Jane Jackson Memorial

Fiery Activist Jane Jackson
to be Remembered

With great sadness but with loving joy in the knowledge her tireless campaigns for civil rights and the disabled helped build a better world, a memorial service for Jane Jackson will be held
on Saturday, November 17, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. at St. James Episcopal Church in Oakland. Ms. Jackson died last September during a visit to Cuba.

She was friend equally of powerful leaders and powerless victims, recalled her pastor, John Rawlinson. “Jane was unforgettable, traveling everywhere in her wheelchair covered with decals and slogans,” he said. “The pledge to ‘go any distance, bear any burden, fight any foe in the cause of freedom’ wasn’t for her just a line in one of John F. Kennedy’s speeches,” he added. “Jane lived those words – every syllable.”

Father Rawlinson explained that Ms. Jackson became an associate of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the struggle to end the apartheid system of racial discrimination in South Africa. At home, she led the drive to establish the sister city relationship between Oakland and Santiago, Cuba, working with then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown and Cuba's President Fidel Castro.

She served on the City of Oakland's Disability Commission. She was a member of the board of directors of Pacifica, the national public radio network which operates KPFA - FM in Berkeley. For years, she was a civil rights activist and voter registration worker in the Bay Area and the
southern U.S.

Ms. Jackson is survived by her two daughters and her grandchildren. A third, adopted daughter resides in Cuba.

The public is welcome to attend the service, Father Rawlinson said. St. James is located 10 blocks east of Lake Merritt, at the southeast corner of 12th Avenue and Foothill Boulevard. The church was founded in 1860. A tradition of community involvement dates from the founders’ offer of free pews to all worshipers, contrary to charging pew rental fees, at the time a customary practice which excluded many Christians from church membership.

Ample free parking is available on site.

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