From the Museum website:
History of the Lillie May Carroll Jackson Museum
"The spark that led to Lillie May Carroll Jackson's lifelong career in civil rights occurred in the 1920s when her daughters, Virginia and Juanita, were refused admission to the Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of Maryland, respectively. She enrolled Virginia in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Juanita in Morgan College, then later in the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1933, persuaded by Carl Murphy, President/Publisher of the Afro-American Newspaper, Lillie Jackson agreed to serve as chairperson of the reorganization committee of the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP. After which, she was elected president of the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP. Under her leadership, the NAACP membership rose from less than 200 in 1935 to over 25,000 by 1946. She remained president until 1970.
With the help of Carl Murphy, Chairman of the NAACP's Legal Redress Committee, the chapter succeeded in desegregating many private and public facilities, achieving equal employment for many citizens, assisted in the election of African Americans to public office, secured appointments of African Americans to leadership positions, revamped discriminatory laws, and desegregated public schools and institutions of higher education.
Dr. Jackson willed her home to Virginia Jackson-Kiah, her eldest daughter. She is credited with developing the home into a museum. It opened in 1978, as Baltimore's first privately owned museum honoring an African American woman.
In 1986, Dr. Jackson was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. The Friends of the Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum organized a tribute to commemorate the work of Dr. Jackson on May 25, 2002. Martin O'Malley, former Mayor of Baltimore, issued a proclamation designating May 25th as Lillie Carroll Jackson Day in Baltimore.
The Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum is now included in Morgan State University's Office of Museums. This is very fitting, in that Lillie Carroll Jackson received an honorary doctorate from Morgan State University. Morgan is the only institution of higher education in the region that has a Civil Rights Museum.
In 2012, Morgan State University completed a beautiful restoration of Jackson’s spacious Bolton Hill home on Eutaw Place and on June 11, 2016, the grand re-opening of the Lillie May Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum was a huge success."
(
visit link)
TEXT OF HISTORICAL MARKER MOUNTED ON THE EXTERIOR OF THE BUILDING
Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum-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 lynching's, 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--
Group that erected the marker: Sponsor-Rededicated 2015-Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Mayor Erected 2015 by City of Baltimore.