Anna Russell Jones

Anna Russell Jones (1902, Jersey City, New Jersey – April 3, 1995, Germantown, Pennsylvania) was an African American artist known for her work in graphic, carpet, and textile design. Her papers are held at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

Education Anna Russell Jones was the first African American woman to receive a four-year scholarship from the Philadelphia Board of Education and the first African American graduate of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (PSDW), now Moore College of Art & Design.

Career After earning her degree in textile design at PSDW, Anna Russell Jones worked as a textile designer for a carpet design studio, James G. Speck Studio, in Philadelphia for four years.

She was the first African American woman from Philadelphia to join the U.S. Army, serving as a member of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps), during World War II. Jones was stationed in Arizona, where she did graphic design work for Army publications and earned multiple awards.

Notwithstanding the racist, patriarchal, and paternalist attitudes that often accompanied the allocation and distribution of scholarship funds, the philanthropic spirit of the period opened up many avenues for Black and African American populations of America's urban manufacturing and industrial cities such as Philadelphia to obtain the financial means of pursuing the ends of social and class mobility through education.

Available financial aid, historically a variable factor, had a great influence on the nature of the study body. After 1900, growing demand throughout the city for secondary education induced the Board of Education to build additional high schools. In 1909, the newly built William Penn General High School was added to the list of schools whose graduates qualified for art school scholarships, along with Germantown High School and West Philadelphia High School after 1915. Between 1910 and 1920 a high school education became far more accessible to large numbers of city resident. In the 1920s, recipients of scholarships allocated by the Board of Education and the mayor's office were often recruited by School of Design graduates installed as art teachers in the city high schools. Despite outreach efforts to other neighborhoods, most scholarship students through the 1920s came from the same North and West Philadelphia neighborhoods described above.. Most recently, Farah Jasmine Griffin's Harlem Nocturne: Women Artist and Progressive Politics During World War II and Terrion L. Williamson's Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life have both provided theoretical frameworks for recovering, studying, and advancing the many vestiges of black women's contribution to the social fabric and cultural landscape of the United States.