On a cold January evening in 1958, George Maceo Jones sat at dinner with the president of the United States.
He was among dozens of Black Republicans attending a $100-a-plate dinner in Chicago featuring Dwight D. Eisenhower and some 5,000 Illinois supporters. While hardly intimate, the evening demonstrated Jones’ prominence in a political party that had pledged to elevate African American people in society.
Four years earlier, the Eisenhower administration appointed Jones, a civil engineer, to serve as an architectural adviser in Liberia, and then India. Eisenhower had vowed on the campaign trail to increase the representation of African Americans in federal government positions.
“This is a positive unmistakable demonstration by President Eisenhower and the Republican Party that the qualifications and ability of men and women of all races is the yardstick by which appointments are made. The color of the skin no longer is a barrier,” said Val J. Washington, director of minorities for the Republican National Committee.
Jones earned three degrees from U-M over a decade. When he received his doctorate in 1934, he became the first African American man in the country with a Ph.D. in civil engineering.
Born and raised in Georgia, Jones joined U-M in 1923 after transferring from Atlanta University (today Clark Atlanta University). He was an honors student as he pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architectural engineering — each awarded in 1925 — and began a career as a draftsman.
He trained alongside some of the country’s most prominent African American architects: William Wilson Cooke, who established a private practice in Gary, Indiana, where Jones first worked, and John Anderson Lankford, who ran an office in Washington, D.C., and is considered the dean of Black architecture.
As a U-M doctoral student, Jones studied wind stress on high-rise buildings. James H. Cissel, a structural engineering professor specializing in designing bridges, was his dissertation chair, along with faculty from civil engineering, engineering mechanics and mathematics.
While a doctoral student, Jones taught at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College and then Howard University.
He left Howard in 1937 to settle in Chicago, where he established a practice as a civil engineer and focused on public housing projects. He was among the first Black men to join the American Institute of Architects.
Jones died in 1970.
