Rebecca Cox Jackson

Rebecca Cox Jackson's own account of her 1830 conversion is specific and dramatic: caught in a violent thunderstorm she had feared would kill her, she experienced what she described as a cleansing of sin and a direct encounter with the voice of God, which she treated as the true source of her religious authority rather than any ordination, which as a woman in the AME Church she could not have received. She began preaching on the strength of that experience, and by her own account she gained the ability to read scripture through that same spiritual transformation, having depended before on her brother to read to her. That brother, an AME minister named Joseph Cox, became one of her sharpest critics, troubled both by her independent preaching and by her growing insistence that celibacy, not marriage, was the higher spiritual path, a position that estranged her from her husband. Conventional AME structures had no place for the kind of unmediated authority Jackson claimed, and by the early 1840s she had found a religious community that did: the Shakers, whose theology already held that direct spiritual gifts were ordinary features of communal life, and whose practice of celibacy matched the conviction she had already reached on her own. She rose to become a Shaker eldress, and in the 1850s returned to Philadelphia to establish a small Shaker family of her own there, whose membership was largely Black and female, unusual for an otherwise overwhelmingly white movement. Jackson's manuscripts, records of visions and theological argument written once she gained literacy through her conversion, were not published in her lifetime; they survive today as Gifts of Power, one of the fullest surviving first-person religious narratives by a nineteenth century Black American woman.

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.