Boys & Girls Club Renames Highland Park Location After ‘Michigan Chronicle’ Publisher Hiram E. Jackson

Photos by Monica Morgan

As a teenager attending Detroit Country Day School, Hiram E. Jackson once got into a fight after another student disparagingly said to him: “You can take them out of Highland Park, but you can’t take the Highland Park out of them.”

But on Monday, April 7, 2025 – standing in front of hundreds of friends, family members, mentors, colleagues, elected officials, and other dignitaries at the Boys & Girls Club of Highland Park– Jackson said that hearing that exact phrase today would be a compliment of epic proportions.

The CEO of Real Times Media and Publisher of the Michigan Chronicle received the honor of a lifetime, as his childhood Boys & Girls Club – where he became a member in 1971 at the age of 6 – was renamed in his honor following a $2 million renovation. With the dedication, the Hiram E. Jackson Club is the first of all the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan to be named after an African American.

For the past five decades, Jackson has been an “all-in” member of the club. As a child, he attended daily. The Boys & Girls Club of Highland Park was his first job, where he started working as a coat checker in the very room where he spoke during the club’s renaming on Monday. He returned frequently as a young adult, volunteering his time and money to support programming and community initiatives. Later, Jackson’s dedication to the club led him to a seat on the BGCSM board, and ultimately, he became the first Black chairman of the BGCSM board, where he served for more than five years and helped select the organization’s current president and CEO.

“Everything that I’ve ever done and everything that I’ve hoped to do is rooted in the time I spent as a youth at the Boys and Girls Club. It’s something that is very much a part of my DNA. I’ve witnessed the impact that it can have on children, on families, and on communities. That’s why I’m so committed to it. It’s really how I got to Detroit Country Day and how I got to Cornell,” Jackson said. “It’s kind of like when you build a house, you build a basement first as your foundation. The Boys & Girls Club is very much my foundation, and the things that have come after that have been successful because I just have an amazing foundation from not just my wonderful parents, but from being a Club kid.”