Lillie May Carroll Jackson, a pivotal civil rights leader in Baltimore, served as president of the city’s NAACP chapter for 35 years, earning the title “Mother of Freedom” for her pioneering non-violent resistance tactics that shaped the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Born on May 25, 1889, to Methodist minister Charles Henry Carroll and Amanda Bowen Carroll, Jackson grew up in Baltimore’s Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church. She graduated from Colored High and Training School (now Frederick Douglass High School) in 1908 and taught second grade at Biddle Street School. In 1910, she married Keiffer Albert Jackson, a Methodist evangelist. The couple toured nationally, presenting religious lectures and films, before settling in Baltimore to raise their three daughters, Virginia, Juanita, and Marion, and son, Bowen.
A life-altering emergency surgery for mastoiditis in 1918 left Jackson’s face disfigured, but deepened her commitment to service. Motivated by her daughters’ rejection from the Maryland Institute and the University of Maryland due to racial discrimination, Jackson co-founded the City-Wide Young People’s Forum with her daughter, Juanita, in 1931. Their “Buy Where You Can Work” campaign urged African Americans to patronize only businesses that hired Black employees, boosting community awareness and revitalizing the Baltimore NAACP chapter.
In 1935, Jackson became president of the Baltimore NAACP, growing its membership to 17,600, one of the largest in the nation. She also led the Maryland state NAACP conference, established chapters statewide, and joined the NAACP National Board of Directors in 1948. Her activism included boycotts against segregated businesses, organizing civil service exam preparation for Black individuals, and fundraising for legal challenges that desegregated the University of Maryland School of Law and secured fair employment and public accommodations laws in Baltimore. In 1958, Morgan State University awarded her an honorary doctorate for her contributions.
Jackson died of a heart attack on July 5, 1975, at age 86. Before her death, she willed her home to be transformed into the Lillie Carroll Jackson Museum, which opened in 1978 as Baltimore’s first privately owned museum honoring a Black woman, later managed by Morgan State University. She was posthumously inducted into the Maryland Hall of Fame in 1986 and named “Marylander of the Century” by the Baltimore Sun in 1999. In 2015, the Lillie May Carroll Jackson Charter School opened to serve girls in grades 5–8.