Lillian Bertha Jones Horace (née Amstead; April 29, 1880 – August 1, 1965) was an African American author, educator, and librarian from Fort Worth, Texas, best known for her novels Five Generations Hence (1916), Crowned with Glory and Honor, and Angie Brown. These are the earliest novels on record written by an African-American woman from Texas. Horace married and divorced twice, and continued to teach, travel and write throughout her life. At the time of her retirement, she had been an educator for over thirty years.
Biography
Early life and education
Lillian Bertha Amstead (or Armistead) was born April 29, 1880, in Jefferson, Texas, to Thomas Amstead (or Armistead) and Macey Ackard Matthews; she also had one sister, Etta. The family moved to Fort Worth when Lillian was two years old. Thomas failed to support them financially, so the girls grew up helping their mother make ends meet. A self-described "dreamy" and "mystical" child, Lillian attended the East Ninth Street Colored School (renamed I.M. Terrell High School in 1921), the first free public school in Fort Worth, and Mt. Gilead Baptist Church. She attended several colleges and universities, including historically black colleges in the Jim Crow south. In 1898-99, Lillian attended Bishop College, a historically black college founded by the Baptist Home Mission Society in Marshall, Texas, which she credited with her commitment to the Baptist faith. Lillian attended the Dallas Summer Normal Institute, a segregated teacher education program, in 1905. In 1914, she enrolled at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University) and graduated valedictorian in a class of seventy-four. Returning to Fort Worth to teach during the school year, Lillian attended summer courses at the University of Chicago in 1917, 1918, 1919, 1928, and 1940; at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1920; and at Columbia University in 1924. In 1920–1921, she attended Simmons College in Louisville, Kentucky, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1922. While at Simmons College, she held the position of Dean of Women. Jones would later return to the University of Chicago in 1940 to study for a master's degree in Library Science.
Career
After attending university, Horace moved back to the South and married David Jones, the son of her pastor Reverend Prince Jones. For the first few years of their marriage, they lived with his family in Denton. During this time, she studied for and passed her teaching exams, and took up her first teaching position in 1901 at a school in the rural community of Parvin in Denton County, Texas. The following year, she was named principal of the Handley Colored School, a one-room school in the Handley community east of Fort Worth. In 1911, Lillian returned to I.M. Terrell High School to teach English. During her long teaching career at I.M. Terrell, she established the school's journalism and drama departments, started a School Newspaper at I. M. Terrell called Terrellife, and formed the school's first library using donations from parents. For many years, she served as the school's dean of girls.
Though teaching was her career, Lillian's greatest wish was "to write a book worth reading by an intelligent person, not necessarily [her] friend." In 1916, Lillian self-published her first book of utopian fiction, Five Generations Hence, the first known novel by an African-American woman in Texas. The plot of the migration narrative, centering on fictional African-American educator Grace Noble, presents African-American women as heroines and the return of black Americans to Africa as a "plausible solution to the obstacles facing blacks in the South", five generations after their enslavement and transport to the Americas. The book was not widely distributed, but came to scholars' attention in 1995 when it was excerpted in Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836-1919.
In 1938, Lillian began writing a biography of Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams, the minister of Chicago's Olivet Baptist Church, then the largest church in the United States with a congregation of 12,000. He had been a minister at Lillian's own Mt. Gilead Baptist Church in Fort Worth prior to moving to Chicago. Williams was killed in a plane crash in 1940, and although Lillian finished the book the following year, power struggles within the National Baptist Convention prevented distribution of the book until 1964, when it gained the attention of Martin Luther King Jr. "Crowned with Glory and Honor": The Life of Rev. Lacey Kirk Williams was published posthumously in 1978.