Last updated: July 26, 2024
Person
Leroy Jones
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Quick Facts
Significance:
Valet to Franklin D. Roosevelt
Place of Birth:
Wake County, North Carolina
Date of Birth:
May 22, 1896
Place of Death:
Durham, North Carolina
Date of Death:
December 6, 1984
Leroy Jones was born in 1896 in rural Wake County, North Carolina. He was the eldest of Junious and Olivia Jones’ fifteen children. Leroy’s father was a Baptist minister; his mother was a seamstress. Both parents were the children of emancipated slaves. At age 21, Leroy reported for military duty at U.S. Army base Camp Greene on August 3, 1918. The men at Camp Greene served in segregated units, the African American soldiers often worked in labor or supply units. His arrival coincided with a serious wave of “Spanish” influenza. Just two months later, Camp Greene was under forced quarantine to combat the epidemic. The camp newspaper reported on October 9 that “most of the cases were confined to the colored men.”1
Jones may have served in combat overseas. Many men who trained at Camp Greene were deployed to France and saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war.2 Jones was discharged on September 10, 1919. He may have been unsuccessful finding work after the war—the 1920 U.S. Census records him as resident of a boarding house with no occupation. Jones was among the wave of Black Americans who moved to New York and other northern cities in response to the acute labor shortage caused partly by a decline in immigration and the struggling southern economy. The details of Jones’ arrival in New York are not known, but he was with FDR when they both arrived at Hyde Park for a brief visit in April 1922.3 Arriving with only his new valet—FDR called him Roy—and possibly Miss Rockey, they stayed for two weeks. At Sara Roosevelt’s request, Josephine Plog, wife of the superintendent for the Roosevelt estate, made the closed house ready and served as temporary cook and housekeeper during FDR’s short stay. Plog remembered “He wanted to come to Hyde Park to have a rest and get away from the noise and the bells in New York and be very quiet.”
“He didn’t get up till about ten or eleven o’clock and then his valet would take him down on the porch and he would sit in his wheelchair whittling out boats and little things that he was very fond of doing. . . . He would rest a while, and then he would do the same thing—go out on the porch and wheel himself around and have his valet look after him.”4
Jones was no stranger to the care of people with disabilities. His sister Mozelle had poor eyesight and underwent three separate operations, all of them unsuccessful. Eventually, her parents enrolled her at the North Carolina Institution of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind.5
Jones accompanied FDR on a series of winter houseboat cruises in the Florida Keys between 1923 and 1926.6 He was with FDR at Horseneck Beach, Massachusetts in the summer of 1923. And he was with FDR when he made his first visit to Warm Springs in October 1924. Writing to his mother from Warm Springs during that first visit, FDR reported, “Roy is faithful and seems to like it. He is chauffeur as well as butler and valet.”7
It appears that Jones earned $75 to $100 per month. By contrast, railroad porters earned an average of $65 per month in the 1920s.8
Jones was back in Wake County, Georgia for a short time where he met and married Luzelia Hartfield on July 22, 1926. Jones returned to New York with his bride, but adjusting to life away from home was difficult for her. Jones resigned his employment with Roosevelt in 1927 and returned to Georgia.9 His sister recalled their arrival:
I have the most vivid memory of him driving up to our country home in a brand-spanking-new 1927 black-on-black, T-Model Ford! We, the Jones family without a vehicle, were so shocked; we couldn’t believe it! You can imagine how sophisticated he looked—with his shoulders squared back, his head perpendicular to the steering wheel, and his tall frame almost touching the top of the inside.10
By 1930, Jones was working on his family’s farm and took over the operation when his father moved the family to Durham in 1932. He and his wife later moved to Durham where he worked as a butcher at the Washington Duke Hotel. Leroy Jones died at age 88 on December 6, 1984.
NOTES
1 “Are Fighting Spanish ‘Flu’ at Camp Green,” Trench and Camp, Vol. 2, No. 43 (October 9, 1918).
2 Jones’ sister noted in her recollections that her brother “served our country bravely.” Dr. Beverly “Eagle” Rogers, A Century + of Living: The Autobiography of Cora Jones “Boot” McLeod, Trilogy Christian Publishers, 2022.
3 Large numbers of Black southerners relocated to northern and midwestern cities during the First Great Migration (1910-1940). When the war effort ramped up in 1917, more men were sent off to Europe to fight leaving their industrial jobs vacant. The labor supply was further strained with a decline in immigration from Europe and standing bans on peoples of color from other parts of the world. All of this opened opportunity for the Black population to be the labor supply in non-agricultural industries.
4 Interview with Josephine Plog (1947.14). Sound Recordings Collection, Roosevelt & Vanderbilt National Historic Sites.
5 Opened in 1869, the North Carolina Institution of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind was the first state-supported school in the United States for African American blind and deaf students.
6 FDR rented the Weona II in 1923. He purchased a houseboat in 1923 with his friend John Lawrence and they renamed it Larooco. Jones appears in photographs with FDR and his small crew aboard the Larooco.
7 FDR to Sara Roosevelt, [Autumn, 1924], FDR, His Personal Letters, 1905-1928, Elliott Roosevelt, ed., Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948, p. 567-8.
8 Franklin D. Roosevelt: Family, Business & Personal Financial Matters, Checkbooks, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. It’s difficult to estimate the monthly salary as payments to Jones and McDuffie are irregular and fluctuate. Payments may sometimes include additional expenses incurred by Jones on FDR’s behalf, and payments do not appear on a regular monthly basis. Salary was probably sometimes, or usually, paid in cash. See also The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, University of Chicago Press, 2022, p. 369
9 FDR’s last check payment to Jones is dated January 29, 1927.
10 Dr. Beverly “Eagle” Rogers, A Century + of Living: The Autobiography of Cora Jones “Boot” McLeod, Trilogy Christian Publishers, 2022.