The Rev. Deacon Godfrey Redfield Jackson was born in 1857 at Dungeness on Cumberland Island. He was the son of Lewis and Fanny Jackson and his father was the Senior Warden of St. Cyrprian’s in Darien when that church was founded. It is likely, but not certain, his African-American family was enslaved before the Civil War. However, by 1870 his father, a carpenter, owned property valued at a substantial $1,000 in Darien, GA. 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 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. He returned to serve as a teacher and what we would now call a “bi-vocational” Deacon to the Black congregations at St. Perpetua and St. Ignatius Chapels.

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