Perry Brooks Jackson was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on January 27, 1896, the first child of Brooks Carey and Ida Mae Jackson. Zanesville’s schools were integrated, and he excelled in them, though he met racial discrimination as a boy that stayed with him for life.
He came to Cleveland in 1915 and worked his way through Adelbert College of Western Reserve University, graduating magna cum laude in 1919 and earning election to Phi Beta Kappa. He finished law school at Western Reserve in 1922. The law school dean told him no large firm would hire a Black graduate. That proved true, so he started a practice on his own with less than a dollar to his name.
To support himself he joined the Cleveland Call, the city’s Black newspaper, in 1923 and rose to editor. He left in 1927 when the paper merged with the Cleveland Post to become the Call and Post.
A Lincoln Republican, he won a seat in the Ohio General Assembly in 1928. There he was responsible for voter registration forms that dropped any reference to race or color, and for legislation defining the duties of notaries public. He served on Cleveland City Council, then joined the city’s police prosecutor’s office in 1934, the first Black lawyer to do so, and left in 1941 as its chief.
In August 1942 Governor John W. Bricker appointed him to fill an unexpired term on the Cleveland Municipal Court. He lost the 1943 election for the seat. He ran again in 1945 and won, and voters returned him in 1951 and 1957. In 1960 he was elected to the new Domestic Relations Division of the Court of Common Pleas, and in 1964 to its General Division, winning re-election in 1967.
Ohio’s age limit for judges ended his elected service in 1973, when he was 77. The Ohio Supreme Court then appointed him a visiting judge, and he kept hearing cases until January 1986. He died in Cleveland on March 20, 1986, at 90, and is buried at Highland Park Cemetery. His wife, Fern Payne Jackson, whom he married on August 22, 1933, died in 1983.
Off the bench he played piano, belonged to Alpha Phi Alpha, was a 33rd-degree Prince Hall Mason, and served as a trustee of St. John’s A.M.E. Church, which he joined as a student. He worked with the NAACP, the Urban League of Greater Cleveland, the Phyllis Wheatley Association, Goodwill Industries, the YMCA, the Boy Scouts and many other groups, enough that some in the city called him “Mr. Cleveland.”