By Barnett Wright | The Birmingham Times
Hezekiah Jackson IV, who served as president of the Metro Birmingham NAACP, Birmingham Citizens Advisory Board, and the Inglenook Neighborhood Association, died on Tuesday. He was 65.
Mr. Jackson, born in Birmingham and a life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, once said he was a part of the city’s Civil Rights movement for as far back as he can remember.
“I came from a time where [volunteering] wasn’t negotiable,” he told The Birmingham Times in a 2016 interview. “People wanted to keep us busy, so they wanted us to work with the church, they wanted us to work with the Civic League, the NAACP; anything that was going to keep us busy,” he recalled.
His death comes less than three months after the passing of his close friend Myrna Carter Jackson, no relation, who served as a first vice president of the local NAACP chapter. Mrs. Jackson died on May 31.
Paulette Roby, Chairwoman of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Activist Committee/Foot Soldiers and longtime friend said Mr. Jackson served as her mentor for many years.
“I’ve known him because he worked with my mother [Mary Porter] with the Birmingham Housing Authority over 37 years [and] I have always had respect for him because of that,” Roby told The Times on Tuesday. “He showed me the way, when it came to the Civil Rights Movement, when it came to politics, when it came to voting and how he cared about equal justice
“… I’m the person I am today in that Foot Soldiers office and chair of that organization because of the love that he had for that organization. I feel so thankful and grateful that I had the fabulous time to be with him on that journey and he really, really meant a lot. He will be missed.”
Born March 6, 1959, Mr. Jackson attended C.W. Hayes High School in Birmingham and studied at Miles College in Fairfield.
In the interview with The Times, he recalled walking door-to-door on behalf of the NAACP, asking residents to sign up and talk about the future of the Black community.
“Older people would tell the stories and we wrote the stories down so that we could tell the stories again like they told it,” he said. “Being in those tight communities, stories would get cross referenced. If we tried to retell the story someone would say ‘that’s not how it happened’ so we would write it down,” he said.
Mr. Jackson would become active in city and neighborhood politics. In 2001, he served as the first president of the newly formed Citizens Advisory Board, which represents Birmingham’s 99 neighborhood associations. In the 2005 Birmingham City Council election, he lost to Maxine Herring Parker in a runoff in District 4. Incumbent Gwen Sykes finished fourth. He once served as Sykes’s administrative assistant.
In 2015 Jackson was involved with efforts to have the 1930s Jefferson County Courthouse murals removed or covered due to their depictions of African American workers, both in slavery and under racist industrial labor conditions.
Beginning late that same year, he was paid by the Oliver Robinson Foundation for “community outreach” efforts relating to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s work to test soils in and around the 35th Avenue Superfund Site. State Representative Oliver Robinson later pleaded guilty to accepting bribes to oppose the EPA on behalf of the Drummond Corporation and its attorneys, Balch & Bingham.
During an August 2018 interview on WJLD’s Gary Richardson Show, Mr. Jackson, who was not charged and denied wrongdoing, said he was “duped”. “Of course, I was [duped]—and that very seldom happens,” he told Richardson.
The NAACP suspended Mr. Jackson and he was replaced by Dorothea Crosby as president in late 2018.
But Jackson told Richardson he was used to challenges throughout his life. “I’m always being approached by people in the human rights community about doing documentaries about me because they ask, ‘Wow, how have you survived all 60 years being openly gay? No one has killed you, and … you’ve been in all these treacherous waters like politics.”
Services will be held Saturday, August 10, 2024, at Sardis Baptist Church, 1615 4th Ct. West Birmingham AL 35208 at 12:30 p.m. and viewing will be held Friday, August 9, 2024, at 45th Street Baptist Church, 7600 Division Ave. 35206.
