Thomas Elsa Jones, known universally as Tom, was born near Fairmount, Indiana, March 22, 1888, the son of David and Sarah (Thomas) Jones.  After graduating from Earlham College in 1912, he entered Hartford Theological Seminary and was recorded a Friends minister.  He then served as field secretary for the Young Friends of North America until 1917, when he married Esther Balderston, a member of a Philadelphia Quaker family.  She was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, April 11, 1891, and after graduating from Wellesley had attended Hartford to prepare for work as a missionary in Japan. The Joneses lived in Japan from 1917 until 1924, teaching in several schools, working under the auspices of the YMCA and the YWCA, doing relief work in Siberia and in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake of 1923 for the American Friends Service Committee and aiding the small number of Quakers in Japan.  Simultaneously, Tom Jones was conducting fieldwork for his Columbia University dissertation in sociology.  A study of Japanese mountain people, it was a challenge to the widely accepted theories of scientific racism current in the 1920s. In 1926, Tom Jones was appointed president of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.  In his twenty years as its head, he made it the first fully accredited black in the United States, raising its endowment to an unprecedented level.  He and Esther Jones also undertook two major projects for the American Friends Service Committee, studying race relations in South Africa in 1937-1938 and in the United States during World War II. In 1946, Tom Jones became president of Earlham College.  His record there was similar, raising ten million dollars in ten years and presiding over the transformation of Earlham from respectable Midwestern church school to national college.  After his retirement in 1958, he continued to work as an independent consultant, and was a key figure in the establishment of the Earlham School of Religion. Esther B. Jones died in Richmond on April 4, 1967.  In 1968 Tom Jones married Elizabeth (Walter) Furnas, the widow of Earlham vice president Paul Furnas.  She died in 1972.  Tom Jones died in Richmond, August 5, 1973.

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