"Lillie May Carroll Jackson"(May 25,1889-July 5,1975)

Pioneer civil rights activist,organizer of the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP.Invariably known as "Dr.Lillie,"Lillie,Ma Jackson,"and the "mother of the civil rights movement,"Lillie May pioneered the tactic of non-violent resistance to racial segregation used by Martin Luther King and others during the early civil rights movement.She was the seventh child Charles Henry Carroll,who claimed descent from Charles Carroll of Carrollton,a signer of the Declaration of Independence)and Amanda Bowen Carroll who said to be the granddaughter of a free-born chief named John Bowen.After completing her public school education and graduating from the Colored High School and Normal School in 1909,Lillie May became a second grade teacher at the old Biddle Street School.She grew up singing soprano in the choir of the Sharp Street Baptist Church.On an occasion when the church was used to show religious motion pictures,she met Methodist evangelist Keiffer Albert Jackson of Carrollton,Mississippi.Promoter of religious films,Keiffer requested that she sing a song entitled "The Holy City."Years later,in 1910,they were married.Once they were married they began to travel together,she sang while the silent pictures were shown and lectured wherever he showed his films.Upon the arrival of their first child,the Jackson family settled in Baltimore.In addition to her oldest child,Virginia,Lillie May gave birth to two other girls,Juanita Elizabeth and Marion,followed by one son,Bowen Keiffer.In 1918 she experience a life changing crisis.Lillie May underwent emergency surgery for mastoiditis.The procedure was so extensive her doctor told her that he "had removed more decayed bone from her head than he thought possible to survive."As a result,the right side of her face was permanently disfigured.Most photos of her henceforth were taken from the left side to conceal her scars.She was literally the mother of the civil rights movement.Her daughter Juanita,the first African American woman to practice law in Maryland,married Clarence Mitchell,Jr.September 7,1938.His brother Parren Mitchell was the first African American congressman from Maryland.Juanita and Clarence had four sons:Clarence Mitchell 3 (a former state senator),Michael Bowen Mitchell,Sr.(former state senator and Baltimore City Council member),Keiffer Jackson Mitchell, M.D.,and Georgia Davis Mitchell.Kieffer son,Kieffer J.Mitchell,Jr.was a Baltimore City Council member and Clarence Mitchell IV was a member of the Maryland State Senate.As a successful owner of rental property,she was free to engage in activities which led to community improvement.She sponsored the City-Wide Young People forum with her daughter Juanita in the leadership in the early 1930s.The forum conducted a campaign to end racial segregation beginning with the grassroots "Buy Where You Can Work"campaign of 1931.Lillie May and Juanita along with the forums'members encouraged African American residents of Baltimore to shop only at businesses where they could work,boycotting businesses with discriminatory hiring practices.The campaign's success led to similar protests in other cities around the country.At one forum gathering,Charles Hamilton Houston,informed the audience "we could sue Jim Crow"out of Maryland.Subsequently,Carl Murphy of the Afro-American newspaper suggested that Lillie join forces with the NAACP.That was the beginning of her thirty-five year tenure with the NAACP,in a role as president of the Baltimore branch in 1935,a position she held until retirement in 1970. 1934 saw the beginning of Thurgood Marshall's employment with the Baltimore NAACP branch.The next year he won a landmark case financed the Baltimore NAACP,Murray v.Pearson,removing the color barrier from admissions to the University of Maryland School of Law.In 1946 she founded the Maryland the state conference of the NAACP and was elected to the National Board of Directors in 1948.In 1938 the NAACP won a historic legal challenge  to racial barriers in publicly funded institutions.A court judgment overturned city policy assuring all Baltimore City school teachers received equal pay.Her 1942 movement to register black voters began a shift in city politics.That same year she was named to Maryland's first interracial Commisson.She was also fundamental to Baltimore being the first Southern city to integrate its schools after the landmark Brown v.Board of Education decision.Baltimore's Fair Employment Practices law was passed in 1958.She was such a force in Maryland and Baltimore politics that Governor Theodore Mckeldin was noted to have said of her,"i' rather have the devil after me than Mrs Jackson.Give her what she wants."Ultimately,her efforts built the Baltimore NAACP intothe largest branch of the organization in the United States with a peak membership of 17,600.She died from a heart attack.