[AKA2D '91]

UC honors pioneering African American educator
Building named for teacher, donor Jackson

Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday,
August 31, 2004


She was gifted, no doubt about that.

She could read by age 3, an impressive feat for the
youngest of eight black children whose father had been
a slave and who lived in Mississippi, in the heart of
the Jim Crow South.

Lincoln had been dead but 40 years, women couldn't
vote and many blacks lived in fear of lynching. Little
Ida Louise Jackson followed her older brothers to
school and taught other children to read.

Everyone said she was unusually bright, but who would
have predicted that one day, eight years after her
death at age 93 in Oakland, she would outshine even
the midday August sun?

That's what seemed to happen at an emotional ceremony
Monday when the Ida Louise Jackson Graduate House
became the first building at UC Berkeley to be named
after an African American woman.

A harsh noontime sun beat down on the podium and many
of the chairs set up in the courtyard of the newly
christened Jackson House -- a recently built graduate
student dorm at College and Durant avenues. But the
hot glare seemed eclipsed by the glowing tribute for a
woman who broke through barriers of injustice, paved
roads to advanced education for African Americans and
inspired generations of others with her devotion.

"It's awesome. Thank you for this wonderful tribute,
this incredible tribute," exclaimed Inez Dones, a
friend of Jackson's and trustee of the annual
fellowship that Jackson endowed for African American
doctoral students at Berkeley.

"We hope that as we unveil her name, it will become a
beacon of light, a beacon of inspiration," Dones said.


Jackson was one of only 17 black students in 1920 when
she enrolled at UC Berkeley, where she founded the Rho
chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first African
American sorority at Cal. She later served as the
sorority's national president.

"She's quite well known in Berkeley because of her
trust and her fellowship," said Mary Ann Mason, dean
of Cal's graduate division.

"She became the first African American woman in the
state of California to receive a teaching credential,
which she did in 1924," Mason said. "And then she went
on to become the first African American of either
gender to teach in the Oakland public schools."

Her assignment in Oakland, where she taught for 15
years at Prescott Intermediate School, "was met with
protests," said Barbara Phillips, also a former
national president of Alpha Kappa Alpha, who came from
North Carolina for Monday's ceremony.

It would be 13 years before Oakland hired another
black teacher, Beth Wilson, whose daughter, Diane
Wilson-Thomas, was at the dorm's christening. "She and
my mom had great energy," Wilson-Thomas recalled
before the ceremony.

"She dedicated her life to education," Mason told the
gathering. In 1933, Jackson started the Summer School
for Rural Teachers in Mississippi.

The following year, she established the Mississippi
Health Project, which brought nurses and doctors to
poverty-ridden communities. Her contributions were
recognized the same year by then-President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who invited her to the White House for the
Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

She served a short term as dean of women at Tuskegee
Institute and returned to Oakland, where she taught at
McClymonds High until retiring in 1953.

She spent 17 years managing the family sheep ranch in
Mendocino County and then gave the 320-acre spread to
UC, providing the means to establish her fellowship.
It offers an African American Ph.D. student $15,000
for one year plus an additional $2,000 if the
dissertation is finished by May of that year.

"It's been wonderful to have a fellowship named for
Ida Louise Jackson," said last year's recipient,
Kathleen Sterling, who attended Monday's ceremony and
has been researching 13,000-year-old stone tools in
caves in the Pyrenees.

As the event drew to a close, about 50 Alpha Kappa
Alpha members of all ages stood in a circle, held
hands and sang their sorority hymn.

The closing act came when a banner was lifted from
Jackson's name on the front of the building.

"Oh, that's marvelous!" said Christine Hill, president
of a foundation that gives scholarships in Jackson's
name to a half-dozen graduating high school seniors in
the Bay Area each year.

"Oh, how beautiful," added Hill, who wore Jackson's
special sorority pin marking 50 years of membership.