Edward Jones was born in Charleston, South Carolina and became part of the mulatto elite of that majority African-American city.
[1] According to historian Bernard E. Powers, the senior Jones associated himself with elite white Charlestonians and "seldom kept the company of even light-complexioned free blacks and never of slaves.
During his time at Amherst, Jones was involved in the first African American newspaper, Freedom's Journal, with John Brown Russwurm and Samuel Cornish.
[1] In February 1829, he joined the Andover Theological Seminary and the African Mission School in Hartford which was run by the Episcopal Church; eighteen months later he was ordained as a priest.
Jones was a superintendent of the liberated African village of Kent, Sierra Leone and it was there he met one of the Nova Scotian settlers, Hannah Nylander, and married her.