an advocate of freedom for all Blacks. Moreover, Jones, like many of the free Blacks, could read and write, prompting a Tuscaloosa newspaper to protest: “They secretly poison the ears of our slaves with the incendiary publications of abolitionism.” Following John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, some Alabama legislators attempted to pass bills designed to remove all free Blacks from the state. Obviously, there were many prominent free Blacks of good character who would be exempted, thus the bills and their amendments died before becoming law.
The American Civil War came and went, followed by the Reconstruction era. For Southerners, devastated by war, it was a painful time, full of economic hardships, military rule, and political resentment and indignation. Slaves were emancipated and with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress granted full citizenship to all Blacks, prompting Shandy Jones to run and win election as one of the first members of the Alabama State House of Representatives. Although Jones was hopeful that changes in the law would improve conditions for African Americans, the Reconstruction years, in many ways, proved to be even more difficult than life in the antebellum South.
Shandy Jones soon realized his dreams of equality for people of color were crumbling. A multitude of impediments came his way with the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in Tuscaloosa in 1868, and the arrival of a man named Ryland Randolph, who had purchased Tuscaloosa’s newspaper, Independent Monitor. Randolph was not only its outspoken editor, but the Grand Cyclops of the local Klan in that city. As the very embodiment of white supremacy, Randolph refused to accept the Confederacy’s defeat, or any deviation from the “natural order” of the races. As a leader in the fight against Reconstruction and Civil Rights, his scathing political editorials intimidated and threatened the Black population of Tuscaloosa, along with whites who favored political and social change. Because Jones was a legislator representing Tuscaloosa, he became Randolph’s favorite target to ridicule and slander.
The African Repository, the official publication for the American Colonization Society.
In 1869, Randolph ran for and won a vacated seat in the legislature, making him Tuscaloosa’s second representative and one of the few elected Democrats. Upon arriving in Montgomery, he insulted the legislature, calling them the “House of Misrepresentatives” made up of “vile thieves and baboons,” and spent most of his term arguing with Jones or making speeches critical of other Republican legislators. As expected, In February of 1870, Randolph was expelled from the Legislature for contemptible and slanderous speech against members of that body. He returned to Tuscaloosa. Later that year, so too did Jones, having lost his bid for reelection.
Back in Tuscaloosa, Jones fell into a state of despair. He had lost the election, and his dreams of leading free Blacks to freedom in Liberia had vanished. What’s more, Randolph’s attempts to destroy the man he labeled “Gorilla Shandy Jones” were intensifying. The Klansman began demanding that Jones be “given the taste of a good hickory stick” and expelled from town. He organized a boycott of Shandy’s barbershop. Worst still, Randolph’s newspaper, Monitor, began alluding to threats of lynching him. Fearing for his life, Jones packed up his family and moved to Mobile in 1871, leaving behind everything he had worked years to build.
Much about Jones’s life in Mobile is unknown. However, we know he was appointed to an important position in the U.S. Customs House for his political patronage to the Republican Party in 1872. We know, too, that his wife Evalina died shortly after they arrived in Mobile, and he later married a white woman named Lucinda. In 1883, Jones was listed as Reverend for the Little Zion Church at the corner of Church and Bayou streets. In 1886, Shandy Jones died, surrounded by the elders of his church. Buried in Magnolia Cemetery, his grave remained unmarked until 2015 when the Friends of Magnolia, a non-profit organization, successfully located the tomb of one of Alabama’s most significant pioneers in the crusade for the freedom for his people.
Russell W. Blount Jr. is the author of five books on the American Civil War as well as a number of articles on 19th-century America in historical journals and publications.
