Blanche Jackson

Blanche Jackson: Market Wimmin and Maat Dompim Womyn of Color Land Project

Blanche Jackson, born in Brooklyn Hospital, Brooklyn, New York, grew up in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the youngest of three children. Her parents were in their late forties when she was born. Her sister was sixteen years older; her brother twelve years older. She attended Catholic school for the first five years of school. After that, she attended public schools, all in Brooklyn.

Blanche Jackson, four years after graduating from high school, started a two-year program in advertising and public relations at a community college in Manhattan, New York. She was one of only two students who completed that degree in the night-school program. She worked in advertising long enough to know she wanted to do something else, such as working at the New York Health and Hospitals Corporation.

Blanche Jackson planted a roof garden in the city and met her then partner, Amoja Three Rivers. In the early 1980s, the couple moved to Heathcote, an intentional community in Maryland (www.heathcote.org).

Blanche Jackson is standing in a road grinning, with pine trees behind her.

For Blanch Jackson and Amoja Three Rivers, that was the beginning of Market Wimmin, their cultural crafts and merchandising business. At Heathcote, where a friend’s parents let them grow gourds on a plot of land in Maryland, Blanche and Amoja learned to make shakerees (percussion instruments made from gourds), which they sold along with other crafts at women’s music festivals and on college campuses.

In 1990, Blanche Jackson and Amoja Three Rivers published published Amoja’s book, Cultural Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intended through Market Wimmin. They began to sell that book, too, and to offer workshops at women’s music festivals.

Blanche Jackson and Amoja Three Rivers were instrumental in starting the Women of Color tent at the North East Women’s Music Retreat (NEWMR). Notably, they also cofounded the Women of Color tent at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which at first, was only half of a tent. It then became a big deal, and was a whole tent. Through those workshops and through Women of Color tents at festivals came the drive to form a nonprofit for the purpose of starting a women’s land project that would reflect the values and culture of women of color. They envisioned like a sort of Women of Color tent that could be open all year round.

Blanche Jackson and Amoja Three Rivers thus founded Maat Dompim Womyn of Color Land Project. They eventually raised the funds to buy over 100 acres of land in Virginia. At the time of this interview, that project was coming to an end. As of 2022, the Womyn of Color Land Project corporation had sold the land. Blanche Jackson bought a few acres near Appomattox, Virginia, where she now lives in a mobile home. She has plans to turn this space into a stopping-off spot for traveling dykes.

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