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The Two Rebeccas: Jackson, Perot and the Philadelphia Family

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The Two Rebeccas: Jackson, Perot and the Philadelphia Family

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1837, a year after Jackson had left her husband, she met Rebecca Perot, who became her lifelong companion and protege, a documented relationship distinct from the 1830 thunderstorm conversion and the break with her brother Joseph Cox that occupy her first article. The two women were close enough that fellow Shakers came to call them the two Rebeccas, a documented nickname distinct from the individual spiritual authority Jackson had claimed for herself through her own conversion experience.

Jackson spent four years at the Shaker community in Watervliet, New York, beginning in 1847, but grew dissatisfied with the community's limited outreach to other Black Americans, a documented institutional friction distinct from the theological compatibility between Shaker celibacy and her own conviction that had first drawn her there. In 1851 she and Perot returned to Philadelphia together, and by 1859 the two had established their own small Shaker family there, made up mostly of working class Black women, a documented urban community distinct from the larger, predominantly white Watervliet family Jackson had originally joined.

That the same woman whose 1830 vision gave her an authority the AME Church would not ordain her into went on, decades later, to found and co-lead an entirely Black urban Shaker community with a companion who took her name and led it after her, marks the Philadelphia family Jackson built with Rebecca Perot as a documented case where a claimed personal authority was carried forward into an institution that survived its founder by nearly four decades.

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