The Hampton Institute class of 1875 included both Deacon Godfrey R. Jackson and Booker T. Washington.

The Rev. Deacon Godfrey Redfield Jackson was born in 1857 at Dungeness on Cumberland Island. He was the son of Lewis and Fanny Jackson. His father was the Senior Warden of St. Cyrprian’s in Darien when that church was founded. It is likely, but not certain, that his African-American family was enslaved before the Civil War. However, by 1870 his father, a carpenter, owned property valued at $1,000 in Darien, GA (roughly $24,000 in 2025 dollars). He graduated from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University, an HBCU), where he was a classmate of Booker T. Washington in the class of 1875.

He taught school in South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia before moving to St. Simons Mills where in 1893 he began work as a teacher in the St. Perpetua parochial “Colored” school. St. Perpetua was a parochial chapel of Christ Church, Frederica, under the Rev. Anson G.P. Dodge. He quickly became a candidate for ordination and returned to Washington, D.C. to attend King Hall, a seminary for Black churchmen attached to Howard University. He was ordained Deacon on May 27, 1897 by the Rt. Rev. Henry Yates Satterlee, who was the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. Deacon Jackson returned to serve as a teacher and deacon to the Black congregations at St. Perpetua and St. Ignatius Chapels on St. Simons Island.

He served until his death in 1924. Diocesan publications eulogized him as, “unique and consistent . . . truly a shepherd to his flock . . .ministering to their wants at all times.”

In his 1925 Bishop’s Address to convention, Bishop F.F. Reese said Jackson, “spent his whole Ministry on St. Simon’s Island, in charge of the work among his people, as assistant to the Rector of Christ Church, Frederica. He was a good and faithful soul and of a fervent spirit, doing his modest work in an humble spirit. In spite of many discouragements, and for several years in bodily infirmity, he was content to serve His Lord in the place where God put him.”