Growing up in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Elaine Jones saw how ugly racism and discrimination could be and decided by the age of 8 that she would become a civil rights attorney. As one of the first African American females to not only attend but graduate from the University of Virginia Law School, Jones was a trailblazer who would never give in to the naysayers when they told her that she was limited by both her race and gender. Immediately after graduating law school, Jones was offered a high-salary position as a Wall Street attorney, but declined in order to take a position with the NAACP’s legal defense fund. It was during this time that Jones took on some of the largest corporate giants in America, including Monsanto, American Tobacco, and Pullman Standard. She left the NAACP for a short time to serve as President Gerald Ford’s Special Assistant to Secretary of Transportation, but returned after the end of the Ford administration. Her work with the NAACP helped to abolish the death penalty in 37 states for 12 years.

NAACP