The Jackson Family

Townsend Dempsey ("T.D.") Jackson worked as a barber and served as a lawman — a deputy sheriff and jailer — in Tulsa. His standing in the community, both as a tradesman and as one of the few Black men with badge authority, gave the Jackson family a fragile and conditional measure of protection in early-twentieth-century Oklahoma. In the days following the June 1921 massacre, when bodies of murdered Greenwood residents were being dumped in the Arkansas River or in mass graves, T.D. Jackson recovered his son's body and rode by horseback for five days to the family burial plot in the Black section of a cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, sparing his son the fate of an unmarked grave. He outlived his son by five years, dying in 1926, and is buried in close proximity to him. His wife, Sophronia, had died in January 1914 — seven years before the massacre — so the burial ride to Guthrie was one he made as a widower.

Sophronia Jackson was the wife of Townsend D. Jackson and the mother of Dr. Andrew C. Jackson. She died in January 1914 — seven years before the massacre — and so did not live to see her son murdered on his own front lawn, or the district her family had helped build burned to the ground. Earlier drafts of this registry listed her only as "Mrs. Talgrie D. Jackson," a name carried forward from a garbled secondary reference, because no primary source available at the time recorded her given name. Family records identify her as Sophronia. Research continues in Memphis and Oklahoma vital records to document her birth, her parents, and the date and place of her marriage to T.D. Jackson.

Julia Althea Jackson, née Ruffin, was born in Calvert County, Texas in 1885. She married Dr. Andrew C. Jackson and was widowed by the massacre at the age of thirty-six. She outlived her husband by half a century, dying in Chicago on June 27, 1971, under the name Julia A. Lester. She is documented in the Tulsa Star newspaper: she departed on an extended trip to Nevada, California, and Oregon, stopping to take in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco — a remarkable journey that speaks to the financial standing and social freedom the Jacksons had built in Greenwood. She was part of Tulsa's Black professional society and is believed to have survived the June 1921 massacre. According to family oral history, as tensions rose Julia pleaded with her husband to leave Tulsa and come with her to Chicago, where they would be safe. Dr. Jackson refused to go — he would not abandon his patients or his community. He stayed, and on June 1, 1921, he was killed on his own front lawn. Julia carried the heartbreak of that refusal for the rest of her life: she had seen the danger, begged him to leave, and lost him because he would not. A Tulsa Star advertisement for 'Jackson's Charlotte Sanitarium' — Dr. Jackson's early radium-bath practice in Claremore, Oklahoma — names the facility 'Charlotte,' which may have honored a family member. The family continues to research Texas, Oklahoma, and Illinois vital records to fully document her birth in Calvert County, her marriage to Dr. Jackson, and her later life in Chicago.

Dr. and Mrs. A. C. Jackson had no children. His line therefore continues through his older sister, Minnie Mae Jackson Guess. Their only living heirs were the Guesses — survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre — and it is through that branch that the family's records, photographs, and oral histories reached the present day. In the present day, the Adams family are the only living heirs to Dr. A. C. Jackson.

Minnie Mae Jackson was Dr. Andrew C. Jackson's older sister. On June 26, 1901, she married Henry Augustus Guess, and through that marriage the Jackson and Guess families became one family in Greenwood — her brother was uncle to her children. Her place in the record matters for a reason beyond genealogy. The Jackson home on Detroit Avenue was looted and burned in 1921, and with it went the photographs and papers that would have documented this family from the inside. The Guess line survived the massacre, and it is largely through her children and grandchildren — who kept their records, gave oral histories, and eventually went to federal court — that Dr. Jackson's family history reached the present at all.

H. Augustus Guess earned a bachelor of laws degree from Howard University in 1903, practiced first in McAlester, and moved to Greenwood in 1913. His own newspaper advertisement — which survives — lists him as a notary public at 216 E. Archer Street, telephone 3337: "Ten Years' Continuous Practice. Civil and Probate Matters a Specialty." He was a founding member of Vernon A.M.E. Church, the only Black-owned structure of that era still standing in Greenwood today. In 1901 he married Minnie Mae Jackson, Dr. Andrew C. Jackson's older sister, making him the doctor's brother-in-law. He was practicing law on Archer Street — in the heart of the district — when the mob came in 1921. Guess survived the massacre. His law office did not. He died in September 1933. The family he left behind did not let the matter rest. His daughter, Lola Wilhelmina Guess Howell, joined the survivors' and descendants' suit against the City of Tulsa, where the pleading recorded plainly that her family's property was destroyed and that the mob had killed her uncle. That uncle was Dr. A. C. Jackson.

The children of Henry Augustus Guess and Minnie Mae Jackson Guess — James Leonidas Guess, Bernice Augustus Guess Griffith, Lola Wilhelmina Guess-Howell (born April 25, 1907), and Townsend Guess — grew up as Dr. A. C. Jackson's nieces and nephews, and were children and young adults in Greenwood when it was destroyed. Because Dr. and Mrs. Jackson had no children of their own, this generation carried his line forward. Lola Wilhelmina Guess-Howell is the best documented of the four, and has her own entry below.

Lola Wilhelmina Guess-Howell was the daughter of Henry Augustus Guess and Minnie Mae Jackson Guess, and the niece of Dr. Andrew C. Jackson. She was fourteen years old when the mob came into Greenwood on June 1, 1921, and she lived to testify about it. The Gilcrease Museum identifies her explicitly as Dr. Jackson's niece, and her oral history is preserved in its Eddie Faye Gates collection. Decades after the massacre, she became a plaintiff in the survivors' and descendants' suit against the City of Tulsa — a pleading that recorded plainly that her family's property was destroyed and that the mob had killed her uncle. She is one of the few people in this record who spoke about the massacre in her own voice, on camera, as a witness to it.