The mural above was completed in August 2022, for a man who completed the work all around him by 1972 ... fifty years out, and the legacy of pastor and civil rights leader Rev. Dr. D. Manning Jackson still is going strong even now, still housing low-income seniors in a city and neighborhood that has changed dramatically! I was attending the dedication ceremony, and the above is my picture of the mural. I got into more of the history in my video for my YouTube audience back then.
Now, I wasn't born in 1972, and in fact, Rev. Jackson would pass away in 1976, five years before I was born. By the time I remember anything, humans were humaning and fighting over control of his legacy ... but his widow Mrs. Jackson and those who worked with her and Rev. Jackson were simply not having the foolishness, and fought off the people who would have stolen it all.
I remember those fights ... I remember being locked out of the church where there was a meeting, and thus, it being a warm summer night, meeting in the nearby police parking lot under the stars... Venus was in the sky, and that began my love of astronomy and the outdoors in the middle of the city. I was perhaps four or five years old, but I still remember the twilight colors, and that huge light of Venus, the Evening Star.
Time passed, but only a little bit ... Mrs. Jackson saw something in me at age 9, and so selected me to as secretary of the Sunday School class I was in. I had the math skills to do division and percentages already, and she taught me how to do basic clerical work -- making records of attendance, who brought their offerings, their Bibles, and the percentages of the total. Later, I would assist her in keeping the youth programs her husband founded together -- making agendas, programs, themes, learning all of the music and arranging pieces, and doing public speaking, week after week, month after month, year after year.
One of the reasons that you can find me around Hive doing so many different things consistently and well is because of the years of mentorship from Mrs. Jackson -- the Jackson Standard still stands twelve stories high in the middle of San Francisco!
But of course, Mrs. Jackson did not know that Hive was coming. She was looking two generations down, having no grandchildren of her own, but I was the grandchild of her best friend, my grandmother ... she knew the day was passing in which she would be able to fight to make sure her husband's work for the people continued, and she even looked past my mother's generation in the fight as well.
Speaking of Thursdays: Rev. Jackson had established board meetings for the El Bethel Arms and Terrace on Thursdays, and that had been going on for years before I was born. Four years before Mrs. Jackson's death, the board needed a new secretary in a time when there was a new fight going on. It just seems that there are so many people out there who think poor people don't need to have anything, and that all that we put together so we can live in dignity and peace is just there to be picked up and dispersed by them to their already-rich friends.
The human capacity for greed is forever a surprise to me, but being raised as I was by and around people who won the fight in my childhood, I was not going to just stand by idle. Indeed, Mrs. Jackson did pick the right nine-year-old -- I joined the board all those years later. I put a whole lot of Thursdays into that -- oh, the memories, good, bad, and ugly -- but we won again!
Meanwhile, San Francisco had changed greatly in the years since Rev. Jackson lived and worked ... civil rights was succeeded by gentrification, the purposeful removal of the African American population in the Western Addition. In reality, Rev. Jackson had done what he did when he did partially to oppose that ... which is another reason why his memory had been pretty much erased from the city, despite his massive accomplishment with his church in the center of it. So, we decided to put his image and his story prominently where it belongs ... when you enter the El Bethel Arms community hall, there the mural sits, so everyone who passes by or enters can learn, and some still living from that time can remember. At night, it is lit, and is one of the few things visible all night long in that area.
(We also would not let San Francisco keep playing dumb -- we went to the state of California to let it be known, "You better RECOGNIZE!" It worked!)
On the mural, Rev. Jackson's favorite quote is there: Luke 22:27, in which the Lord Jesus Christ said to His own disciples, "I am among you as one that serveth." In context, we know the Lord Jesus settled a quarrel between His disciples about which of them was the greatest by reminding them of Who He was, but serving all of them, about to do the menial task of washing their feet (seen in John 13), and also to tell them: "The greatest among you shall be the servant of all."
Rev. Jackson is still serving the center of San Francisco to this day with critical low-income senior housing and additional programs extending his legacy from his surviving church, El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, and is the most influential African American pastor for community good in the second half of the 20th and first quarter of the 21st century in San Francisco.
I missed the first part of all that, but because Rev. Jackson's widow went looking for and found a granddaughter-in-service for herself and her husband, I remain in the church and wider beloved community they helped to preserve, as one who serves.
In loving memory: Rev. Dr. D. Manning Jackson, 1906-1976, and my first mentor, Mrs. Minnie Ruth Jackson, 1915-2018