Barbara Ann Posey Jones

Barbara Ann Posey Jones (born 1943) is an American economist who was a leader of the 1958 Katz Drug Store sit-in as a high school student.^[1] Since 1971, she has been a professor of economics, department head, and Dean at several historically Black Colleges and Universities in the American South. She is a past president of the National Economic Association.^[2]

In 2021, she was awarded the Suzan Shown Harjo Systemic Social Justice Award from the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education.^[3] In 2024, the University of Oklahoma awarded her an honorary degree, noting that her "participation in the Oklahoma City sit-ins helped in the desegregation of many public establishments across the country."^[4]

Jones joined the youth council of the Oklahoma City NAACP at the age of 14, and on a visit to a freedom rally in New York City, ate at a lunch counter for the first time. On her return home, she became one of the spokespeople for the youth Oklahoma lunch counter sit-ins of 1958–1959. The Chi Zeta Chapter of Zeta Phi Zeta Sorority named her "Girl of the Year" of 1958,^[5] Datebook magazine published her article, "Why I Sit In"^[6] in 1960, and she gave a speech entitled "My America" at the 51st Annual NAACP Convention in June 1960.^[7] She graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1963, and completed a master's degree in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1966. There, she met her husband, political scientist Mack Jones, at a 1962 NAACP meeting.^[8] She completed a PhD in economics at Georgia State University in 1973.

Jones began her career at Texas Southern University^[9] and then continued work as an economics professor at Clark College (which became Clark Atlanta University), serving as department chair even before she finished her PhD.^[1] She taught there from 1971 to 1987, winning numerous teaching awards. She joined Prairie View A&M as department chair in 1987, quickly becoming Dean of the College of Business from 1989 to 1997. In 1997, she became Dean of the School of Business at Alabama A&M University, where she served as a professor of Economics until her retirement in 2016.^[10][11]

• Jones, Barbara AP. "Black women and labor force participation: An analysis of sluggish growth rates." The Review of Black Political Economy 14, no. 2-3 (1985): 11–31.
• Jones, Barbara Ann Posey. The contributions of Black women to the incomes of Black families: an analysis of the labor force participation rates of Black wives. Georgia State University, 1973.

• Chapter 8 of Olson; Emami, Zohreh (2002). "Lourdes Benería". Engendering Economics: Conversations with Women Economists in the United States. Psychology Press. doi:10.4324/9780203103074-12. ISBN 978-0-203-10307-4.