Barbara (Jones) Omolade Papers

Barbara (Jones) Omolade, then Barbara Jones, was born on October 29, 1942 to Hugh Jones and Mamie Taylor Jones in Brooklyn, NY. She studied at Queens College, City University of New York, where she received her B.A. (1964) and later went on to receive her PhD in Sociology from The City University of New York (1997).

Omolade was a student at Queens College (QC) from 1960-1964. During the spring semester of 1964, she served as chairman of the Civil Rights Coordinating Council. While working with this council Omolade helped to organize Freedom Week (April 20th-24th) on the QC campus. This event was sponsored by QC’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.) and supported the Mississippi Freedom Project. Freedom Week consisted of lectures and rallies that informed faculty, students and the Queens community about the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and recent developments in the Civil Rights Movement. Objectives of Freedom Week included recruiting volunteers and raising money to send them to Mississippi that summer.

Omolade went on to pursue scholarly research and activism focusing on African American women’s history. In 1977, she taught one of the first social science courses on African American women at the College of New Rochelle, Co-Op City Evening Program. In 1981, she started working at the City College of New York Center for Worker Education and would quickly join the faculty. By 1983, Omolade had helped found Friends of Women’s Studies at CUNY, which was instrumental in establishing the CUNY faculty development seminar on balancing the curriculum for gender, race, ethnicity and class.

In 1994, Omolade’s book The Rising Song of African American Women was published. In 2004, she became dean of multicultural affairs at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she has since retired. In 2010, the Hands on the Freedom Plow was published, which offers personal accounts by women in SNCC. Omolade contributed “Building a New World”, a letter written to her parents describing her decision to join the Civil Rights Movement and move to Atlanta to work in the SNCC office.