Williana Burroughs

Her widowed mother left Virginia for New York City, bringing Williana together with a sister and a brother (Gordon Jones), where she worked as a cook.

[1] Her mother proved unable to care for her children adequately, however, so Williana spent the next seven years in the Colored Orphan Asylum, located at the time on the corner of 143rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem.

[8] Burroughs made use of the pseudonym "Mary Adams" in the communist movement during the 1920s and 1930s, publishing an article for the party's daily newspaper under that name for May Day 1928.

In the spring of 1940 she made a request to return to the United States together with her sons but was persuaded to stay owing to the lack of capable Americans remaining in the USSR.

[11] Williana Jones Burroughs died on December 24, 1945, at the Manhattan home of her friend Hermie Huiswoud, just two months after her return to the United States and barely more than a week before what would have been her 64th birthday.

After his military service he returned to the United States and in 1961 co-founded the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, of which he remained curator until 1980.

[11] Her granddaughter Carola Burroughs was interviewed by Yelena Demikovsky for the documentary Black Russians - The Red Experience, about African-Americans who moved to the Soviet Union.