tablished the Countee Cullen Collection at Atlanta
University, a substantial set of cultural, literary, and
artistic materials and memorabilia relating to 20th-
century African-American literature and the arts.
Bibliography
Ferguson, Blanche. Countee Cullen and the Negro Renais-
sance.New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966.
Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.New
York: Doubleday, 2002.
Jackson, James A. (1878–unknown)
A former minstrel performer, waiter, and journalist
whose widely circulated articles on entertainment
made him the most popular African-American
show business reporter. Jackson was born in Belle-
fonte, Pennsylvania, to Abraham Valentine and
Nannie Lee Jackson. He and his wife, Cabrielle
Bell Hill, who married in April 1909, had one
child, a son named Albert. In the 1930s the Jack-
sons lived in WASHINGTON, D.C., and Jackson was
working as a business specialist at the U.S. Depart-
ment of Commerce.
He began writing for the local newspaper and
later joined the staff of the New York Globeand the
New York Herald.His expertise in entertainment
later led to his appointment as theatrical editor at
the Washington Tribune.The Clef Club in NEW
YORKCITYmade him an honorary member.
Jackson’s career highlights also included the
distinction of being the first African-American
bank clerk in Illinois and one of only two African-
American investigators for the U.S. Army’s Military
Intelligence Department. He was an army veteran
who was commissioned to serve as adjutant of the
First Provisional Regiment, an African-American
unit that became the Fifteenth Regiment.
A member of the NATIONALASSOCIATION
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OFCOLOREDPEOPLE,
Jackman was a high-ranking Mason and an active
member of the National Negro Press Association
and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Jackson, Walter Clinton(1879–1959)
One of two North Carolina professors who coedited
the 1924 ANTHOLOGY OFVERSE BYAMERICANNE-
GROES.Jackson, a professor at the North Carolina
College for Women, was coeditor with NEWMAN
IVEY WHITE, English professor and department
chair of Trinity College, now Duke University. The
volume, published by the newly established Trinity
College Press in Durham, North Carolina, was one
of the first anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance
to showcase the work of African-American poets.
Jackson and White were part of the substan-
tial group of white scholars and artists who publi-
cized the substantial tradition of African-American
letters and art.Bibliography
White, Newman Ivey, and Walter Clinton Jackson, eds.
An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes.Durham,
N.C.: Trinity College Press, 1924.J. B. Lippincott and Company
A long-standing publishing company in PHILADEL-
PHIA. Joshua Ballinger Lippincott, a New Jersey
native who was steeped in book culture and the
publishing business from his early days, established
the company in 1836. After several successful
mergers, J. B. Lippincott and Company became
one of the largest and most successful publishers in
America.
The early history of the publishing company is
linked to its production of works by Oscar Wilde,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Washington Irving, and
Edgar Allan Poe.
Lippincott made overtures to ZORA NEALE
HURSTONand in 1934 published the writer’s first
novel, JONAH’SGOURDVINE.Despite its interest in
her work, Hurston was a bit dismayed by the com-
pany’s seeming lack of familiarity with African-
American authors and scholars. It was she, for
instance, who had to insist that advance copies of
Jonah’s Gourd Vinebe sent to prominent writers such
as W. E. B. DUBOISand JAMESWELDONJOHNSON.
By 1942, however, company executives were working
to broaden distribution of Hurston’s work. As her bi-
ographer Melba Boyd notes, Hurston’s colleague, the
Rollins College professor Edwin Grover, was asked to
help “to do everything possible to spread the good
word” about the Hurston books that “do not get the
distribution they deserve” (Boyd, 363).
The firm merged with Harper and Row in
1977.J. B. Lippincott and Company 273