Lillie Carroll Jackson Museum historical marker erected by the City of Baltimore
Appropriate for African-American History month, celebrated annually each February in the United States, the Hayles and Howe US artisans have commenced work on the 1890 Lillie Carroll Jackson house museum in Baltimore, Maryland’s historic Reservoir Hill neighborhood. Born in 1889, Lillie Carroll Jackson began working for civil rights in the late 1920’sand achieved extraordinary success in securing equal rights for African-Americans in Baltimore and Maryland. President of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP from 1935 to 1969, Mrs. Jackson expanded it into the largest chapter in the nation by 1946. Under her leadership and with the help of the NAACP’s Legal Redress Committee, the chapter de-segregated the city’s private and public facilities, worked for equal employment opportunities, secured the election of African-Americans to public office, and removed country-wide the local segregation mandates known as Jim Crow laws. The NAACP chapter also equalized teachers’ salaries throughout Maryland, and in a series of cases from 1935 to 1950, opened the University of Maryland to African-Americans. Mrs. Jackson desired to join races in a single, unified community. As she said, “You can’t have freedom and equality without brotherhood, and you can’t have brotherhood without freedom and equality.”
Lillie Carroll Jackson died in 1975, and in her will declared the house in which she lived for 22 years a civil rights museum. The museum was open to the public until 1990 by which time it had fallen into disrepair. The house museum stood unused until the late 1990s when Morgan State University became owner of the property. Since then plans and funding have been put in place for renovating the house so that it can be re-opened to the public. Hayles and Howe are pleased to be restoring the house’s three floors of historic traditional flat plaster as well as decorative plaster cornice. Rich with history, Mrs. Jackson’s former home will once again be a most significant repository for artifacts and memorabilia from the American civil rights movement.
