Mahalia Jackson House

Internationally acclaimed singer Mahalia Jackson bought the home at 8358 South Indiana Ave. in 1956. At the time she was a nationally-known artist with both a white and African American following, yet when she began looking for a home she encountered difficulty, as whites were reluctant to sell to her. She eventually found 8358 South Indiana Ave. in Chatham which was owned by Dr. Marchmont who was willing to sell it to her in 1956. Jackson was one of the first African Americans to move to Chatham; soon after she moved in her living room window was shot out. News of the attack on a celebrated artist in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood made national headlines, and CBS’s Edward R. Murrow interviewed Mahalia Jackson in her home on his popular Person to Person television show.

Jackson was undeterred by the incident and she settled into her new home. She was frequently visited there by “numerous preachers at whose churches she had sung, young gospel singers seeking her advice, writers from all over the world, and persons involved in civil rights crusades.” Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, were frequent visitors to 8358 South Indiana Ave.

Jackson was born in New Orleans in 1911; both sets of her grandparents were born into slavery and her family worked hard to make ends meet. Her father worked as a stevedore, barber and pastor; her mother died when she was 6 whereupon Mahalia was cared for by her aunt. She was raised in a devout Baptist family and began singing in church as a child where she displayed an unusually powerful voice and a great love for gospel music with its expressive songs and powerful beats. She had no formal musical training and credited her success to her faith.

At age 16, she came to Chicago with her aunts, joining the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities. She found work in hotels and as a domestic servant, but in the 1930s she opened her own profitable beauty salon and floral shop, revealing a practical business sense that would span her career. Soon after arriving in Chicago she joined the choir at Greater Salem Baptist Church, where she would remain for four decades. At Greater Salem she joined the Johnson Gospel Singers, one of the first professional gospel groups in the country that performed in churches throughout the South Side. In the 1930s she met Thomas A. Dorsey, gospel composer and choir director at several Baptist churches on the South Side, who exposed Mahalia to a broader audience with tours outside of Chicago.

Although she made her first recording in 1936, it was not until 1947 that Jackson’s warm voice and powerful performance style garnered national attention with her recording of “Move on Up a Little Higher.” The record sold 8 million copies and introduced the emotive qualities of gospel music to a wider audience. The success of the album allowed her to close her beauty salon and flower shop and pursue her music career, which ulitmaltely produced over 30 albums. Her early fame continued throughout the 1940s and, in 1950, she performed at Carnegie Hall for a full house. Afterward, she realized, “think of it—me, a wash woman, standing there where such people as Caruso and Lily Pons stood.” Dozens of Carnegie Hall performances would follow. In the 1950s Jackson’s performances were regularly broadcast on television and radio and she began touring internationally, performing for royalty and presidents.

In 1956 Jackson met Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the National Baptist Convention. She began to perform regularly before King’s major speeches and became active in the Civil Rights Movement. King praised her voice as “one heard once in a millennium.” She became a close ally of King and an important figure of the Civil Rights Movement. Most notably, Jackson sang before King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. 

In 1972, Jackson was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and again was nominated for Best Soul Gospel Performance for "How I Got Over." She died of heart failure in the same year. She had married and divorced twice and had no children. Mahalia Jackson's success as a gospel singer earned her the titles "The Queen of Gospel" and the "World’s Greatest Gospel Singer" and she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 for her inspiration on American music.

Mahalia Jackson and her second husband, Sigmund Minters Galloway, in 1964 in front of the ranch house she purchased a decade earlier. Jackson and Galloway divorced in 1969.

(Ebony, November, 1964)