Lawyer, ‘great citizen’ was trustee for Art Institute, Lincoln Park Zoo
When the Art Institute needed to implement a $5 million grant to better reach African Americans, it reached out to Jetta Norris Jones, who became the founding chair of the museum’s Leadership Advisory Committee, comprising Black community leaders.
“When Jetta would ask anybody, they immediately said, ‘Of course, I’ll be involved in it,’ ” recalled Teri Edelstein, then the museum’s deputy director and a longtime friend of Jones. “Jetta not only knew everyone in the community, but everyone admired her.”
After decades as a “quiet force” in Chicago civic life and the arts, Jones, 95, died April 9 at her daughter’s home in Los Angeles after living with dementia for years.
“Jetta would never browbeat anyone, but because she was so smart and had such good judgment, she had a power to lead people,” said Edelstein. “She had a power to listen to other people and to bring people to good decisions.”
Jones went on from leading that committee — which still exists today — to becoming the museum’s first Black woman trustee, beginning in 1995. She also served on the boards of the Lincoln Park Zoological Society, WTTW-Ch. 11, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the art museum at Mount Holyoke College, her undergraduate alma mater.
A lawyer by training, she was active in Harold Washington’s groundbreaking campaign for mayor and served in his administration as director of external affairs. She also chaired the city’s Joint Human Relations Council, her family said.
Jones grew up in Philadelphia, the daughter of a prominent African American attorney. And although she at first wanted to become a child psychologist, her father influenced her to attend Yale Law School, as he had, where she was the only Black woman in her class, said her daughter Courtney Moore.
“She certainly never looked back,” Moore said. “I think she chose Chicago because she was interested in politics, and what better city to go to than Chicago?”
In 1953 she married Dr. James E. Jones, who would become a prominent OB-GYN affiliated with the University of Chicago Hospitals. She and “Jimmy,” who died in 2006, were very active in their Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood, friends said, and collected art.
“They were very good friends with Dr. Margaret Burroughs, who founded the DuSable Museum,” Moore said. “And I remember my mom telling me fondly about a trip they took with Margaret Burroughs to New York, where Margaret took them around to a lot of the Black artists’ studios way before they were discovered.”
A painting the Joneses donated to the Art Institute, by the AfriCOBRA artist Nelson Stevens, is featured in the current exhibition “Bisa Butler: Portraits.”
A common thread in Jones’ extensive volunteer efforts was her desire to work on behalf of women and African Americans, her family said.
In the 1999 book, “Our
Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class,” Jones tells the author, “I am optimistic for the future, but the Chicago metropolitan area is still a very segregated place.”
At the Art Institute, she brought businesswoman and art collector Denise Gardner into the organization, at first through the Leadership Advisory Committee, Gardner recalled.
“She was persuasive in making sure that I and others were integrated into the fabric of the museum,” she said. “She liked to lift others up.”
Gardner followed Jones’ footsteps in chairing the LAC, then joining the museum board. Just days after Jones died, she was chosen to be the Art Institute’s next board chair, beginning in November.
In her time on the board, she has often thought back to Jones’ example, Gardner said: “I remember how effective she was at working with others on the board and very quietly but steadfastly promoting diversity and inclusion — long before they became catch words . ... With her lawyer training, she was extremely persuasive in a quiet way. She knew how to present a case.”
Gardner was also struck by the Joneses’ “exquisite artistic taste,” she said. “They were a wonderful couple. They liked to mentor younger people. They were just great citizens.”
After a visitation this week at Unity Funeral Home, Jones was buried alongside her late husband at Oak Woods Cemetery. In addition to Moore, she is survived by daughter Julie Simms, son Josh Jones, a grandson, two step-grandsons and two great-grandchildren.