Mannie Jackson says he wants “to be involved in a movement that allows good people not to do bad things.”
“I’m a multimillionaire and I still fear being stopped by the police,” Jackson told Diverse following recognition in January from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for exemplifying the ideals of college sports. “Of all people, why should I be afraid? But, I still fear that. Now, the police ought to know this and they ought to feel this, and at some point we’re going to be able to engage in some dialogue that erases this fear.”
With such issues in mind, the former Harlem Globetrotter player and team owner has been the driving force in the creation of the Mannie Jackson Center for the Humanities (MJCH) that is scheduled to open in late 2015.
In 2008, Jackson bought the Lincoln School in his hometown of Edwardsville, Illinois, a crumbling facility that had once proudly served as a segregated school for Black students. Jackson donated the school that he once attended to Lewis and Clark Community College in 2011 and formed a partnership in the development of the center.
In addition to its conference facilities, the MJCH will operate a fully functional STEM center and a full-service conference center that will provide the opportunity for introduction of college programs such as culinary and hospitality.
Jackson says that the center is needed to address by-products of rapid cultural change that the Founding Fathers, who lived in an overwhelmingly majority White era, did not foresee as they formulated some of our nation’s bedrock principles.
“We all know you have free speech but you don’t go into a theater [and yell, ‘Fire’] and you don’t drive through Harlem and holler, ‘Nigger,’” says Jackson. “So, we have free speech but we’ve got to respect cultural differences [so] that we don’t insult other folk.
