C. Bernard Jackson

C. Bernard Jackson (November 4, 1927 – July 16, 1996) was an African-American playwright and the founder of the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Inner City was one of the first arts institutions in the United States to promote multiculturalism. The facility nurtured the careers of numerous performers, including Beah Richards, George Takei, Edward James Olmos, Nobu McCarthy and Forest Whitaker.

Biography

Background Clarence Bernard Jackson was the only child of Clarence I. and Ruth R. (Brown) Jackson, who were both originally from Dinwiddie County, Virginia. His father was employed as a doorman at an apartment building. The younger Jackson grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, where he was involved in one of the city's toughest street gangs. Because he was able to speak Spanish, Jackson often served in a diplomatic capacity.

In the wake of the 1965 Watts Riots, Jackson founded the Inner City Cultural Center in Central Los Angeles. Unlike other arts organizations that catered to one ethnic group or another, Inner City operated under the concept of multiculturalism and provided assistance to a wide variety of cultural institutions. This included Luis Valdez's El Teatro Campesino, the East West Players and the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, founded by Carmen Zapata.

Jackson was also a proponent of non-traditional casting. For example, in 1975, Inner City produced Maggie The Mouse Meets The Dirty Rat Fink, a Christmas musical that was written by Jackson. In the production, a black man and woman were cast as the parents of a Japanese daughter and a Chicano son. The following year, Jackson staged, Langston Hughes Said, a musical tribute to the Harlem Renaissance writer. The production included Hughes's one-act play, Soul Gone Home and featured a Chinese mother with her son played simultaneously by two actors, one black and the other Chicano.

He died on July 16, 1996. In the wake of his death, playwright George C. Wolfe recalled how Jackson encouraged him to stage one of his early projects, "Tribal Rites, or The Coming of the Great God-bird Nabuku to the Age of Horace Lee Lizer." "Though I've been involved in many projects since," Wolfe said, "this production was perhaps the most crucial to my evolution" as an artist.

Honors and awards 1962: Obie Award for Best Musical – Fly Blackbird