RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Looking at pictures of the past, Dr. Richard Jackson gazed at the large photo on his lobby’s wall of his grandfather Dr. Isaiah Jackson, who was born in 1888 and founded his family-owned Dominion Medical Associates in 1911.
“To have him here to look at, when I have questions sometimes or deep thoughts, I come here, and I look at his picture and wonder what would he do in different situations?” Richard Jackson said.
Outside of the brick building in Richmond’s historic Jackson Ward at 3rd and Leigh Streets is a plaque honoring Isaiah as a co-founder of the once renowned Richmond Community Hospital. It was a lifeline for the Black community not accepted at white hospitals.
Isaiah was a contemporary of the famous surgeon and inventor Charles Drew. The two are pictured together along with about a dozen other Black Virginia doctors in a photo hanging in Richard’s office.
“When I was growing up this whole area was filled with Black doctors and professionals from optometrists to pediatricians,” said Richard “AJ” Jackson Jr…