Jackson was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He became involved in political activism as a child with his mother, Essie. He went to Cincinnati Country Day School where he commented in an interview that "I was the black kid at Country Day who stayed in the houses of wealthy white people". He attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he played football. He got a tryout with the New England Patriots but didn't make the team. Jackson's family moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1973, eventually settling in Silver Spring, Maryland. After graduating from college, he got a high-level executive job at Republic Steel and was admitted to Harvard Business School. He married his wife, Michele, in 1976.
Ministry
The death of his father, Harry Jackson Sr., caused Jackson to decide to become a Christian minister. He and his wife moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he preached in the inner city. Soon he took a job at Corning Glass in Corning, New York, and preached in his free time. There he founded a church called the Christian Hope Center, and his parishioners were mostly white. "We really broke racial barriers for a black man pastoring white people in 1981," he says.
Hope Christian Church
Jackson's work in Corning attracted attention, and he was recruited to Beltsville, Maryland to take over Hope Christian Church.
Views on marriage and abortion
Jackson believes that same-sex marriage and abortion are morally wrong. He believes that abortion and gay marriage are causing the erosion of the black family, saying "I don't know of anybody black who says, 'I hate gay people.' We're more accepting generally. But you overlap that – homosexuality and gay marriage – with broken families, and we don't know how to put it back together," he says. "I believe that the Bible teaches that same-sex marriage is an oxymoron," he says. "If you redefine marriage, you have to redefine family. You'd have to redefine parenting. I'm looking at the extinction of marriage. And black culture is in a free fall." Jackson has agreed with Pope Benedict XVI's belief that condoms promote AIDS.
Activism
Jackson is a prominent activist against same-sex marriage. Jackson began writing about the black family in the late 1990s, and he gained national recognition through his columns for Charisma magazine, in which he frequently wrote about abortion and gay marriage. In 2009, he began leading the movement against legalizing same-sex marriage in Washington, D.C. A group led by Jackson filed a lawsuit in the District of Columbia after the D.C. Board of Elections refused to allow a ballot initiative on the issue of same-sex marriage, claiming that such an initiative would violate D.C.'s Human Rights Act. In January 2010, the D.C. Superior Court upheld the board's decision. Jackson appealed to the D.C. Court of Appeals, but the court upheld the Superior Court's decision in a 5–4 vote. Jackson then appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but it was rejected without comment in January 2011.
