Marvin T. Jones

Marvin Tupper Jones is the owner of Marvin T. Jones & Associates, a photography company in Washington, DC that serves businesses, institutions and governments.  He has been published in well-known magazines and has worked in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.  Jones’ documentary photography of Haiti and the East African nation of Somaliland exhibited at the Organization of American States, Howard University, California African American Museum and the Roanoke-Chowan Community College. 

Jones’ decades-long career as a documentary photographer has expanded to other forms of documentary media.  He accomplished this by founding the Chowan Discovery Group (CDG).  The mission of the CDG is to research, document, preserve and present the 400+ year-old history of the land owning tri-racial people of color of the Winton Triangle, an area centered in Hertford County, North Carolina.   Founded in 2008, the Chowan Discovery Group (www.chowandiscovery.org)  co-produced in 2009 its first major presentation, a stage production, scripted by Jones, called The Winton Triangle.  The CDG is the recipient of three grants from the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.  The CDG succeeded in placing the Pleasant Plains School, the Winton Triangle’s first, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

In addition to writing articles, Jones has made many presentations about the Winton Triangle’s history on national and regional radio and television, at colleges and universities, museums and to civic groups. The North Carolina Office of Archives and History accepted nine of his nominations for highway historical markers.  Jones is also the producer of five video documentaries.

A native of Cofield, a village in the Winton Triangle, Marvin Tupper Jones began this project a decade ago by scanning the photograph collection of relatives and neighbors.  The Winton Triangle digital collection now has over 80,000 files of photographs, documents, maps, audio and video recordings.  Jones’ work for Chowan Discovery has yielded awards of excellence from the North Carolina Society of Historians and the African American Historical and Genealogical Society.