By Johnny Woodhouse

More than a dozen former Fletcher High School football players have made their way to the National Football League (NFL), including current Fletcher head football coach Ciatrick Fason (Minnesota Vikings).

But none had the staying power of 1969 Fletcher graduate Noah Dale Jackson.

A seventh-round NFL draft pick in 1974, Jackson played for the Chicago Bears for nine consecutive seasons from 1975-1983 and completed his 10-year NFL career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1984.

A Jacksonville Beach native, Jackson broke down color barriers in high school and college.

In 1966, he became the first African American to play football at Fletcher and was one of three former Fletcher football players to make an NFL roster in the 1970s.

“Noah was a stud. We bonded and I always admired him not only for his athleticism, but more so for his handling of racial prejudice and mistreatment while representing Fletcher High,” said Jacksonville attorney Bob Parrish, a 1969 Fletcher graduate and a member of the NFL’s New York Jets in 1973.

Grew up next to historic grammar school

Born April 14, 1951, in Jacksonville Beach, Jackson was the second son of George and Lottie Mae Jackson. He grew up in a house on the corner of 4^th Avenue South and South 11^th Street, a stone’s throw from the Jacksonville Beach School for Colored Children (School #144), which was formerly located at what is now Jacksonville Beach Elementary School.

“We lived so close to the school that it was like we lived right on campus,” said Issac Green, a Jacksonville Beach native who lived across the street from Jackson on South 11st Street. “One weekend, Noah and I snuck into the school and removed all the paddles and straps from the teacher’s desks.”  

Lifelong best friends, Green and Jackson started working as caddies at the Jacksonville Beach golf course when they were 10 or 11 years old. “The course was right behind our street. During the summer, we shagged golf balls and caddied at the country club in Ponte Vedra Beach,” Green recalled. “We also sold copies of The Beaches Leader newspaper, back when it was only 10 cents.”

In the fall of 1965, Jackson and more than 50 of his School #144 classmates integrated into Fletcher, which had just opened its new high school campus off Seagate Avenue in Neptune Beach.

“All of us felt strange and maybe a little scared. We thought we wouldn’t be accepted by the white students,” Jackson recalled in 1969.

“But before that first day was over, we saw we were wrong. We got the same treatment as everybody else.”

Running the racial gauntlet

Jack Taylor, Fletcher’s legendary football coach from 1959-1974, first set eyes on Jackson in 1964, while scouting a summer youth football league. By the time Jackson was eligible to play football at Fletcher, he was already a man among boys. “He deadlifted more weight than we stocked. I had to buy a longer bar and more weights just to see what he could do,” Taylor said in 1992. “He did all that we had and bent my new bar.”

Jackson was one of more than a dozen African American students who came out for football trials in 1966, but the only one to make the varsity squad. “Coach Taylor told me I’d have a hard time because of my race, and he warned me that I should expect name calling and jeers from opposing teams,” Jackson recalled in 1969. “He said I must be ready for it and not let it bother me.”

Despite the turbulent times, Jackson thrived in high school, taking classes from algebra to typing. He played football and basketball for three years and became the first Black athlete to be inducted into Fletcher’s exclusive lettermen’s club. As a senior, he was crowned homecoming king, elected co-captain of the football team, and voted as the most valuable player.

As a junior, Jackson and fellow Fletcher teammate Tom Sullivan became the first African Americans to be named to The Jacksonville Journal’s All-County Football Team. Sullivan, who graduated from Fletcher in 1968, went on to help crack the football color barrier at the University of Miami and played seven seasons in the NFL, including six with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Green said a lot of Jackson’s success at Fletcher, both on and off the field, can be attributed to his mother, who volunteered for years at a soup kitchen at Thomas Chapel Church of God by Faith in Jacksonville Beach, where a building, the Jackson McNeil Center, is named in her honor.

“She always told him to stay in school and get an education. She believed that was more important than football,” said Green, who remembers accompanying Jackson to a teenager dance at the Jacksonville Beach Flag Pavilion.

“The only reason they let us in was because everyone knew Noah Jackson.”  

Adapting to the next level

In 1969, many southern colleges were just starting to desegregate their sports teams. The year before, the University of Tampa hired progressive head football coach Fran Curci, a former University of Miami assistant. The private college encouraged Curci to break the color line and Jackson was one of his first African American recruits.

During Jackson’s first year in Tampa, the Spartans were ranked No. 1 in the nation among small-college teams.

In November 1969, Tampa (8-1) hosted the Florida A&M Rattlers (7-1) in front of a sold-out crowd at Tampa Stadium. The landmark game was the first between an all-Black college from Florida and an overwhelmingly white one.

 “It still has meaning, all these years later,’” Curci said in 2019. “I think we all knew we were part of something very special and very historic.”

Jackson played three seasons for the Spartans but gave up his final year of college eligibility to sign a free-agent contract with the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts on March 8, 1972.

Jackson suited up for 44 games with the Argonauts, playing both left guard and left tackle. In 1974, his last year in the CFL, he was selected by the Football Reporters of Canada to the Eastern Conference All-Star Team. “Up there, it’s a job and everybody is fighting for a job in order to live,” he told The Beaches Leader in February 1976. “When it becomes a way to earn a living, there is an entirely different light on the game.”

A defensive player in high school and college, Jackson made the switch to offense in the pros, where he felt he could enjoy a much longer career. “The body of an offensive lineman who takes care of himself can last until he’s 35 or older,” he said. “A defensive player is lucky if he can make it to 30. Most of those guys have had at least one knee operation and other injuries and their bodies won’t last as long. I hope to play until I’m 35 and I think I can do it on offense.”

Jackson’s mother never attended any of her son’s football games, believing that if she stayed home and prayed, he would never be injured. For the most part, her prayers were answered.

Making the grade as a pro

In 1974, Jackson was drafted by both the NFL’s Baltimore Colts and the Florida Blazers of the upstart World Football League. Jackson never signed with either club, preferring to play out his third-year option with the Argonauts, who failed to make the 1974 CFL playoffs. On Jan. 28, 1975, the Bears traded a future draft pick to the Colts for the signing rights to Jackson, who officially joined the Bears on March 25, 1975.

Chicago won only four of its 14 games in 1975 and finished third in its division. One of its bright spots that season was rookie running back Walter Payton, a first-round draft pick from a historically Black college in Mississippi who rushed for 679 yards and seven touchdowns. Four other first-year starters for the Bears, including Jackson, were named to Football Digest magazine’s 1975 Rookie All-Star Team.

Green said one of the first big-ticket items Jackson purchased was a peach-colored Cadillac Eldorado. “We drove down to Daytona Beach in it to watch the Florida Classic,” said Green, referring to the annual college football game between Bethune-Cookman University and Florida A&M.

Jackson also set aside money from his pro contracts to pay for several additions on his mother’s home in Jacksonville Beach, according to his younger sister, Carol Jackson Kenny, a 1970 Fletcher graduate. At the end of the 1977 season, when Payton broke O. J. Simpson’s single-game rushing record, Green said Payton gave Jackson and the rest of his offensive linemen gold pocket watches.

“Once while I was living in Atlanta, Noah introduced me to Payton when the Bears scrimmaged the Falcons,” he said.

During his nine years with the Chicago Bears, Jackson helped pave the way for seven of Payton’s 1,000-yard rushing campaigns. A durable offensive lineman, he started 70 of 74 games during his first five seasons, including a streak of 50 consecutive starts from 1976 to 1979.

“He was light on his feet and great on sweeps,” former Chicago Bears head coach Jack Pardee (1975–1977) told The Beaches Leader in 1992. “He was a good run blocker and at the time we were a good running team. Our brand of football fit him to a tee.”

In 1984, Jackson was cut by the Bears in training camp. He was quickly picked up as a free agent by the Buccaneers and appeared in six games that year, including the season opener against the Bears, a 34–14 loss at Soldier Field.

After the cheering stopped

Before his playing days were over, Jackson settled down and started a family in Lake Forest, Illinois, home to the Bears training facility and one of the first African American enclaves on Chicago’s North Shore. The union produced two daughters, Noelle, in 1980, and Camille in 1983.

“Lake Forest was a stop on the Underground Railroad,” said Noelle Jackson. “When I grew up there, we owned the smallest house on the block. Golf was my father’s passion. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up golf balls for him in the backyard.”

Noelle Jackson said her parents divorced in the early 1990s. By then, her father had been out of pro football for more than six years and was employed as a physical education instructor and a counselor at the Chicago Center for New Direction, a community house for wards of the state. He also spent time as a licensed electrician.

As he got older, Jackson shuttled back and forth between Chicago and Florida, always serving as an integral part of his daughter’s lives. In July 2004, he attended his first-ever Fletcher class reunion in Jacksonville Beach. “That was the first time many of us had seen Noah since we graduated,” recalled 1969 classmate Kathy Marvin in 2004. Added Taylor, Jackson’s former high school coach: “It was a complete surprise. It made the evening.”

Jackson sat at Taylor’s table during the 35^th class reunion dinner, and said his old coach, then 73, hadn’t changed much. “His heart was still the same,” Jackson recalled. “The bond between coach and me was one of a father and son. He gave me a good work ethic. That’s something that stayed with me all the way through my pro career.”

Whenever Jackson was in town, Green said you could always find him on the golf course. “Noah was a good golfer. We played in tournaments together. He could easily shoot between 79 and 82,” Green added.

When Green was a deacon at Titus Harvest Dome Spectrum Church, he and Jackson and former Harvest Dome pastor Rodney “R.J.” Washington Sr., who lost his battle with cancer in 2018, often played as a threesome.

Not long after that, Jackson’s own health started to fail. He developed lymphedema in one leg to the point where it became severely infected. In 2021, he was diagnosed with kidney disease and was in and out of Jacksonville hospitals for the next two years.

A proud man who once had the strength to hold off NFL Hall of Fame defensive linemen like Alan Page of the Minnesota Vikings, Jackson told his daughter in his final days, “I’ve never been down and not been able to get back up.”

Noah Dale Jackson, who was inducted into the University of Tampa Sports Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Jacksonville Sports Hall of Fame in 1987, passed away peacefully on Nov. 20, 2023, surrounded by family and friends at Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville. He was 72.

He is survived by two siblings, three daughters and four grandchildren. He was laid to rest at Beaches Memorial Park in Atlantic Beach.  

“Noah will always be remembered for his bigger-than-life personality,” said his daughter, Noelle. “His memory will live on in the hearts of all those who loved him.”