The Jackson family project 2025

If you had walked into the gymnasium at Pratt Elementary School in Prospect Park on the afternoon of Friday, May 9,  2025, you would have seen three older African Americans seated in chairs, addressing a student assembly. If you had stayed a few minutes longer, you would have realized that the assembly was to honor their grandparents and parents, Jackson family members whose presence in Prospect Park more than 100 years ago was history-making.

 

In 1908, Madison and Amy Jackson built a handsome brick house on Franklin Avenue for their family. Prospect Park probably didn’t look all that different then: pleasant homes on winding, tree-lined streets in close proximity to the University of Minnesota and other amenities. 

The Jacksons were the first African American family to integrate the all-white neighborhood – and their three young daughters, Marvel, Helen, and Zelma, would be the first African American children to attend Pratt Elementary School just a few blocks away. 

In 1909, the Jackson family was met by groups of neighbors demonstrating against them; asking them to leave the neighborhood because of their race. In one exchange, Madison Jackson was told that the kids nearby wouldn’t want to play with his children. He did not strike back in anger – but chose instead to build a playground in his backyard. As he had guessed, children flocked to play there. 

The Jacksons continued to live in Prospect Park for another 20 years. When Madison died of cancer, many of the same neighbors who had stood in their front yard years before in protest came to mourn his passing. 

 

The neighborhood Prospect Park Association (PPA) started what they call the Jackson Family Project in 2019, after learning about the family in a TPT documentary called “Jim Crow of the North.” 

Jerry Stein is a lifelong Prospect Park resident and the Jackson Family Project’s co-chair. He said, “This project matters because the neighborhood is coming to terms with a despicable chapter in its history. We can’t change what happened, but we can honor the Jacksons for their resilience, and for their strength. Children and adults are learning from this that we have a choice in how we respond. Through these three little girls who lived in the neighborhood, the issues of racism and discrimination are immediate and real.” 

Stein continued, “All three daughters graduated from local high schools, and attended the University of Minnesota, at a time when very few young people went on to college. They did not see themselves as victims.”  

The Minneapolis Public School Board voted in 2022 to dedicate the Pratt playground to the Jackson family. A St. Paul architecture firm, 4RM+ULA, created the original design. Funds to renovate the new playground were appropriated in 2024.  Recreating the playground at the school integrated by the Jackson sisters has a poignancy to it, all these years after their father built the first neighborhood playground in their own backyard. 

 

Kiah Young-Burns, a first-grade teacher at Pratt Elementary School, started incorporating the Jackson family into her curriculum in 2021. Young-Burns used the former residents as a lens through which her students learned about broader historical topics like housing discrimination, the Harlem Renaissance, and civil rights. Other Pratt teachers began incorporating Young-Burns’ curriculum into their classrooms in 2023. 

Among the guests in attendance at the May 9 event at Pratt were Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Lisa Sayles-Adams, Minneapolis School Board Members Kim Ellison and Abdul Abdi, and Ward 2 Minneapolis City Council member Robin Wosley. 

 

“In addition to learning by the students at Pratt,” Stein said, “we always knew there needed to be an effort to help the adults learn things, too. We kicked off that aspect of the project this year with  community members reading, ‘A Man’s Life: the Autobiography of Roger Wilkins’. Roger Wilkins is the son of Helen Jackson, and this is really some book. For our program next year, we have more ideas for things we’d like to offer adult learners.”

On May 8, community members gathered at the Pillars of Prospect Park to discuss the book. About 60 people turned up for the event, facilitated by Roger Wilkins’ brother-in-law Melvin Peters, a retired professor of African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University. 

The Jackson Family Project is funded by the Pratt Parent Teacher Organization, the Prospect Park Association, the University of Minnesota Good Neighbor Fund, the Prospect Park Coop Legacy Fund, the City of Minneapolis Neighborhood Community Relations, and individual gifts. To learn more about this project visit: www.jacksonfamilyproject.org.