Early life Jones was born in northwestern
Mississippi; the specific location is unclear as some sources indicate
Senatobia, while others suggest nearby
Coldwater. A son of Robert and Elnora Jones, Robert Earl Jones left school at an early age to work as a
sharecropper to help his family. He later became a prizefighter. Under the name "Battling Bill Stovall", he was a sparring partner of
Joe Louis.
Career Jones became interested in theater after he moved to
Chicago, as one of the thousands leaving the South in the
Great Migration. He moved on to New York by the 1930s. He worked with young people in the
Works Progress Administration, the largest
New Deal agency, through which he met
Langston Hughes, a young poet and playwright. Hughes cast him in his 1938 play, ''Don't You Want to Be Free?
Jones acted mostly in crime movies and dramas after that, with such highlights as Wild River (1960) and One Potato, Two Potato (1964). In the Oscar-winning 1973 film The Sting, he played Luther Coleman, an aging grifter whose con is requited with murder leading to the eponymous "sting". In the later 20th century, Jones appeared in several other noted films: Trading Places (1983) and Witness'' (1985). Toward the end of his life, Jones was noted for his stage portrayal of Creon in
The Gospel at Colonus (1988), a black musical version of the
Oedipus legend. He also appeared in episodes of the long-running TV shows
Lou Grant and
Kojak. One of his last stage roles was in a 1991
Broadway production of
Mule Bone by Hughes and
Zora Neale Hurston, another important writer of the Harlem Renaissance. His last film was
Rain Without Thunder (1993). Although
blacklisted by the
House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s due to involvement with leftist groups, Jones was ultimately honored with a lifetime achievement award by the U.S.
National Black Theatre Festival. ==Personal life and death==