Sarah “Sally” Evelyn Jackson lives by herself near Stone Mountain, a 30-minute drive from campus, and even though she is 96 years old, she is still razor-sharp. She remembers countless stories about her time teaching at the Institute, from the struggles of being a woman entering a male-dominated field, to the civil rights movement on campus and the quirks of the students that she taught. During her 34 years at the Institute, she has seen it all.
Jackson grew up in Alabama, raised by her mother, who was never concerned about fitting in with convention. Jackson’s father died when she was four, so it was up to her mother to provide for Jackson and her seven siblings — one of whom was already in college. Jackson’s mother was determined that all her kids would have an education.
For Jackson’s mother, no job was beneath her, and she never admitted to not knowing how to do something. She found a job selling books and encyclopedias in the Southeast to earn money for the family. When it came time for one of Jackson’s brothers to go to school, the whole family packed up and moved from their home in Alabama to Auburn, Tennessee so he could attend school there.
“People were more important to her than things, and she was willing to just leave everything she’d ever known and go to Auburn, where we stayed for three years,” Jackson said.
After leaving home, Jackson attended King College in Bristol, Tennessee, for her undergrad and the University of North Carolina for her master’s degree before moving to Atlanta with her sister and husband to study for her Ph.D. at Emory University. Jackson recounts how she stood out as a Ph.D. candidate during that time.
“I got my Ph.D. in ‘59, and we went to the graduation ceremony. My brother was there, and a young man behind him said, ‘Who is that woman among all those Ph.D. candidates?’” And [my brother] turned around, and he said, ‘That’s my sister,’” Jackson said.
After she graduated from Emory with a Ph.D. in English, it was difficult for her to find a full-time professor job as a woman. She ended up teaching temporarily at various schools around Atlanta, including Emory, Agnes Scott and Georgia State, while she looked for a full-time role.
When Jackson applied to teach at Tech in 1961, one of the leaders of the English department told her, “We don’t have women at Georgia Tech. And we don’t have women professors.”
Statements like this didn’t hold Jackson back, and that same year, she landed a job teaching night classes at Tech. She said that she hardly ever thought about being the only woman when she was at school or teaching.
“I wasn’t aware of that. You grow up going to school with boys in grammar school and high school, so I didn’t think about it that much,” Jackson said.
As a teacher and student, Jackson said that she never directly experienced discrimination. There were very few women professors and students at Tech, which limited many girls who might have otherwise considered college if it was less of a taboo. Jackson simply did not care or think about how that would affect her. Like her mother, Jackson was more focused on working hard at what she did than on how being in her role was perceived by society.
After the first year of teaching night classes at Tech, Jackson stayed on full-time as a professor until 1994, when she retired. During her time at Tech, the Institute underwent countless changes, big and small, and she interacted with hundreds of students.
Tech’s integration in —– was one of the biggest progressive changes that Jackson witnessed during her tenure. Edwin D. Harrison was the Institute’s President at the time, and he saw to it that there were no public anti-integration demonstrations, but that did not mean that it was easy being Black on campus.
Jackson said that she was in a conversation with a Black student one day, and someone asked, “How do the other students treat you?”
The Black student responded, “I’m never treated. I pay my own way.”
Jackson is an encyclopedia of other recountings and stories from her time at Tech. Once, she had a track athlete finish her course with a D, and the athlete’s coach asked her if she might have made a mistake and if the athlete should have ended with a C.
“I pulled out my grade book and looked at it, and I said, you know, you’re right. I did make a mistake. He should have had an F,’” Jackson said.
As an engineering school, Tech is not very well known for its English department, but that did not deter Jackson or her colleagues from educating students about writing and literature. One thing Jackson kept in mind during her time teaching was that she was not teaching engineers. Instead, she taught students who were just a few months out of high school and didn’t know what they would do or become, including many students who were interested in things other than engineering but ended up at Tech because of their parents.
Jackson remembered that many students didn’t think they could perform in her classes because they didn’t have exposure to writing or literature. She remembers that after a class one day, a boy came up to her and said, “I can’t write a poem.”
“I said, ‘Well, that’s a requirement of the course. You have to write a poem. I don’t care what it is. It can be free verse. It can be a blank verse. It can be rhymed. It can be unrhymed. It can be whatever you want. It can be as long as you want or as short as you want. You just have to have some kind of emotional feeling in it. Some idea that conveys emotion,’” Jackson said.
The boy sighed and asked if his mom could help him. Jackson told him to get as much help as he could. When he turned in the poems, Jackson thought they were some of the loveliest poems she had seen, and she still has them to this day.
Jackson was also at the Institute for the Centennial celebration when Tech had been open for 100 years, and as part of the period reflection on Tech’s 100-year history, she co-authored a book, “Images & Memories, Georgia Tech: 1885-1985,” outlining the history of Tech through pictures and photographs.
Even though Jackson is retired now, she stays busy in her community through her local church. She was the first woman elder at her Eastminster Presbyterian Church and has been an elder there since 1975. She also serves on several church committees, teaches Sunday school classes, and works on committees for the Atlanta Presbytery.
Jackson’s retelling of her time at the Institute is just one of thousands of stories that women who have worked or studied at Tech could tell. Jackson had to break expectations to earn her place at the Institute, but once she was there, she witnessed and documented incredible change and served as one of the examples of female success at the Institute in the 20th century.