George Jackson Academy

He took Harlem to Hollywood Back when he was 12 and already built like a baby bull, George Jackson would catch the train early on Tuesday mornings and ride from Harlem down to 86th St. and Broadway. It was movie day at school, and he always staked out the best seat. The year was 1970, and he walked through streets and a time that boiled with the lost, the sinister and the unsettled, up the stairs of a tired-looking old parochial school on W. 83rd St. In a fourth-floor classroom, he found magic. “That film course got me going, “Jackson would say. He died last week, at 42, of complications from a stroke. Raised by a single mother, he would go from Harlem to Harvard to Hollywood. As much as anyone, George Jackson connected American entertainment to the lives of people who lived in streets like the ones where he grew up. At 27, he was the strong, unseen hand behind “Krush Groove” the 1985 movie that did for hip hop what “Saturday Night Fever” did for disco. He ran Motown records for a couple of years, repointing the great, fallen name of his youth. At his last stop, he was helping to invent two internet companies for urban America, Soulpurpose.com and UBO.com. His bankroll was made of brains and charm, not money or connections. He learned not to squander any of it from his mother, Hettie Hogan Jackson Stancil, a manager at the Amsterdam News, and from his three years on W. 83rd St. There, he attended a tiny junior high school, Msgr. William Kelly, that gave the best promising boys, no matter what their families could pay. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Kelly became a fertile roost for blacks, Latinos, Asians and whites. All the play and study were hard. “George broke his ankle playing basketball down in the lunchroom,” said Ron Riddick, a classmate and now a corporate lawyer. “A month later, he was back playing ball, pretty successfully, by using a crutch. “The other kids tailed Jackson when he walked to the train, because no one had faster, surer fists to stand down older high school kids looking to score a bus pass or lunch money. Kelly was run by Brian Carty, a member of the Christian Brothers of DeLaSalle, who knew each kid as well as he knew the lines on his hand. The classes in math and English and history demanded so much reading, work and study that the Kelly boys had a huge head start for high school. And the film course-showing everything from “Birth of a Nation” to “Freaks” and “Rosemary’s Baby” for the Kelly seventh and eighth graders- was no different from what it would have been in any respectable college. “He used to say that he saw “Shane” 40 times, and the first one was in Brother Damian’s film class,” said Tim Brosnan, now the executive vice president for Major League Baseball, then an Irish kid from Stuyvesant Town who made a lifelong friend of Jackson. A football player at Fordham Prep and Harvard, he promoted boxing matches at college, “the start of his entertainment career,” said George Rivera, another Kelly boy who landed at Harvard. After school, Jackson took and quit a job with Procter & Gamble. He moved to California and bulled his way into a studio training program. “He didn’t have money or a place to stay, so he slept in his car right outside the Paramount lot for two or three months,” and Doug McHenry, who would become his partner. “At the crack of dawn, he’d take a shower and clean up. He used to see Barry Diller walking the lot every other morning at 5:30 a.m.” With zero film business connections, Jackson crashed a big Hollywood party by sweet-talking two starlets from a TV show to accompany him. They drove in his beat up car. “He told them, ‘I’m going to park a block away, because I don’t want to wait for the valet at the end,’” said McHenry. Of course, the security let the two gorgeous women in, and he floated in right behind them.” At the party, he met McHenry, who was already working in movies, and they produced “Krush Groove,” “New Jack City” and the UPN series “Malcolm & Eddie.” In 1997, Jackson was named to head Motown records, then a label in a free fall. The company was sold, but before he left, a classic Motown group made its first hit album in 20 years. “George was the one who backed us up and green lighted everything we wanted to do,” Otis Williams of the Temptations would say. Home in New York, he married and became a father. His old mentor from the Kelly school, Brother Brian Carty, had started a new junior high for boys and girls, DeLaSalle Academy. He immediately joined the board. He assembled a mountain of cash for the urban internet companies and worked 18 hours a day for the launch. Like many African-Americans his age, he was prone to hypertension. The athlete in him was disguised by junk food. “We talked about sparring, joining the gym, and he was ready to do it as soon as he got UBO.com launched,” said Rivera. “He was doing all the work it takes to spend a million dollars a day.” The stroke came two weeks ago. By Thursday morning, his wife, Yuko, their daughter, Kona Rose, his other, Hettie, sister, Dr. Sharon Jackson, and Brother Bobbie Stancil had said goodbye. They brought over Carty to say his farewell. His old principal missed his first day if school in decades.