Alberta Odell Jones was the type of person who truly deserves to be described as impressive and exceptional. She lived a life of firsts, breaking barriers of both race and gender and paving the way for others to follow in her footsteps.

After graduating with honors from Louisville’s Central High School, Alberta began her college career in 1949 at the segregated Louisville Municipal College for Negroes, which merged with the University of Louisville in 1951. She attended U of L on scholarship for the next two years, graduating at the top of one of the school’s first integrated classes with a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting and economics. She put her undergraduate degree to work taking a job as an accountant for a local insurance firm and began saving money to pay for law school.

Alberta attended the University of Louisville School of Law for one year before receiving a scholarship to study law at Howard University in Washington D.C. While at Howard she worked for Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper drafting legislation and “making the law come to life.” She graduated 4th in her class with job offers from multiple Washington law firms. Instead of remaining in Washington she returned home to Louisville and took the Kentucky Bar Exam. When she arrived to take the test she was informed by the secretary of the State Board of Bar Examiners that she would be the first Black female attorney in Kentucky if she passed. When a reporter from the Louisville Courier Journal showed up to cover the story and take her picture Alberta said, “If I had known how much was depending on me I would have studied harder- and I would have worn something different.” She did indeed pass the bar, becoming Kentucky’s first Black female lawyer, and she opened her own practice in Louisville’s predominantly Black West End.

In 1960 Alberta was approached by a fellow graduate of Central High School who wanted her assistance. This was the up-and-coming young boxer then known as Cassius Clay, who sought her representation in negotiating his first contract. Alberta traveled with Clay to California where she brilliantly negotiated his first professional contract which contained a provision far ahead of its time that would require a portion of his earnings to be set aside and held in trust with her as co-trustee. Without her approval he would not be able to access these funds until age 35. Alberta’s role in these negotiations likely makes her the first woman and first Black person of any race to negotiate a major professional contract as a sports agent. And of course Cassius Clay wasn’t just any athlete. Clay would later change his name to Muhammad Ali, known widely as “The Greatest of All Time.”

In addition to this high profile achievement, Alberta made great contributions to the fight for civil rights in Louisville. She was a founder of the Independent Voters Association, a controversial group in the Democratically controlled Louisville which sought to register Black residents as Independents, encouraging people to “vote for the man, not the party.”

Though in the previous year’s presidential campaign John F. Kennedy had campaigned for the Black vote, the national Democratic party did not have a unified commitment to civil rights, and the same was true at the local level in Louisville. The city, often referred to as the “Gateway to the South,” had a reputation of being a little more civilized than their neighbors to the south. Louisville had never seen the kind of overt and pervasive racial violence that was so common across the deeper south. In the years since Reconstruction city leaders had allowed for small, calculated concessions to demands from the Black community, giving just enough to keep them pacified without doing much- if anything- to disrupt the lives of white residents. Both parties locally were fairly liberal for the time in that “at least we are not wearing white hoods to the office” sort of way, but neither party went so far as to really champion civil rights.

Louisville had been a staunchly Democratic city since the formation of the party in the 1860s, with Republicans winning only a handful of municipal elections over the next century. In early 1961 the city’s Black community began pushing for desegregation of the city’s businesses. At the time the Democratic Mayor and Board of Aldermen refused to even consider a desegregation ordinance, and the party campaigned on this position in that fall’s municipal elections. The local Republican Party saw this as an opportunity to gain power for the first time in almost thirty years, and their candidates ran on a platform centered on desegregating downtown businesses with candidates for Aldermen pledging to pass such an ordinance and mayoral candidate William Cowger promising to sign it into law.

The Independent Voters Association recognized the power Black voters had to leverage their votes as a cohesive block in order to force change. Black voters allegiance to the Party of Lincoln had waned as Democratic presidential candidates like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy actively courted the Black vote, but the IVA understood that the fight for civil rights at the local level transcended national party alliances. The IVA became a political force in its own right, holding rallies to educate residents and registering over 6,000 Black Louisvillians as Independents.

With the support of the IVA and much of Louisville’s Black community, the Republican candidates swept Louisville’s 1961 election, and they eventually managed to pass a desegregation ordinance. Republican Mayor Cowger recognized the role Black voters played in his party’s election, and he hired a number of Black residents for positions in his administration. The following year the IVA demonstrated its commitment to political independence by supporting Democrats Wilson Wyatt and Frank Burke in their national bids for the House and Senate.

In 1963 Alberta returned to Washington D. C. where she participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with a delegation from Louisville. Back home she was working with a group of over 200 people both Black and white that sought to consciously build interracial friendships by organizing visits to each others’ homes.

The following year she helped to collect donations and organize a trust fund for a seven-year-old Black boy named Bucky Welch whose forearms were crushed when he rescued a puppy from underneath a train. Bucky’s arms had to be amputated and over the course of his life he would require several thousand dollars worth of medical care. The story gained national attention and Bucky received support and donations from celebrities like baseball player Mickey Mantle and comedian Joe E. Brown. Within two weeks the Bucky Welch Fund had collected around $2,500, and a group of attorneys filed a $350,000 lawsuit against the Kentucky and Indiana Railroad line which would eventually be settled out of court.

By 1965 Alberta had earned a reputation as a skilled attorney, and in late February of that year she was appointed Kentucky’s first female prosecutor of any race, serving in Louisville’s Domestic Relations Court. As a vociferous political Independent she was surprised to be offered the position in a Republican administration, but she took the job. When she did she told Isaac Gumer, the prosecutor who appointed her, “I’m not promising anything,” as if to say she would not toe the party line or stop her activism because she was being given a job. Even after her appointment she continued much of her work as a lawyer outside the Domestic Relations Court as well as her activism with the IVA.

Just six months after being appointed as prosecutor her body was found floating face down in the Ohio River.