Rev. J. H. Jackson visual materials

Biographical/historical note

Reverend Joseph Harrison Jackson was born in Mississippi in 1900, where he grew up before graduating from Jackson State University. Jackson went on to graduate school at Creighton University for education and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School for theology, later completing further graduate studies at the University of Chicago. When he moved north to Chicago, Jackson joined Olivet Baptist Church, a historic Black church in the Bronzeville community on the south side of Chicago that once boasted a 20,000-member congregation, then the largest protestant church in the world. The influx of Black people into Chicago during the Great Migration caused this great increase of the Olivet community and the church, in turn, provided many resources that helped Black people settle into the city. As head pastor of Olivet starting in 1941, Jackson promoted the church’s principles of fair education and housing for Black people in Chicago. The J. H. Jackson Education Building opened in 1962 and housed a fully-staffed daycare center until its closing in the late 1980s. Jackson had international influence and traveled extensively to different countries across the globe, namely Russia, England, and several countries in the Middle East. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Jackson also served on the Central Committee of World Council of Churches.

Jackson was president of the National Baptist Convention for 30 years and had a significant impact on the convention’s goals and tactics to achieve social change for the Black community in the United States. Although Jackson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. agreed on the fundamental belief that Black people in the U.S. need to achieve social and economic change, they disagreed greatly on how to do so. While King, also a member of the National Baptist Convention, promoted the tactic of civil disobedience as a means of liberation, Jackson adamantly rejected this praxis and encouraged voting to change oppressive, racist systems from within. Eventually, the disagreement affected the NBC in its entirety and led to the split between the National Baptist Convention into a separate Progressive National Baptist Convention in 1961. Jackson continued his presidency of the NBC as a conservative civil rights leader until his death in 1990, caused by illness. He was survived by his wife, Maude Thelma Jackson, and his daughter, Dr. Kenny Jackson Williams, both since deceased.