JONES, Prophet

JONES, Prophet (b. 24 November 1907; d. 12 August 1971), preacher, religious leader.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, James F. Jones, popularly known as Prophet Jones, achieved national prominence as a flamboyant religious leader in Detroit during the 1940s and 1950s. He became one of the few African Americans featured regularly in the mainstream, white-controlled mass media of his era, only to have his acclaim tarnished at the height of his fame with a morals arrest for propositioning an undercover policeman.

Jones arrived in Detroit in 1938 and soon began preaching and prophesying on a weekly radio program. Through his broadcast pulpit, he attracted predominantly African American working-class followers to rousing all-night services, first at a wood frame church in the city's slums and in subsequent years at a converted movie house complete with a $5,300 throne.

Jones's devoted following bestowed him with such lavish gifts as a fleet of expensive automobiles, a wardrobe of fine suits, and a fifty-four-room mansion. He displayed his finery on shopping sprees at downtown department stores, accompanied by an entourage of handsome valets and assistants. His appeal echoed that of Little Richard and other gender-bending performers on the black drag circuit of the 1940s and 1950s, when the so-called freakish man occupied an accepted queer social role in Jones's native South.

Jones achieved local notoriety through a mixture of opulence, faith healing, and predictions, which sometimes bordered on the fantastical. Each November on his birthday, Jones treated members of the press to a lavish banquet at which he announced prophesies for the coming year, prophesies published with fanfare in the next day's newspapers. He predicted that anyone alive in the year 2000 would live forever and also claimed to have foreseen the dropping of the first atomic bomb in a puff of smoke from a piece of fried chicken.

In November 1944 Jones's sashaying extravagance drew national attention when Life magazine featured him in a multipage photo spread showcasing his luxurious home, quoting prices for various fixtures, and suggestively showing his young assistant James Walton reading to him at bedside. In 1953, after Jones had supposedly healed their mother with a folk cure of sips from a water fountain at the Gary, Indiana, bus station, two schoolteachers presented the prophet with a full-length white mink coat worth over $12,000. The gift garnered another appearance in Life. In the decade after World War II, Jones received similar exposure in Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post, which dubbed him the "Messiah in Mink."

Jones's rise to fame came in the midst of Cold War attacks on visible homosexuality and as African Americans pushed to end legal segregation in Dixie and de facto segregation in the North. Middle-class black critics, skeptical of Jones's clairvoyance, attributed his popularity to superstition. Writing in Ebony in 1951, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. insinuated that Jones and Walton had been lovers and that their relationship was an open secret.

While rumors of homosexuality complicated his celebrity, white reporters followed Jones when he attended Dwight Eisenhower's first presidential inauguration in 1953 and tagged along on an evangelical trip he made to New York City in 1954. A year later, Jones purchased a time slot for a short-lived series on WXYZ-TV, becoming the first African American preacher with a regular show on Detroit area television.

On 20 February 1956, Detroit police arrested Jones at his home for an alleged indecent act with a black rookie vice officer who had been planted among the prophet's followers. Jones immediately lost his radio program, forcing him to sell his vehicles and spacious home within weeks to pay his debts. The morals arrest sparked a frenzy in the three Detroit dailies, the two local African American weeklies, and the national gossip press. The scandal magazine Whisper unabashedly asked whether Jones was "seer or queer?"

As African Americans in postwar Detroit battled racial inequality in housing and employment, middle-class blacks—striving for improved material conditions and social status—heralded the downfall of Jones. Meanwhile, his working-class supporters rallied behind him, filling the courtroom for the six-day trial in July 1956 and cheering when an all-white jury found him not guilty.

Despite his acquittal, the specter of homosexuality remained with Jones for the rest of his life. The Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, and the Advocate all noted the arrest in their obituaries when Jones died. Although diminished in stature and wealth, Jones remained a noteworthy figure in Detroit, continuing his bold flamboyance in the decade before the rise of the gay liberation movement. When he died in 1971, 2,700 mourners attended his funeral, where his white mink coat lay draped over his coffin.