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Mrs. Lillie Jackson, she was bitterly against whiskey and what have you, and
she felt that those places should not be in certain areas. But there were so
few Black tavern owners that it really didn't bother us too much. But she
was bitterly against - let's face it, if a white man wanted to open a place of
business, he would come and put it right in the neighborhood. It wasn't
right. And so Lillie Jackson was against it. She was right. She was trying to
protect the community. The ones that she was against were mostly places
that were operated by whites. They didn't care about the community, except
to take the money out of it. They didn't give a damn about a nice place.
Until I opened this place downstairs and Little Willie's Inn - and I am going
back to 1935 - the places that whites had for blacks in the black community
didn't have a decent chair to sit in. No. They didn't even have black
bartenders. It was a nasty rip-off altogether."1
Lillie Jackson was probably not too concerned with the quality of seating in taverns,
but she would definitely have agreed with much of Adams' statement.
Initially, Clarence Mitchell later recalled, Jackson opposed taverns and
other commercial intrusions alone, but eventually, in 1937, she spurred the
formation of the Northwest Residential Protective Association in 1937."^ Juanita
Jackson Mitchell recalled in an interview how this association was organized and
what the results were:
Juanita Jackson Mitchell: My mother said you start with what you have.
You start with your family, then you go to your church, and your neighbors,
organize the neighborhood. She is the first one who organized
neighborhood protective associations in the Black community.
Dr. George B. Murphy was a great educator and was the brother of
Carl Murphy. He lived in the 1700 block of Druid Hill. (I lived in the 1300
block.) In the grocery store diagonally across from he where lived, they
wanted to put in a tavern. My mother told him to organize.
Interviewer: This was the first —
Mitchell: Yes. The Northwest Residential Protective Association was
organized. And its first battle was to keep that tavern out. They did
everything on that: picketed, -
Interviewer: Did they win?
Mitchell: They won that. Then that gave a push to organize these
neighborhood protective associations all over the ghetto. My mother felt
that this action by the neighborhoods would also get some people who were
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