Mother Jones (August 1, 1837 – November 30, 1930)

Mary Harris Jones, born in Cork, Ireland, in 1837, was a prominent American labor and community organizer who helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World. She worked as a teacher and dressmaker but after her husband and four children all died of yellow fever and her workshop was destroyed in a fire in 1871 she began working as an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. She was a very effective speaker, punctuating her speeches with stories, audience participation, humor and dramatic stunts. From 1897 on she was known as Mother Jones and in 1902 she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, upset about the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a Children's March from Philadelphia to the home of then president Theodore Roosevelt in New York. Mother Jones remained a union organizer for the UMW into the 1920s and continued to speak on union affairs almost until her death. She released her own account of her experiences in the labor movement, "The Autobiography of Mother Jones" in 1925. In her later years, she lived with her friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess on their farm in what is now Adelphi, Maryland. She died at the age of 93 on November 30, 1930 and is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery at Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside miners who died in the Virden Riot of 1898.


Mother Jones with President Calvin Coolidge

Mother Jones Monument at Union Miners Cemetery
at Mount Olive, Illinois