Jehu Jones

Jehu Jones, Jr. (1786–1852) was a Lutheran minister who founded one of the first African-American Lutheran congregations in the United States, as well as actively involved in improving the social welfare of blacks.

Jones was born enslaved in Charleston, South Carolina, and named after his father, Jehu Jones Sr., a tailor who bought his freedom (along with his wife and Jehu's mother Abigail) in 1798, and eventually became a successful real estate investor and innkeeper in Charleston. Because of his mixed race ancestry, Jehu Jones was able to join Charleston's relatively privileged mulatto elite; his father bought his first slave in 1807. Jones took over his father's tailoring business circa 1816, as his father concentrated his own energies on a hotel which he opened to cater to white travellers.

Although originally connected with the Episcopal Church, Jones Jr. joined the Lutheran Church and became of member of Charleston's St. John's Lutheran congregation in 1820. However, after the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, South Carolina increasingly restricted the civil rights even of free blacks.

His brother Edward Jones, became the first black college graduate, eventually immigrating to Freetown, Sierra Leone to become the first principal of Fourah Bay College.

In 1832, with the encouragement of his pastor, Rev. John Bachman, Jones traveled to New York for ordination as a missionary by the New York Synod, having accepted a job as a missionary to Liberia. There, he was to work with freed slaves sent by the American Colonization Society who emigrated to that new nation.

However, Jones did not reach Liberia, for upon his return to Charleston after ordination, he was briefly jailed for violating South Carolina's new law (passed after Nat Turner's slave rebellion) which increased the prohibition on free blacks from returning to the state (which his mother Abigail had encountered after a trip to New York some time before 1827).

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