Irene Dobbs Jackson

Irene "Renie" Dobbs Jackson (, 1908–1999) was an American professor of French at Spelman College and a civil rights activist who helped desegregate Atlanta's public libraries, where African American patrons were only allowed to read books in the basement.

Irene Dobbs was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1908, to Irene and John Wesley Dobbs, an American civil and political leader. She was the eldest of the couple's six daughters, including activist and civic leader Josephine Dobbs Clement (1918–1998), opera singer Mattiwilda Dobbs (1925–2015), and educator June Dobbs Butts (1928–2019).

Dobb attended Spelman College, where she studied French and graduated class valedictorian in 1929. She also studied at the University of Chicago, Middlebury College, the University of Grenoble, and the University of Toulouse. While in France, she corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had known throughout her childhood. In 1958, she earned a doctorate from the University of Toulouse.

Dobbs married Maynard H. Jackson, a pastor, though he died in 1953. who became the first African-American mayor of Atlanta and any major city in the Southern United States.

Jackson taught at the historically black colleges and universities of Bishop College, North Carolina Central University, and Spelman College, She was interviewed for the Civil Rights History Project.

Jackson died in 1999, after which the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution commemorating her.