Scope and Content Note
The records of the Gilbert Jonas Company span the years 1947-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1956 to 2006. Gilbert Jonas (1930-2006) founded the Gilbert Jonas Company in 1962, and for many years the company was the principal fundraiser for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. These records, however, document the fundraising and public relations work of the Gilbert Jonas Company on behalf of nonprofit, child welfare, foreign aid, civil rights, and social action organizations other than the NAACP.
Some of the larger client files relate to the Fund for an Open Society (OPEN), Hale House (New York, N.Y.), Harlem Youth Development Foundation, Holy Land Conservation Fund, International Civil Rights Center & Museum (Greensboro, N.C.), International Rescue Committee, Minority Business Enterprise Legal Defense and Education Fund, Northside Center for Child Development, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Roger Baldwin Foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union, Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality (SEDFRE), Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), and World Federalist Association. The first part of the collection is composed entirely of client files that include direct mail campaigns, financial statements, solicitation letters, reports, correspondence, subject files, memoranda, donor lists, newspaper clippings, and publications of the client organizations. The bulk of the 2023 addition is composed of more extensive client files but also includes Jonas's personal correspondence, miscellany, subject files, and a file on Mississippi civil rights leader and politician Charles Evers. Correspondents include Derrick Bell, Jingsheng Wei, and Harris Wofford. Notable in the subject files is material on Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, New York, where Jonas was a sports reporter for the student newspaper. Captured as part of his beat, and included in the file, are photographs of Jackie Robinson during his 1948 rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Before Gilbert Jonas founded the Gilbert Jonas Company in 1962, he was employed in several capacities by the Harold L. Oram Group, an organization with a mission similar to what would become Jonas's company. Files on the Africa League, American Committee on Africa, American Friends of Vietnam, and the Harold L. Oram delegation to Vietnam in 1959 shed light on this phase of his career before he started his company.
A large file on Gilbert Jonas's friend, Charles Evers, the older brother of assassinated civil rights leader and NAACP official Medgar Wiley Evers, stands apart from the client files. Charles Evers was a civil rights leader in his own right and a politician. The Charles Evers file documents his efforts to bring out, organize, and empower the newly enfranchised Black vote in Mississippi through campaigns for the United States House of Representatives (1968), governor of Mississippi (1972-1973), and the United States Senate (1978-1979), all of which he lost, and for mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, which he won in 1969 and in several subsequent campaigns. The Evers file documents the Gilbert Jonas Company's fundraising and public relations support for Mississippi political campaigns on the national level, and fundraising, organizational and other administrative support during Evers tenure as mayor of Fayette, Mississippi. For example, the Gilbert Jonas Company coordinated through SEDFRE for a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, police officer to train the all-Black Fayette Police Department after the white officers quit en masse when Evers was first elected mayor in 1969. The Evers file also documents Evers's participation in the transition of the Democratic Party in Mississippi from an all-white "regular" party through several stages, from the Freedom Democratic Party and the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, to an integrated Democratic Party in Mississippi representing all races.