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Lillie Jackson put her training as a school teacher to use by regularly tutoring her
young daughters. Eventually, though, Lillie and Keiffer Jackson came to feel that
their daughters needed a more settled life with a regular school. Also, a traveling
Black family inevitably suffer racial affront, and the Jackson became increasingly
concerned about the effect of these racial incidents on their children. So, after 6
years together traveling and despite Keiffer's personal passion for the road, they
decided to settle down in Baltimore in 1917. Taking her own mother's advice about
the relationship of property to independence, Lillie Jackson developed a real estate
business that specialized in renting houses and apartments rather than speculative
buying and selling. In her view, this business allowed her to live up to her maxim
"Be your own boss," at the same time as it provided for others. Keiffer Jackson
worked with his wife's real estate business, continued showing religious films
(though limiting his territory to the general vicinity of Baltimore), and began
making his own movies of successful Black enterprises, stressing themes of Black
self-sufficiency.   Shortly after locating in Baltimore Lillie and Keiffer Jackson's last
child and only son, Bowen was born."

The importance of religion did not decline after the family settled in
Baltimore. After a mastoid illness in 1919 that nearly took her life- and a botched
operation that left her face permanently disfigured- Lillie Jackson threw herself
into religious activities with renewed vigor. Sharp Street Methodist Church became
a center of family activities, not just on Sundays, but several days a week. The
Jackson children grew up in a religious family-centered environment that both
Juanita and Virginia remember as being very close and loving. It was also a strict
environment: their parents took a dim view of such activities as dancing and raised
the girls to defend their virtue by not speaking to boys. Juanita Jackson Mitchell
later remembered that she was still scared to talk to a boy in high school. Such
strictness might have created resentment in the children, but, as she put it, their
parents "kept us so busy that there was no real rebellion." Keeping busy was not all