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study, worship, and work, for there were family recreational activities such as
almost yearly vacations at Atlantic City.
During the Jackson sisters' childhood, neither of their parents were direct
participants in the Black freedom movement, although they moved in the same
social and religious circles as many of the leading movement activists of the era.
Ullie Jackson, for example, was a schoolmate of Carl Murphy's, graduating from
Colored High and Training School a year after he did; the acquaintance seems to
have been renewed in the 1920s. Keiffer had joined the NAACP in the early 'teens,
prior to settling in Baltimore, but was apparently little active for his children only
learned of this when a membership card was found in his effects after his death in
1970. The lack of freedom movement involvement by the Jacksons aside, however,
ethnic pride and consciousness of racial discrimination were an important pan of
the family culture and tradition; family stories and parental attitudes, rather than
protest activities, were most important in instilling a positive sense of African
American identity. In 1915, in an incident remembered by his children six decades
later, Keiffer Jackson wrote to protest the Jim-Crow accommodations they
encountered on a railroad. Moreover, Keiffer was light-skinned and was often
mistaken for white, but, unlike some of his relatives, adamantly refused to attempt
to pass, a point of family pride. And Lillie Jackson always maintained that their
experiences on the road, often related to Keiffer's light complexion, confirmed the
two of them in their hatred of racism; as Juanita Jackson Mitchell has recalled:
My mother used to tell the story that my father always carried his marriage
license, because when they got into a town, they would look for the Black
churches and Black pastors and inquire about a place to stay. Before the
children came, my mother said, the sheriff would take him aside and say,
•Jackson'—because he did look like a white man- 'Jackson, we don't allow
white men to associate with colored women in the day time.' And he would
pull out his marriage license and show that she was his wife.11
Additionally, Keiffer Jackson's stories of the vicious racism he encountered
as a child in Mississippi did much to impress his children with the horrors of racism.
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