It’s unlikely Mannie Jackson dreamed, while attending racially-
segregated schools in 1950s downstate Illinois, that one day he
would be involved in an educational endowment designed to
encourage humanities exploration and to help students and
citizens of all backgrounds become culturally-aware community
leaders. But his own story suggests that he was already thinking
about how challenges in life can fuel one’s ambition and
imagination. One of thirteen children born in a converted
railroad boxcar in tiny Ilmo, Illinois, and raised in a
segregated part of Edwardsville, Jackson experienced firsthand
the pressures of poverty and prejudice, attending segregated
schools until the eighth grade. (Edwardsville’s schools were
finally integrated in 1952, two years before the US Supreme
Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling.) It wasn’t until he
started attending Edwardsville High School that Jackson
discovered his gift for playing basketball and was subsequently
named a first-team all-state basketball player and Ill