Biography
Joseph Jackson Jr. was one of the Tougaloo Nine, the nine Tougaloo College students who walked into the whites-only main branch of the Jackson public library on March 27, 1961, asked for service and refused a police order to leave. They were arrested for breach of the peace, held about thirty-two hours, and released on March 28 for court. Each was convicted of disturbing the peace, fined $100 and given a thirty-day suspended sentence.
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission photographed each of them on arrest, and the Civil Rights Digital Library preserves the individual sit-in mugshots. The catalog does not name the jail that held them.
He was held on his own for at least part of the thirty-two hours.
No birth date is recorded. An interview in 2026 described him as eighty-eight, which would put his birth in 1937 or 1938; because that spans two years and rests on a reported age rather than a record, no birth year is stored here.
Photo credit
Custody record
Participant accounts place the Tougaloo Nine’s March 1961 detention at more than thirty hours, with estimates varying around thirty to thirty-six hours. The thirty-day sentences were suspended, not thirty days actually served; an exact common hourly duration has not been imposed on all nine.
