Illustration by Chris Honeysuckle Ellis
Happy involved herself in every imaginable public issue aimed at broadening justice and opportunity for citizens at large.
There are two competing accounts of how the nickname Happy was earned by Dorothy Snowden Jones, who was never called anything else.
One story has it that her two older sisters, Sally and Edie, were so delighted when they got news of the pending arrival that they insisted to their mother Grace that their sister be called “Happy” — basically, because that was the emotion which the prospect of welcoming her created in them. Another version has it that when the newborn got the ritual celebratory buttocks-slap from the attending physician, she proceeded to laugh rather than cry.
Possibly both stories are true, inasmuch as the prospect of encountering Happy Jones, who left us last November at the age of 80, was always one that begat smiles of anticipation. She is still receiving testimonials of love and respect from her community — most recently from the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, which honored her in a special January ceremony at First Congregational Church, and by being named an honoree in the forthcoming Memphis Suffrage Monument (called “Equality Trailblazers”) which will be placed on Civic Center Plaza in May 2019 during city bicentennial events.
That latter piece of public art will feature eight bronze busts and four etchings, where Happy will be included along with Marion Griffin, Maxine Smith, and Minerva Johnican. Jones was the first donor to the Memphis Suffrage Monument and was the primary enabler of a published memorial to the state’s decisive role in the passage of, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment: The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage, editions of which have appeared as a bound volume, an e-book, and an audiobook.
Born a member of the socially prominent Snowden family, Happy Jones, like her sisters, embraced society in the largest possible sense. She involved herself in every imaginable public issue aimed at broadening justice and opportunity for citizens at large — from the sanitation workers’ struggle of 1968 to black-white comity to women’s rights to the extension of voting rights to fairness and equality for the LGBTQ community.
Jones was an activist for numerous other causes, working as a marriage and family therapist and social worker, and was a recipient of the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis “Legends” award. Politically, she worked within the Republican Party to help establish a two-party political system during the 1960s and 1970s, later becoming an independent, working across party lines as her ever-growing progressive streak became irreconcilable with the rightward drift of the party she had been born into.
In the words of her longtime friend, current Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen: “Happy was always in the forefront of progress and justice. She was a leader for over 50 years, crossing political and racial lines. Hers was a life well-lived.”
At election time, for the last couple of decades, she had joined with two other activist women, Jocelyn Wurzburg and Paula Casey, in publishing a widely-distributed and equally widely-regarded ballot. (Jones, Wurzburg, and Casey usually agreed, but not always, making a point of always stating the reasons for their recommendations.)
In the crisis year of 1968, Wurzburg had been a co-founder with Jones of the Memphis Panel of American Women, which organized consciousness-raising events to counter bias, each public panel group including a moderator and four other women: a white Protestant, an African American, a Jew, and a Catholic.
Wurzburg relates a story illustrating how Jones could combine her crusading instinct with a sense of impish irony: “Happy once sat next to a man on a plane ride home. She told him she was a member of the Panel of American Women. He didn’t quite understand who we were, but he told her he belonged to a patriotic organization too, and Happy recognized its name as being related to the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils.
“Thinking he was with someone like-minded,” Wurzburg continues, “the man proposed us as a program for one of his group’s meetings. Happy agreed to the booking , and they sure were surprised when the night came, and our integrated panel walked in and started speaking against anti-Semitism and racism.”
No mere ideologue, however, Happy Jones was a skilled communitarian. She was the soul of companionability, a well-loved wife and mother, and a fully rounded character with several hearty pastimes, including sailing, where she possessed captain’s skills for every size craft from a one-passenger pram to a 50-foot sloop.
In this, as in her pursuit of justice in the choppiest of times, Happy Jones always managed to keep an even keel.
