Jane Roberts (first lady)

Joseph Jenkins Roberts advanced as a political leader and served as governor of Liberia from 1842 to 1848. Jane Roberts effectively served as the first First Lady. She also made contributions to farming, such as raising turkeys.^[8] She took a role in educating some Liberian children.^[8]

In 1847, the Republic of Liberia declared independence from the United States, and Joseph Roberts was elected as the first president. He served until 1856.^[1] This lengthy tenure enlarged his wife's influence as the first First Lady of the nation.

President Roberts made diplomatic visits to several countries and met with several heads of state, in an effort to gain recognition for the Republic of Liberia. His wife Jane sometimes accompanied him, including to Barbados, the United States, England, Belgium, and France.^[1] When they made a state visit to England, Queen Victoria received the couple on her royal yacht and honored them with a seventeen-gun salute. The couple returned to Monrovia on a British warship.^[9] French President Louis Napoleon III met with the couple twice, including in 1851. Later his government donated equipment to the Liberian military.^[1]

In 1856, Joseph left the presidency. He was selected as president of the newly established Liberia College, serving until 1872. That year he returned to politics and was re-elected to Liberia's presidency. Jane Roberts again served as first lady.

In 1872, Roberts lost both a sister, Susannah (Waring) Lewis, and their mother, Harriet (Graves) Waring Brander. After being widowed, her mother had remarried by 1847 to Nathaniel Brander, who also was a politician. He served with Joseph Roberts as vice president.^[1]

Joseph Roberts died in 1876, soon after he resigned from the presidency. Jane had tried unsuccessfully to nurse him back to health when he was ill.^[1]

The widowed Jane Roberts continued to be active in her community.^[1] In 1887, she started a project to construct a hospital in Monrovia.^[5][10] While raising money, she visited the United States, where she dined with President Grover Cleveland and his wife at the White House.^[5] She was the only black woman to do so. President Cleveland contributed money to the hospital project. In 1891, she spoke at the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, which had been one of the state societies supporting American settlement in Liberia.^[1]

In July 1892, Jane Roberts represented her government in meeting a second time with Queen Victoria, at Windsor Castle.^[1] She was to present a quilt for the queen, made by Americo-Liberian Martha Ricks over a period of twenty-five years. Roberts and the Liberian ambassador arranged for Ricks to accompany her and present the quilt personally to Victoria.^[9][11][12]

Decades later, African-American artist Elton Fax drew a quick illustration of this Roberts/Ricks-Queen Victoria meeting and a larger portrait of Roberts, based on the 1905 photograph on this page, and entitled "They'll Never Die". The brief piece was published in 1949 in local newspapers.^[13]

Roberts returned to England after the turn of the century. From 1906 until her death, she lived in London with a British couple, politician John Archer, the first black mayor of Battersea, a borough of London, and his wife Bertha.^[1] In England, she continued to raise funds for the Monrovia hospital, often through gifts from friends. Hallie Quinn Brown noted in a 1910 visit that Roberts at ninety-one years old was still "clear in mind and wonderfully active."^[9]

On January 10, 1914, Jane Roberts died in the Archer home.^[14] She was one of the oldest members of the Liberian community. She was interred at Streatham Cemetery in London.^[1]