Granddaughter Keeps Memory of Pioneering Black Journalist Vivid

The house stands much as her grandmother left it when she died in 1979, except for the large sign over the front porch reading “FAY M. JACKSON.”

Dale Lya Pierson put the sign up about four years ago, even though the rambling, 75-year-old house on Van Ness Avenue, south of Hancock Park, is not a museum or open to the public. She did it, Pierson said, to keep her grandmother’s memory alive.

Fay M. Jackson was a pioneering black journalist in Los Angeles. She founded the first black news magazine on the West Coast in the late 1920s, and in the 1930s became the first black Hollywood correspondent for the Associated Negro Press, which served 216 newspapers throughout the country.

Jackson was a black journalist in an era when Los Angeles had restrictive housing covenants and rules that allowed blacks to swim at public pools only once a week. But it was also a time when black culture thrived in the city, particularly evident in the businesses, clubs, restaurants and theaters on Central Avenue.

Saw It All, Saved It All

Jackson observed it all, wrote about it and saved nearly every photograph, article, telegram, script and playbill.

Pierson doesn’t remember much talk when she was young about what “Mother Dear”--as everyone called Jackson--had accomplished in her youth. But after Jackson died, it became “my mission,” she said, to organize Jackson’s voluminous papers on black Los Angeles history.

The task took her all over the big wood-frame house. “There were boxes and trunks in the basement, there were filing cabinets in the garage, filing cabinets in the back house,” said Pierson, 43, an event coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Los Angeles.

Cecil Ferguson, a curator who put together parts of the collection for an exhibit at the city’s William Grant Still Community Arts Center three years ago, says the photographs and written material in the Jackson collection are a “great resource,” particularly that about blacks and the film industry.

“Many of the early black programs were unrecorded,” he said, “and here was a woman who had the foresight to leave boxes, organized and marked, and files on blacks like Paul Robeson, Clarence Muse and Rex Ingram.”

When Jackson published her magazine, Flash, in 1928 and 1929, Pierson said, she wrote extensively about the inequities faced by black people, including the poor wages paid black actors. Flash carried articles such as “The Dilemma of the Negro Actor,” about the stereotype roles assigned blacks by Hollywood studios, and “The Color Fad,” about prominent whites who crowded into local black night clubs.

As a Hollywood correspondent for the Associated Negro Press, Jackson chronicled the careers of black performers, and curator Ferguson noted she was one of very few blacks who had studio credentials, “where she could come and go on the set.”

Copies of Flash from Pierson’s collection are included in the “Black Angelenos” exhibit currently at the California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park, and Jackson herself was featured there in an earlier exhibit about local black achievers called “Positive Images.”

“She was very candid, didn’t bite her tongue,” Pierson said recently while going through boxes in one crowded room of the house. When Jackson was sent to London in 1937 by the Associated Negro Press to cover the coronation of King George VI with a “black slant,” she sent back interviews with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, actor Robeson and Josephine Baker. But that wasn’t all she filed.

“She was looking at all the rubies and diamonds” on members of the royal family, Pierson said, “and talked about them coming from the mines of South Africa where natives ‘scratch for basic needs in housing, employment and human dignity.’ She was critical of everything that was going on and noted that these rewards, everything the empire had, was the result of colonialism.”

Pierson found one Associated Negro Press clipping that showed Jackson made front-page news herself at that time, with a headline reading: “Colored Girl Triumphs in Europe.”

Jackson was born in Dallas in 1902 and came to Los Angeles in 1918, Pierson said. She graduated from Los Angeles Polytechnic High School in 1922 and then went to USC, where she studied journalism. She married a black medical student, John Robinson, whom she later divorced.

Short-Lived Publications

In the 1930s, Jackson also helped found a black women’s magazine geared to helping women find jobs, and started the California News, a weekly newspaper, in the 1940s. Her publishing ventures were short-lived, Pierson said, because Jackson found it hard to get financial backing and because “she had a disdain for money.”

The house on Van Ness originally belonged to Jackson’s sister, Annie, Pierson said, whom she described as “blonde, very fair, who passed for white.” She was a successful beautician, Pierson noted. “She was the money-maker of the family. That’s how we survived.” In an ironic view of how Jackson’s own family lived and coped with racism, Pierson added: “All my older cousins remember when going to see Annie at her job they’d have to go round the back door and call her Miss Lillian.” Annie left the house to Jackson when she died.

Pierson, also known by the single name Dalili, grew up at the house with her mother, who was Los Angeles-area director of the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission and died just two weeks before Jackson herself, in a 1979 plane crash.

Pierson still lives at the home with her husband, a doctoral candidate in African literature. “I need the house for my spiritual well-being,” she said, although she added that she rents out four second-floor bedrooms to help make ends meet.

Last year she successfully led a fight in her neighborhood against a Los Angeles Unified School District plan to condemn the houses on her side of Van Ness for a new junior high school.

Pierson hopes to see the Jackson collection go to a university or a museum, “to see this displayed for public education,” she said. “My own belief is that our major problem as a black people in America is the lack of knowledge of our own culture and history. If we had more (of a) grasp of how long the struggle has been going on we would not have these youths coming up with nothing behind them.”

One of her most treasured pieces from the collection, Pierson said, is a letter she found after her grandmother died. It had been written in 1925 by Jackson, then pregnant, to her unborn daughter.

“I want you to be a noble character--man or women,” Jackson wrote. “I want you to love your race--to glorify it and above all be a credit to it.”