“The most able Negro surgeon in America.”

Andrew Chesteen Jackson was born on February 8, 1879, in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, Townsend Dempsey (“T.D.”) Jackson, worked as a barber and later served as a lawman, a deputy sheriff and jailer in Tulsa. T.D. raised his son in a household that prized public service, literacy, and respectability politics at a time when those virtues offered Black families fragile, conditional protection.

He earned his medical degree at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, one of only two historically Black medical schools in the country, founded in 1876 to train Black physicians at a time when most white medical schools refused them admission. In August 1903, he received his first medical license in Arkansas — issued by a tribal medical board, reflecting the Native-governed licensing authority that operated in Indian Territory before Oklahoma statehood in 1907. By the early 1900s, Dr. Jackson had relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Greenwood district was rising into what Booker T. Washington would call “the Negro Wall Street of America.”

In Tulsa, Dr. Jackson practiced surgery and general medicine, serving both Greenwood's Black community and, quietly, when white doctors would not handle a case, white patients as well. He performed surgery at Frissell Memorial Hospital, a Black-owned-and-operated hospital that served the Greenwood district, and maintained a private office on the corridor of professional offices near Greenwood Avenue.

His skill was nationally recognized. Drs. William and Charles Mayo, co-founders of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. are widely cited as describing him as “the most able Negro surgeon in America.” He participated actively in the National Medical Association (the professional society of Black physicians, formed in 1895 after the American Medical Association refused to admit Black doctors), appearing as a discussant on diagnostic medicine at NMA conferences, including the differential diagnosis of scarlet fever and diphtheria, then leading causes of childhood mortality.

Dr. Jackson practiced medicine inside a system engineered to exclude him. In the early 1900s, the American Medical Association refused to admit Black physicians. The vast majority of the country's medical schools — including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the University of Chicago — did not accept Black applicants. Of more than 150 medical schools operating in the United States at the time, only two trained Black doctors: Meharry Medical College in Nashville (founded 1876) and Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. (founded 1868). Both were built specifically to fill the void left by white institutions' refusal.

The 1910 Flexner Report, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, restructured American medical education — and, intentionally or not, shuttered most of the small, underfunded Black medical schools that had tried to fill the gap. Five of the seven remaining Black medical schools closed within a decade. Meharry and Howard survived. Dr. Jackson graduated from Meharry, one of a tiny national cohort of Black physicians trained under these conditions.

Beyond credentialing, the racial science of the era — phrenology, Social Darwinism, and the pseudoscientific claims of physicians like Samuel Cartwright (who invented fictional diseases to justify slavery) — produced a medical culture in which Black bodies were regarded as experimental subjects rather than patients deserving care. Black physicians navigated this by building their own parallel infrastructure: the National Medical Association (1895), the Journal of the National Medical Association, Freedmen's hospitals, and Greenwood's own Frissell Memorial Hospital, where Dr. Jackson performed surgery.

Anecdotal accounts collected by Greenwood survivors and their descendants describe Dr. Jackson as a physician who treated both Black and white patients — the latter in cases that white doctors refused or could not handle. His willingness to cross the color line in his practice, at personal risk, is part of the oral history preserved by Greenwood community institutions and cited in several secondary sources.

Dr. Jackson was not only a practitioner — he was a contributor to the medical literature of his era. His documented contributions include participation as a discussant at the National Medical Association's annual conferences, where he engaged on the differential diagnosis of infectious disease at a time when scarlet fever and diphtheria were among the leading causes of childhood mortality in the United States.

The Journal of the National Medical Association (Vol. 10, No. 3, p. 142) records Dr. A. C. Jackson of Tulsa, Oklahoma as a discussant — a physician whose clinical opinions were considered peer-level contributions, not mere audience commentary. In this context, “discussant” carried academic weight equivalent to a conference presenter: your name was printed, your reasoning was preserved in the literature, and your expertise was cited by colleagues.

The Mayo Clinic founders' endorsement — describing him as “the most able Negro surgeon in America” — was not a compliment granted lightly. William and Charles Mayo were among the most influential figures in American surgery in the early 20th century. To be named by them, across racial lines, in an era when Black medical achievement was systematically suppressed and uncredited, is a primary-source measure of Dr. Jackson's clinical standing.

At dawn on June 1, 1921, a white mob, including hundreds of civilians who had been deputized at the National Guard armory, crossed the railroad tracks into Greenwood. They burned 35 city blocks, killing an estimated 300 Black residents and leaving 10,000 homeless.

Dr. Jackson, 42 years old^†, walked out of his home with his hands raised, surrendering to armed white men. A white landowner who had come to check on his property recognized him and called out to the men not to hurt the doctor.

They shot him anyway. Witness “Judge” Oliphant later testified that the killer was a young white man in a white shirt and cap, a “citizen,” not a law enforcement officer. The same witness also said that he saw police on the scene, and that the police were “the chief fellows setting fires.”

The men who shot Dr. Jackson looted and burned his home while he lay dying. Other looters in the neighborhood, in the DOJ's own words, “danced a jig and just had a rollicking easy good time.”

He died of his wounds. The historical record generally fixes his death on June 1, 1921, but his sister Minniemaintained that he survived a day or two longer before succumbing to his injuries. After his death, his captors paraded his body through the streets like a trophy.

No one was ever prosecuted. The federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act, had it existed in 1921, could have been used to prosecute the murder, the U.S. Department of Justice cited his case specifically in its January 2025 Review.

In the days after the massacre, the bodies of murdered Greenwood residents were dumped into the Arkansas River or buried in unmarked mass graves. Black-owned funeral homes that might have intervened were under direct threat, authorities warned operators that their buildings would be burned if they attempted to handle the dead with dignity.

T.D. Jackson refused that fate for his son. He recovered Dr. Jackson's body and rode by horseback for five days to a family burial plot in the Black section of a cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he laid his son to rest beside earlier generations of the family.

The grave was lost to time. In 2010, the family relocated the burial site. In 2013, a headstone was finally placed. Dr. Jackson rests in close proximity to his mother and father.

The A. C. Jackson Foundation carries Dr. Jackson's name into the present. The work he was doing on June 1, 1921, extending medical care to a community that the surrounding city refused to serve, training the next generation of Black physicians, and being publicly visible at a time when that visibility cost lives, is the same work this platform exists to continue.

Every section of Dr. AC Jackson Foundation is built in his memory:

• · The Jackson Family, the documented genealogy of Dr. Jackson — known family members, primary-source profiles, and a call for descendants to come forward.
• · Photo & Document Archive, every surviving photograph, newspaper clipping, professional record, and historical document in the collection.
• · Healthcare You're Owed, surfacing the federal, state, and hospital programs (including the 501(r) charity care every nonprofit hospital is required to offer) that most eligible Americans never claim.
• · Wealth & Legacy Academy, financial literacy, entrepreneurship, credit, and real estate, taught through the Greenwood blueprint.
• · Modern Black Wall Street, a directory of Black-owned businesses keeping dollars circulating inside the community.
• · Descendants of Greenwood, reconnecting the families scattered in 1921, including Dr. Jackson's own.
• · The Greenwood Portal, an immersive walkthrough anchored at Dr. Jackson's residence as checkpoint six.