William Jones, forged a career as engineer despite racism; 91

The frustration was still palpable when William J. Jones, by then 78 and retired, spoke in 1993 about one of many incidents of bigotry he had endured during his career as an engineer.

"You always worry about it," he said, recalling a day in 1941 when he was asked to leave a room filled with white students at Tufts University because the recruiter present would not consider hiring a black man. "You go back to your room, and you just beat your pillow."

Persevering through decades when the color of his skin meant that he had to use separate washrooms, hotels, and even different cabs than his white engineering colleagues, he worked on the development of radar, was a lecturer at Harvard College, and a research affiliate at MIT.

Mr. Jones died Feb. 8 at Neville Center at Fresh Pond, a nursing and rehabilitation facility in Cambridge. He was 91, and his health had declined in recent months, prompting him to move from his Oak Bluffs home.

In an oral history interview with Robert Johnson Jr., an associate professor at Framingham State College, Mr. Jones reflected on the role that happenstance had played in his life.

"Ninety percent of my success was by accident; I was in the right place at the right time," he told Johnson in 1993. "Two weeks later or a half a day earlier, it wouldn't have happened. . . .

"You have to be good, but you also have to have a chance and you had to have some nice people around you once in a while," he said. "I think there were some decent people. I would be less than honest if I said they were all racist, but I can say for every good person, there were three racists then and about 2 1/2 now, but they are not as outspoken."

Despite the prejudice he faced, Mr. Jones never allowed bitterness to influence his contact with others, said Bill Geary, former commissioner of the Metropolitan District Commission. The two worked together when Mr. Jones was an associate MDC commissioner in the 1980s.

"Bill Jones was just a magnificent human being," Geary said. "He had the intellect of a genius, but he always had a common touch and a magnificent heart. And he could always relate complex issues in a very simple way so that people could understand them and could discern the human dimension of the problem at hand that needed to be solved."

He added: "I called him 'everyone's grandfather.' He was the grandfather you would want. There was this universal humanity in which he treasured every human being."

Mr. Jones was born in New York City, the son of immigrants from the West Indies. He and his identical twin , Cyril, became exemplary students.

The brothers graduated from Stuyvesant High School, where they began fixing radio receivers and obtained government licenses for amateur radio stations.

Because of family finances during the Depression, the brothers planned to attend City College of New York. But an encounter at a government office led to a meeting with a Wall Street stockbroker who offered to pay their tuition anywhere.

Their mother wanted them to attend the same school, so they went to Tufts University.

Several months after enrolling at Tufts, their father was stuck and killed by a car, and the stockbroker's finances suddenly worsened, leaving the twins to find jobs to pay for their education. For a while, they split one full-time job without letting their employer know they were twins who alternated shifts.

According to a family story, "their boss said: 'This is the dumbest guy I've ever met. You have to teach him everything twice,' " said Mr. Jones's son Peter of Belmont.

Rejected from dozens of jobs because of his race after graduating, Mr. Jones became certified as a civil service engineer to work with the Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, N.J., during the nascent days of radar in World War II.

He was selected to become a liaison with the Radiation Laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and traveled the country, visiting labs and government contractors, though lodging opportunities for blacks were limited.

"Many of the hotels were just red-light places," he said in the oral history. "Sometimes you'd have to hang your clothes on a hook to keep them away from the roaches."

His association with MIT led to wartime work with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on radar and technical matters. After the war ended, Mr. Jones went to Newark College of Engineering and received a master's degree in electrical engineering. A few years later, Mr. Jones moved with his family to Massachusetts, where he was a researcher at Lincoln Laboratory.

He subsequently worked at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator lab run by Harvard and MIT, lectured in Harvard's physics department, and was appointed a trustee of Southeastern Massachusetts University. He left Harvard in 1973 to work at MIT's energy lab, where he remained until retiring in 1982.

Mr. Jones and his wife, Dorothy, who died in 2002, spent summers on Martha's Vineyard. He moved there in the late 1990s after she entered a nursing home on the island, visiting three times a day to give her her meals for five years.

A sailor and fisherman much of his life, Mr. Jones always kept a boat in Vineyard Haven Harbor.

"He could look out the window of his house and see, 'Oh, the birds are working, let's go fishing,' " his son said.

In addition to Peter, Mr. Jones leaves two other sons, Marc of Belmont and Geoffrey of Bristol, Vt.; his twin, Cyril of Brooklyn; a sister, Hazel Gorham of Denver; four granddaughters; and a grandson.

A memorial service will be held in the spring.

Correction: Because of an editing error, an incorrect age was given for William Jones in a headline on his obituary yesterday. Mr. Jones was 91 when he died on Feb. 8.