I went to Milwaukee Trade and Technical High School and during freshman year they had us take an exploratory shop class to decide the trade we wanted to spend the next three years learning.
Reggie Jackson | Milwaukee, WI
They had an electronics shop, plumbing shop, carpentry shop, all these different shops. I didn’t know which one I wanted to do. My guidance counselor said, ‘Reggie, you’re doing really well in school. Maybe you should do the pre-engineering track. It includes electronics and a variety of things that will lead you to become an electrical engineer.’ So I said, ‘Okay, that sounds good.’ I was thirteen years old. I didn’t know anything, so I listened to my guidance counselor and got on the electronics track.
While I was in high school I joined the Air Force Junior ROTC and really loved it. My family has a long track record of serving in the military. My father, great-grandfather, and all five of my mother’s uncles served. I did some research this year and found out that my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather served in the Union Army’s Colored Troops unit during the Civil War. I found out the battles that he served in and that he was 53 years old when he enlisted in the Union Army.
It must be in my blood because as a kid I was just crazy about the military. When I was in third grade, my best friend and I knew where every U.S. Marine Corps base was in the U.S. We used to walk around singing the Marine Corps hymn.
I thought I had it figured out when I was a kid, but I look back on it and think that I didn’t really know what I was doing at seventeen. After I took my SAT exams, I got letters after letters from colleges. But I was also recruited to go into the Navy as an officer. So instead of applying to college, I signed up for a Navy ROTC scholarship. I filled out the application and got the letters of recommendation. But right before Christmas of my senior year, I found out that the recruiter hadn’t turned in my application and it was past the deadline. I was told I would have to wait another year to reapply for the scholarship. I was disappointed because I really wanted to join the Navy, go to college, and become an electrical engineer. They gave me the option of going on active duty through the nuclear power program, which was an exclusive program. Only a very small percentage of people that go into the Navy are even eligible for this program. I was trained as an electrician, to work on submarines, air carriers, or any type of nuke ship. After my six years in the Navy, I worked as an electrician. It kept me gainfully employed for over 20 years, but it wasn’t something I was very passionate about.
The first time I visited the Black Holocaust Museum was in 1994. I wanted to be a history teacher and was at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I was driving down North Avenue and saw the museum and thought, ‘Wow, that seems like an interesting place.’ So I pulled over and rang the doorbell. Dr. Cameron opened the door, invited me in and told me to take a look around. He said, ‘Once you’re done taking a look around, come over and we’ll sit and we’ll talk for a while.’ So I spent some time looking at some of the things he had in the museum. He had a bunch of pamphlets that he had written that he was selling for like fifteen cents or something, ridiculously low. I was studying to be a history teacher and had a strong interest in Black history, but there were things he had in the museum that I had never seen before. I had not seen lynching images in the detail that he had; these were stories I had never heard before. And then he told me that in 1930 he had survived a lynching. So I sat down with him and we had a fascinating four-hour conversation. He told me in great detail his story of surviving a lynching, and why he started the museum. I thought to myself, ‘This is a living lynching survivor. There can’t be very many lynching survivors.’ I wondered about this man who started a museum when he was 74 years old. Who does something like that at the age of 74? He’s supposed to be basking in the glow of his retirement. Dr. Cameron was the type of person that when you sat down and talked with him and listened to him, he inspired you to do more with your life. I knew then I wanted to be involved.
Dr. Cameron became my friend and mentor. He taught me how to research the history of our confusing nation. He loved the law, especially the Constitution. His vision was of a nation that would live up to the ideals of the founding fathers and become a nation of people that see themselves as one single and sacred nationality. From my first conversation with Dr. Cameron, I knew I wanted to be involved with the Black Holocaust Museum and teach history. I have taken to this work with a ferocity that matches nothing I’ve ever done before in my life.
In the summer of 2002, I had some time off from work and I came back to the Black Holocaust Museum to volunteer. This was eight years after I first met Dr. Cameron.
He wasn’t really around the museum as much at that time; he had hired staff and refurbished the museum. I asked the staff what kind of help they needed and they told me, ‘We need griots.’ I said, ‘What’s a griot?’ They explained to me that griot means an oral historian, the keepers of the history of a community. It is a French word used in the Western part of the French-speaking nations in western Africa. Griot is an old profession in Africa.
So I went into the griot training program and at the end of the week, they said, ‘OK Reggie. You’re on your own.’ By the end of the first week, I was giving tours. My job had gone through some challenges with the recession after the 9/11 attacks. I was working as an electrician while I attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to study to be a history teacher. My job offered everybody voluntary time off for five weeks, so I took the time. By the end of those weeks, I was entrenched at the museum. I loved it. I became the Saturday griot at the museum and gave tours there almost every Saturday for years.
Along the way, I became close friends with Dr. Cameron, the museum’s founder, and his wife He became my mentor, and he treated me as a son. My relationship with him was a turning point in my life. It put me on the path to take the history that I knew and was studying and gave me a platform to talk about it.
Two years after Dr. Cameron passed away in 2008, the museum closed due to financial difficulties. A year later, his son Virgil came to me about joining a group of volunteers who were trying to figure out how to do the museum’s work without a building. I wanted to continue carrying forward his work. With the museum temporarily closed, we came up with the idea of doing an online museum, a ‘museum beyond walls,’ which we launched on Dr. Cameron’s birthday, February 25, 2012. We started to do a lot of community programs, which reinvigorated the community’s interest in the museum. One of the public presentations I lead is called ‘Hidden From History.’ We talk about different events in our history that were hidden from us, things that weren’t taught in schools. I also lead facilitated dialogues. We have people read a specific book or specific topic, and we have people come in and give their thoughts in small groups. I met Dr. Fran Kaplan, a Milwaukee educator, when she interviewed me for a film about Dr. Cameron, and together we developed a program that we call ‘griot to go.’ I joked with people that it was really ‘Reggie to go’ because I was the only griot that was doing it.
Around that time I learned about Wisconsin Humanities and was invited to join the board. I think that the humanities are a really important part of our lived experience. It is an important part of what makes our lives better. Many of the projects that Wisconsin Humanities funds are related to Wisconsin history, and I wanted to learn more about Wisconsin history. Being on the board was also an opportunity for me to learn about places around the state of Wisconsin since I hadn’t traveled around Wisconsin very much.
I co-founded Nurturing Diversity Partners in 2017 with Dr. Kaplan. Our goal was to have people come together for conversations about things we don’t normally talk about in this country. And the fact that Fran and I are from different generations, racial groups and backgrounds shows that you can do this work across such boundaries.
Our first client was a group of folks in La Crosse. They were starting an organization called Creating a Healthier Multicultural Community.It was a group of grassroots folks from a variety of different parts of the community that wanted to find a way to bring people together to talk about some of the racial challenges they were having. They wanted community leaders to have a space to have conversations about some things they had never talked about together before. It was fascinating to have people come in and sit together at small tables, get to know each other, talk about some of these challenging issues, and then begin to build capacity to work together.
Dr. Cameron had such a big impact on me. He inspired so many people to do more with their lives. I have done this work in fifty different communities around the state. I’ve worked with different faith-based organizations, schools, and school districts. I think I’ve spoken to just about every college and university in the state of Wisconsin. I have taken a very weird path to get to where I am today—from the Navy to a career as an electrician to a teacher to an oral historian. It has been a fascinating journey for me to continue this work that for me started in 1994 when I rang the doorbell on the new Black Holocaust Museum and Dr. Cameron opened the door, invited me in, and told me to take a look around.
Reggie Jackson’s story was produced by Jen Rubin. You can learn more about the Black Holocaust Museum here.
Reggie is a former board member of Wisconsin Humanities. His story is part of our 2022 series celebrating Wisconsin Humanities’ 50th anniversary.
In this talk, Reggie Jackson shares what he has learned about dealing with anger in a positive way from his mentor, Dr. James Cameron, the only known lynching survivor and founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum.
