Nathaniel Raphael Jones (May 12, 1926 – January 26, 2020) was an American attorney, judge, and law professor. As general counsel of the NAACP, Jones fought to end school segregation, including in the northern United States. From 1979 until 1995, he served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before assuming senior status, and in 2002 retired to resume a private legal practice. Early years Jones was born in the Smoky Hollow district of Youngstown, Ohio, several blocks from a federal courthouse that now bears his name. Although he lived in an integrated neighborhood and attended an integrated public high school, his mother took him to the local segregated YMCA, where he heard and met national civil rights leaders. She also introduced him to J. Maynard Dickerson, a lawyer as well as publisher of the weekly black newspaper, The Buckeye Review, who became his mentor. Jones became active in the local NAACP's youth council and successfully organized a boycott of the local roller skating rink, which previously only allowed blacks to skate only on Monday nights. He graduated high school in 1945 and was inducted in the U.S. Army since World War II had not yet ended. He later recalled his shock at the segregated training facility at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, and those Italian prisoners of war received better treatment than black soldiers. Nonetheless, Jones served with the United States Army Air Corps. After the war, using the GI Bill, Jones entered Youngstown College (now Youngstown State University). There, he continued working with the NAACP, and when nearby Warren, Ohio tried to bar blacks from the local swimming pool, he saw future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall in action. After receiving his Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1951, he enrolled in law school, studying at nights while serving as director of Youngstown's Fair Employment Practices Commission. He graduated in 1956, receiving a Bachelor of Laws degree. Legal career Jones was admitted to the bar in 1957, setting up his own private practice. In 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy nominated him as Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio in Cleveland. Thus in 1962, he became the first African American to serve in that position in the district. He held that position until his 1967 appointment as Assistant General Counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson's National Advisory Commission on