None of her life’s challenges sparked her ambition more than the death of her sister. She was convinced that if her sister had regular access to a doctor, she and other family members would not have died of typhoid.
Edith Irby Jones, the first African-American student to attend the University of Arkansas School of Medicine, was paralyzed at the age of five. For 18 months, she was unable to use her legs due to the illness. When she was eight years old, her father was killed in a car accident.
According to Changing the Face of Medicine, when she started the School of Medicine, the racial abuse directed at her did not deter her from pursuing her dreams. She was barred from using the same dining, bathroom, and lodging facilities as her colleagues, but she was unfazed. She had faced and experienced far more difficult circumstances in her life than what was thrown at her.
She was used to being denied equal access to many opportunities as the daughter of a sharecropper and domestic worker. She had the black community and her family on her side the day her story at the Arkansas School of Medicine made headlines, so nothing could deter her from becoming the school’s first African-American woman graduate.
When it came time for her to start college, a high school teacher helped her obtain a scholarship to Knoxville College in Tennessee. Her medical school education was paid for by African Americans in Little Rock and the Arkansas community.
Her high school alumni paid for her tuition, and the Arkansas State Press, a black newspaper, covered her living expenses. In the face of the racial discrimination she faced, the medical school’s custodial staff even provided her with fresh flowers every day.
In return, Jones assisted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in recruiting members even in the dead of night. But, in those dark times, her husband, Professor James B. Jones, whom she dated and married while still in medical school, was the strongest pillar in medical school.
When she graduated from medical school in 1952, she spent the first six years of her professional career in her hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Because of racial tensions at the time, she and her husband moved to Houston in the years that followed. They had two kids. She completed her internal medicine residency at the Baylor College of Medicine Affiliated Hospitals. While her school was accommodating, the hospital where she was assigned discriminated against her by limiting her patient rosters. She completed the last few months of her residency at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.
In 1962, she opened her own private facility in Houston, which is still operational today. Jones devoted her life to bettering the lives of the poor and her community. In 1985, she was elected president of the National Medical Association. The organization was founded for Black doctors who were denied membership in the American Medical Association.
In 1991, she was instrumental in the establishment of a medical center in Haiti. In 1986, Houston officials established “Edith Irby Jones Day” to honor her. In 1988, she was named the American Society of Medicine Internist of the Year. In 1998, the former Southeast Memorial Hospital’s ambulatory center was named in her honor.