Giles B. Jackson

Portrait Courtesy of Meredith Carrington and Barry O'Keefe

GILES B. JACKSON WALK
Clay Street from 2nd Street to 3rd Street

Giles Beecher Jackson was born enslaved on September 10, 1853 in Goochland County to James and Hulda Jackson. In 1874, he married Sarah Wallace before studying law and becoming the first Black attorney certified to practice law before the Virginia Supreme Court in 1887. In 1900, he was appointed as vice president of the National Negro Business League by Booker T. Washington. In 1901, as part of the inauguration festivities, President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned him as an honorary colonel of the Third Civic Division, which was a Black cavalry unit. In 1902, he formed the Negro Development and Exposition Company of the United States of America, which organized the Negro Building at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition in 1907 - and the following year, he published the Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States. In 1914, he was appointed as chief of the Negro Division of the U.S. Employment Service. In 1920, he began to petition the federal government to establish a Negro Industrial Commission, but it had not been established at the time of his death on August 13, 1924. His remains were laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery.