During the 1930s and 1940s, when America had little interest in addressing racial inequality, Luther P. Jackson became a loading voice in the struggle for racial Justice. This biography tells the story of the professor and political activist who cajoled, implored, and lobbied black Virginians to vote - a man who fervently believed that education was at the core of the search for social change. Long before the sit-Ins and freedom marches of the 1960s, Jackson strove to erase the assumptions of racial inferiority that infected African Americans. Understanding that blacks had to change their minds before they could change their world, he set out to make people ""vote conscious."" Descended from ex-slaves, Jackson was born in 1892, attended school in Lexington, Kentucky, and received bachelor's and master's degrees from Fisk University in Tennessee and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Until his untimely death in 1950, he taught at Virginia State University in Petersburg. Convinced that teachers could sow the seeds of racial equality, he mobilized them along with their students and families. By publishing, organizing, and proselytising on behalf of voting, Jackson stimulated a political awakening among black Virginians. As a target for racial recrimination and hostility, Jackson walked a tightrope of protest and accommodation, one that jeopardized his health, family, and career. Yet he was a tenacious optimist with faith in the political process. He took the long view, Michael Dennis notes, recognizing that failed legislative maneuvers did not render conventional institutions useless. Largely forgotten, even in Virginia, until the author resurrected his story, Jackson was involved in almost every important civil rights and liberal initiative in the South in the second quarter of the 20th century. His forceful program of political education laid the ground-work for the full-fledged assault on segregation of the 1950s, when Marlin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement emerged to stand on Jackson's shoulders.
