Historical Background

Ruth Veletta Jones, grandniece of Frederick Douglass, was born in Cambridgeport, but moved to Somerville as a young girl.  While residing at 74 Elmwood Street in West Somerville, Jones was the first Black woman to graduate from Somerville High School in 1915.  “It was kind of hard,” Ms. Jones said about living in Somerville“. Passersby would sling derogatory comments at them. The family moved back to Cambridge and five years later, Jones became the first woman to register to vote in Cambridge in 1920. According to the Cambridge Historical Commission, she was one of 14 surviving women voters of the 1920 election who were recognized on the 70th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. When she tried to look for a job, Ruth Jones recounts to Kathleen Walcott of Ethnic Foundations, inc. of Cambridge, “A Boston department was advertising for fair colored girls to run their elevators…that was in 1916. I had a lot of friends who would say, ‘Ruth, why don’t you try to get a job anyway.’ They put the brown and darker girls on the back freight elevators. Well, I didn’t do that.  I said, ‘Oh no!, I’m going to work in an office.’ […] I tried for an office job and got it and worked 25 years at it.” Jones served as a telephone operator for the Mass Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) for 25 years, the first Black telephone operator in the area. Her niece, Helen Hatcher relayed that: ”when someone gave her boss a hassle about employing a black woman in a job that could have gone to white, the man responded that “Miss Jones have a smile in her voice.”