Jones was born in Missouri in 1882 and educated at the University of Iowa, where he developed his philosophy that rural Black youth needed practical skills alongside academic learning. When he learned about the desperate conditions in Rankin County, he traveled south to do something about it. The school he founded combined strict discipline, Christian teaching, and manual labor with classroom instruction -- students farmed, built structures, and maintained the campus as part of their education. Jones led the school for more than sixty years, an extraordinary tenure that saw it grow from a clearing in the pine forest to a self-sufficient campus sprawling across rolling hills, open fields, and lakes southeast of Jackson. The grounds included a post office, a working farm, athletic fields, a chapel, and an amphitheater. By the time of Jones's death in 1975, Piney Woods was drawing students from more than twenty states, Mexico, the Caribbean, and several African nations.

In 1937, Jones formed a student band to help raise money for the school. He called them the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, and they became something no one expected: America's first racially integrated all-female jazz orchestra. The band included Jones's adopted daughter, Helen Jones Woods, on trombone, alongside young women of African-American, Mexican, and Chinese heritage. They started as a school fundraising act and ended up barnstorming across the country, playing to packed houses at the Apollo Theater, the Regal in Chicago, and the Howard in Washington. The Sweethearts were not the only musical act to emerge from Piney Woods. The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, one of the foundational groups of American gospel music, formed at the school. So did the Cotton Blossom Singers. Beginning in the 1930s, the school also fielded baseball teams -- not for sport alone, but as another arm of its relentless fundraising machine.

In 1954, Jones appeared on the television show This Is Your Life. The host asked each viewer to send one dollar to support the school. The response was staggering: $700,000 poured in, and Jones used the money to establish Piney Woods' endowment fund. By the time he died in 1975, that fund had grown to seven million dollars. The television appearance was just the most dramatic episode in a long tradition of creative fundraising and public outreach. George Washington Carver spoke at the school. So did LeRoy T. Walker, who would become the first Black president of the United States Olympic Committee, and Mike Espy, who would become the first Black Secretary of Agriculture from the Deep South. Wynton Marsalis played a benefit concert in 1994. Morley Safer profiled the school twice on 60 Minutes, in 1992 and 2005, calling it an academic oasis.

More than ninety-eight percent of Piney Woods graduates go on to attend college. The roster of institutions reads like a who's who of American higher education: Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Spelman, Morehouse, Howard, Rice, Emory, Tufts, Vassar, UCLA. The school houses roughly 300 students in grades nine through twelve, funded by donations and its endowment. Its alumni include Helen Jones Woods, the jazz trombonist; Grace Morris Allen Jones, a pioneering African-American educator and wife of the founder; Virgia Brocks-Shedd, a librarian and poet; and Noelle Roe, the first African-American military officer in the state of Colorado. What Jones started with two dollars under a cedar tree has become one of America's most remarkable educational institutions -- a place where the rolling pine forests of Mississippi shelter a tradition of excellence that has endured for more than a century.