Hazel Wright Jones

Hazel Louise (Wright) Jones 03/09/1931 – 01/11/2020

Services will be held at Wells Funeral Home on Highway 35 in Batesville. Visitation will be Saturday, January 18, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM, and the funeral service will be held Sunday, January 19, at 12:00 noon. Interment will be held at Forrest Memorial Park.

Hazel was a country girl, born in a log cabin on March 9, 1931, the third of eleven children of sharecroppers Henry and Grace Wright. They picked cotton and poke salad. You couldn’t eat cotton, but you could eat poke salad - as well as possums, coons, turtles, and frogs.

She walked barefoot to school in Blackjack, Mississippi, and graduated Valedictorian two months after her sixteenth birthday in 1947. The following month she married Martin Emanuel Jones JR., a WWII Navy veteran who had left at age 17 to fight in the Pacific.  They were together 70 years, until his death in 2017.

She attended Northwest Mississippi Junior College and Mississippi State University. She worked for Mutual of New York in Memphis, Tennessee, and as a reporter and layout artist for the Cotton Trade Journal, until they moved to Washington, D.C., where she became a full-time homemaker. Later, they moved back to Memphis, where she was employed by Libby, McNeil, and Libby, then as an executive secretary to the president of URW/AFLCIO (local 186) until her retirement.

Hazel enjoyed politics, genealogy, and volunteerism. In 1972 she was a Tennessee delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Miami. She also worked on several mayoral campaigns with Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges in Memphis.  She volunteered at Memphis radio stations for West Tennessee Talking Library, reading and recording newspapers, magazines, and books for broadcast to visually-impaired listeners. And she made time to be a “den mother” for our local cub scout pack.

An Oxford, MS resident for the past 30 years, she was active in the Retired Senior Volunteer Program and the Panola County Historical and Genealogical Society (PAN-GENES), and worked for conservative political causes. She was also active in the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, and co-founded the Robert Henry Tubbs chapter of United Daughters of the Confederacy. Her book, “Wright-Tubbs Family Tree and Related Branches”, documents approximately one thousand surnames and is available in the Ole Miss Research Library as well as the Library of Congress (CS71.W95.1991).

She attended Trinity Baptist Church (Pastor Robert Wilcutt) in Batesville.

Hazel was preceded in death by her parents, Henry and Grace (Tubbs) Wright; sisters Alliene (Wright) Vick, Addie Lee Wright, and Vaneda (Wright) Tramel; brother Gene Douglas Wright; and husband Martin Emanuel Jones Jr. She is survived by sisters Jeanette (Wright) Smith, Judy (Wright) Pratt, Sylvia (Wright) Hadinger, Priscilla (Wright) Carter, and Susan (Wright) Stevens; brother Donald Wright; and son Martin Emanuel Jones III.