C. Bernard Jackson; Creator, Director of the Inner City Cultural Center

C. Bernard Jackson, creator and director of the innovative 30-year-old Inner City Cultural Center, which develops multicultural plays and performers, has died. He was 68.

Jackson died Tuesday at his Los Angeles home near the old Masonic Temple at Pico Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue, which the center bought in 1972.

As early as 1959, Jackson dreamed of multiculturalism in the theater, and as a graduate student at UCLA he co-created a civil rights agitprop musical, “Fly Blackbird,” with a multiethnic cast. When Jackson took the show to New York, it won an Obie as best musical.

A few years later, with the backing of actor Gregory Peck and UCLA neuropsychiatrist J. Alfred Cannon, among others, Jackson tried to found his ideal multicultural center in racially mixed central Los Angeles.

“We couldn’t get anybody interested,” Jackson said. “Then came the Watts uprising [of 1965] and everybody was interested.”

Rising from the ashes of Watts, the creative center set up shop in an old theater and won national prominence in a pilot Educational Laboratory Theater project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Office of Education and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The growing center converted the Masonic building into four theaters, a library, offices and studios, and in 1989 added the Ivar Theater in Hollywood.

As Jackson worked to bridge cultures and communities, he also encouraged the burgeoning careers of several performers--among them Beah Richards, Paul Winfield, Lou Gossett Jr., George Takei, Pat Morita, Bonnie Bedelia, Edward James Olmos and Danny Glover. By presenting their early work, he also boosted the careers of playwrights George C. Wolfe, August Wilson and Luis Valdez.

Jackson encouraged artists in all aspects of theater, staging annual competitions for acting, playwriting, dancing and music. He published books under the Inner City Press banner and created a magazine called Neworld, which chronicled developments in the multicultural arts.

In 1993, a UC Santa Barbara scholar wrote a history of Jackson’s creation, titled “The Autobiography of the ICCC: the Life and Times of America’s First Multicultural Arts Institution.”

Jackson made the complex a cultural center and at the same time an educational and social service organization. And he wanted to make it last.

“One of the major problems in the so-called minority communities has always been the transient nature of institutions, particularly arts institutions,” Jackson told The Times in 1991.

Success did not come easily. Even leaders of his various constituencies were opposed to multicultural approaches and instead favored African American theater or Latino theater.

At a conference on “The State of Black Theater Today” at the Mark Taper Forum last year, Jackson stressed the need for a joint appeal to all races.

His Inner City audiences, he reported, consistently were 30% black and 32% other “people of color.”

“What we’ve tried to do,” he added, “is find a way to that other 38% where all the money is.”

Jackson grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, N.Y., playing chief henchman for his cousin, who headed a tough street gang. Because he already spoke Spanish, he became a sort of diplomat between racial groups.

“Most of my family went to jail and I would have, too, except that somehow I ended up in a high school of music and art,” Jackson said. “That changed my life. . . . It got me out of the neighborhood and it certainly convinced me that art was a valuable tool for changing ways of perceiving the world.”

Jackson served in the armed forces and graduated from Brooklyn College, then moved to UCLA to work on a master’s degree in music.

Among his awards were a Dramalogue award, the LA Weekly Award, and the NAACP Trailblazer and Image awards. The Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights named its annual award for him.

Married only briefly, Jackson had no children and considered his students and the center his family and home. He is survived by an uncle, Obie Brown, an aunt, Augusta Wyatt, and two cousins.

Services are scheduled at 11 a.m. Monday at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center Theater in Little Tokyo, with burial in Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier. A reception is planned for 3 p.m. Monday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St.

Memorial donations ca be sent to the CBJ Endowment Fund at the Ivar Theater, 1605 N. Ivar Ave., Los Angeles 90028.