Mary Harris Jones - Later Years

Later Years

By 1924, Jones was in court again, this time facing charges of libel, slander and sedition. In 1925, Charles A. Albert, publisher of the fledgling Chicago Times, won a $350,000 judgment against the matriarch.

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 as The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).

In her later years, Jones lived with her friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess, on their farm in what is now Adelphi, Maryland. She celebrated her self-proclaimed 100th birthday there, on May 1, 1930 and was filmed making a statement for a newsreel. She died at the age of 93 on November 30, 1930.

She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside miners who died in the Battle of Virden in 1898. She called these miners, killed in strike-related violence, "her boys."

Read more about this topic:  Mary Harris Jones

Famous quotes containing the word years:

    What will our children remember of us, ten, fifteen years from now? The mobile we bought or didn’t buy? Or the tone in our voices, the look in our eyes, the enthusiasm for life—and for them—that we felt? They, and we, will remember the spirit of things, not the letter. Those memories will go so deep that no one could measure it, capture it, bronze it, or put it in a scrapbook.
    Sonia Taitz (20th century)

    If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.
    J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)