Judia Jackson Harris was a Black educator and social reformer who pioneered a model of teacher training, schooling, and cooperative land ownership in rural Clarke County. Though remembered primarily as an educator, she pursued a broad program of reform that paired land ownership with literacy to advance the interests of Black Georgians during the Jim Crow era.
Early Life and Career
Judia Jackson Harris was born in Athens to Alfred and Louisa Jackson in early 1870. She was the last of eight children and one of only two to be born after emancipation. Though Alfred and Louisa could not read or write, all of their children were literate, and three of their daughters—Camilla, Mary, and Judia—became educators. Jackson Harris received her basic schooling in Athens (likely at the Knox Institute, where Camilla taught in the years after emancipation) and then followed her older sister, Mary Jackson McCrorey (1867-1944), to Atlanta University, graduating from its Normal course in 1894. She continued her education with summer courses at other prominent institutions, including Hampton Institute in Virginia and Harvard University. In 1949 she received an honorary doctorate in Literature when she gave the commencement address at Northwestern College in Washington, D.C.
To supplement college costs not covered by her scholarship from a Congregational Church in Connecticut, Jackson Harris joined her sister Mary Jackson McCrorey at a schoolhouse in rural Clarke County during the summer. After graduating Jackson Harris accepted a post in Athens Public Schools. With the exception of one year spent at Haines Institute in Augusta, where Lucy Craft Laney and Jackson McCrorey were both in leadership, Jackson Harris spent her early career teaching in Athens. She became principal of the East Athens School in 1902 but resigned in 1903 to open the Model and Training School in rural Clarke County.
Mutual Benefit Association
In August 1900 Jackson Harris began organizing Black farmers near Helicon Springs, a rural community north of Athens. She believed the community could become a “model rural settlement,” and together, the farmers and Jackson Harris established the Mutual Benefit Association (also known as The Corn Club) for the purpose of “buying land, building and improving homes, and establishing a model school.” Despite the threat of violent resistance from local whites, the Association—then with ten dues-paying members, including Jackson Harris herself—put a deposit on their first forty-one acres of land in December 1900. Over the next few decades, the Association purchased a saw mill, a cotton gin and an additional 2,000 acres of land, becoming a full “social settlement” with industrial classes and lectures among its many offerings. After twenty years, Black families owned nearly all the land in the community, which had the highest percentage of Black property owners of any section in Clarke County.
Model and Training School
Jackson Harris opened the Model and Training School in 1903 on her share of the Mutual Benefit Association land, which she deeded to the Clarke County School Board. To open the school, she had support from the General Education Board, the Peabody Fund, and later, from the Slater Fund, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Clarke County Schools, and many of Athens’ white community leaders, including David C. Barrow, Jr., who served as Chancellor of the University of Georgia from 1906 to 1925. National leaders in the Black community, including W. E. B. Du Bois and George Washington Carver also expressed their support.
The first of its kind in the South, the school combined a model curriculum with a teacher training institute. Music, theater, literature, blacksmithing, sewing, and manual training were all features of the curriculum. When school was not in session during the summer, teacher training was held for the county’s Black teachers. Additionally, the school—together with the Mutual Benefit Association—attracted crowds with their annual agricultural fairs during which canned goods, livestock, and quilts were exhibited and prizes won. Students presented yearly musical pageants, often at the Morton Theatre in downtown Athens.
Though northern philanthropists and some affluent Athenians supported these efforts, local whites were largely “uninterested or actually hostile toward this whole program of collective bargaining and potential educational development,” according to Jesse O. Thomas of the National Urban League. White supremacists shot into Jackson Harris’ home, left a dog with its throat cut on the school porch, and even fired point blank into the schoolhouse door. In the years following World War I (1917-18), Ku Klux Klan “night riders” threatened and terrorized many Black farmers off their land, and local schools saw a drop in Black enrollment as Black citizens took part in the Great Migration. Hoping to slow this exodus, Jackson Harris convinced multiple prominent white Athenians to denounce anti-Black violence in writing, publishing their responses alongside her own “Racial Creed” in 1925. As late as 1927, however, a notice posted in Helicon Springs told Black farmers living near the School “to leave at once or they would be punished.”
Around this same time, Jackson Harris experienced another great challenge when a defective flue caused the school’s main building to burn down. While the community worked to raise funds to rebuild, the school operated out of Jackson Harris’s home across the street. With support from the Rosenwald Foundation, the school reopened with a new brick building in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s, the school persevered with community support, though it suffered from roof leaks, rotten porches, and other maintenance issues. In 1951, the County Health Department closed the school’s lunchroom due to a lack of running water and, in its final years, the school still relied on outhouses. The Model and Training School closed in 1956 when the Athens City and Clarke County school systems merged and its remaining students were bussed into Athens.
Marriage and Retirement
In 1912, at the age of forty-two, Judia Jackson married Samuel F. Harris, Athens’s most distinguished Black educator, best known for stewarding Athens High and Industrial School, Georgia’s first four-year public high school for African American students. While continuing to lead their respective schools, the couple also collaborated on projects with the State Summer School for Colored Teachers and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
In 1949 Jackson Harris retired from the newly renamed Judia Jackson Harris School. When asked to evaluate the impact of her life’s work, she credited the collective, writing that “the major part of what has been accomplished has been done by group action.”
Jackson Harris died in 1960. In 2009 Athens-Clarke County Schools opened the J. J. Harris Elementary School in her honor. Though the Rosenwald-era Judia Jackson Harris School building still stands, it was placed on Historic Athens’ “places in peril” in 2020.
