Dr. Lillie May Carroll Jackson, born in Baltimore on May 25, 1889, was a tireless freedom fighter. As an "American of African descent, "she endured the humiliation of Jim Crow segregation, but did not take this plight sitting down. Using her abiding faith nurtured at Sharp Street United Methodist Church, she believed that "with God, all things are possible."
As president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP from 1935 to 1970, Jackson—-along with Afro-American Newspaper publisher Carl J. Murphy—-organized the community to protest Eastern Shore lynchings, segregated schools, residential restrictive covenants, discriminatory practices of Baltimore retailers and public accommodations establishments, and police brutality.
Jackson made common cause with legal scholars Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall to make the U.S. Constitution a reality. Her leadership resulted in successful litigation of several Supreme Court decisions, including the striking down of racially restrictive covenants in property deeds (1948) and finding segregated public schools unconstitutional (1954).
Jackson was the matriarch of the politically-active Jackson-Mitchell clan that included her son-in-law Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. (known as "the 101st Senator); her daughter Juanita Jackson Mitchell, the first black
woman to practice law in Maryland; her grandson Clarence M. Mitchell III (who at age 21 was the youngest person in the nation to be elected to a state legislature); and U.S. Representative Parren J. Mitchell, the first black U.S. Representative from Maryland.
"The successful struggle for civil rights in Maryland was a defining achievement of this century," the Baltimore Sun wrote. "Lillie May Carroll Jackson was a key general in that battle." She died on July 5, 1975.
(Inscription under the image on the right) Lillie Carroll Jackson " It is somehow fitting that Lillie May Carroll Jackson, a direct descendant of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, would confront an unjust government asking it to fulfill its creed that all men are created equal."—Baltimore Sun, August 1999—
Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum, Sponsor-Rededicated 2015-Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Mayor
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