Remembering the late psychologist who pushed the field of gerontology forward.
Before Dr. Jackson’s almost five-decade-long career, the particular experiences of Black Americans were not reflected in social science research. He spearheaded first-of-their-kind national surveys that resulted in pioneering studies of Black mental health. Thanks to his research and innovative survey techniques, social scientists finally began to notice and understand the statistical patterns in African Americans’ health across the lifespan.
Resources for Black Professionals in Aging Services and Research
Aging While Black: Resources for Learning and Advocacy
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From Student Activist to Leading Researcher
As a psychology student at Wayne State University, in the late 1960s, Jackson and about 17 other students took over the stage during the presidential address at the American Psychological Association (APA) national convention. They demanded that the organization take action to address discrimination and poor training opportunities for Black psychologists. “We didn’t do this thing lightly,” Jackson said in an interview in 2014. “We all thought we were going to jail.” But the APA leadership took their complaints to heart and met with the students. As a result, Jackson helped to found the Black Student Psychological Association at APA and served as its first president.
Just a few years later in 1971, Jackson became the first full-time Black faculty member in the Psychology department at the University of Michigan. In that role, working with graduate students–many of whom went on to become leading aging researchers themselves–Jackson envisioned and carried out the first National Survey of Black Americans. “The survey was designed to do two important things,” he reflected in 2014. “Ask questions of a population that were meaningful to the population; and reach representative samples that allowed us to say with some certainty we really were representing the array of the Black population in the US.”
With all this never-before-collected data about African American health at every age, Dr. Jackson had to make sense of what he was observing. In 1989, Jackson contributed to the book Black Adult Development and Aging with a new social science theory: the Law of Small Effects. Chronic stressors in everyday life accumulate over the course of the lifespan and affect our health, Dr. Jackson reasoned–and Black Americans face more stressors because of systemic racism. Today, the scientific community accepts that social and environmental factors cause health disparities. For example, according to a 2016 CIGNA report, Black women are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer than white women. Black men’s risk of stroke is twice that of white men’s. And Black people are twice as likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s and other dementias as compared to white people. Before Jackson gathered similar research through his National Survey of Black Americans and National Survey of American Life, these realities were invisible.
In 2025, social science research into the experiences of older Black Americans remains essential to reduce health disparities. Researchers still include Black people in scientific studies at a non-representative rate. And older African Americans “are not referred as often for specialty diagnosis for Alzheimer’s, although we have the highest risk factor for Alzheimer’s,” says Dr. Donna Benton, a research associate professor of gerontology at University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. To address these gaps, the National Institutes of Health are currently investing in research to reduce health disparities.
Dr. Jackson blazed a trail for Black gerontologists, serving on the National Science Board, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Today, the many scientists and practitioners he mentored carry on his legacy.
