Who was ‘Mother’ Jones and why is this southwest Illinois town dedicated to her memory?

A BND series about what makes Belleville, St. Clair County and southwestern Illinois a unique place to live. Send questions and tips to newsroom@bnd.com.

Many travelers through the metro-east can recall a large, hand-painted white sign with crudely sketched words signaling a historic monument near Mount Olive .

Few know that the sign directed them to the grave of the person who coined the phrase “pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

More official-looking signs now lead the way to the memorial and final resting place of “Mother” Mary G. Harris Jones, a woman once dubbed the “most dangerous woman in America” and one of the nation’s first prominent labor organizers and activists.

Mount Olive sits just east of Interstate-55 in Macoupin County, about 50 miles north of Belleville’s public square.

Nestled in a cemetery, which bares the graves of thousands of union miners and their families and descendants, her monumental tomb serves as an imposing reminder of the struggles the working classes faced at the turn of the 19th century.

Born some time in the early 19th century (usually dated to 1837, when she was baptized), Jones’ near century-long life was characterized by labor, both as a participant and activist. She stopped her first career as a teacher in order to raise children and support her husband in his ambitions as a union organizer for the National Union of Iron Workers before opening a dress shop once he and all four of her children died of yellow fever.

Once her dress making shop burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, a life time of fighting for labor rights awaited.

“She was feisty, deeply committed to social justice, active in supporting workers in almost every major strike of her day—and she had a great sense of humor,” said Adam Hochschild, who founded Mother Jones Magazine in 1971. “You don’t always find all those characteristics together.”

The magazine operates as a nonprofit publication that focuses its progressive views on news, commentary, and investigative journalism on topics including politics, environment, human rights, health and culture.

Hochschild said the founders chose the name to “honor a great American” and partly to “make people curious to pick up the magazine and find out just what it was.”

Magazines aren’t the only tribute to the great labor leader though. The entire city of Mount Olive serves as a testament to Jones’s activism.

With the national election on the horizon, many people have Trump or Harris signs in their front lawns, but almost all of them also share signs of solidarity with union workers, regardless of their political affiliation.

At Mount Olive City Hall, an entire museum to Mother Jones sits open for anyone interested in learning the history of working-class labor.

Inside, photographic displays of armed strikers, despondent child workers and leveled miner villages are juxtaposed with images of Mother Jones posing and union organizers cheering successful bids. Hundreds of local union stickers line pieces of wood and other display cases.

Photos of Jones provide a colorful description of the woman and one can see that agitative personality — her mournful black dress and stern, pursed lips show a woman personified by her creed: “I belong to a class that has been robbed, exploited, vilified, persecuted and jailed down the ages, and because I belong to that class, I have the instinct to go and help break the chains.”

“Almost 100 years after her death, she is still inspiring many workers to think about a tradition of struggle,” says Rosemary Feurer, a history professor at Nothern Illinois University specializing in labor history, “and to think of their common interests, their needs and how to organize collectively rather than individually in order to address the same kind of wealth inequality that exists in such an uneven way in our time as it did in hers.”

Feurer, who also works as the project director and statue committee of the Mother Jones museum, says one Jones’s most important works was inspiring and creating other labor organizers. In response to being called “the grandmother of all agitators,” Jones said she wished to be the “great grandmother of all agitators.”

Jones’s work was often met with violence, and she was imprisoned a handful of times while campaigning for labor rights and organizing demonstrations. Many of these scenes are shown at the museum, but traveling exhibits help bring the story to a national level, since that’s what Jones herself did.

“We have worked with people from across the globe to lift up her story,” Feurer said, “because in telling her story, we also capture much of the drama of working class history—the tragedy and the triumphs, the story of how people from across the globe came to the United States and through labor activism, remade the nation into a place that put workers perspectives on the agenda.”

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