Witness to History: Remembering Freedom Summer

Jack Landron

Actor and musician Jack Landron was born in 1938 in Puerto Rico but grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood of Roxbury. While attending Boston's Emerson College (as a theater arts major), he began singing in the local coffeehouses under the name Jackie Washington, quickly establishing himself as one of the most charismatic performers on the Cambridge folk scene during the advent of the folk revival in the early '60s. A committed activist, Landron traveled south to work for black voter registration, serving as a personal assistant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for a time. As an actor, Landron has worked with the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, the Negro Ensemble, the Caribbean American Repertory Theater, and the Free Southern Theater, and was a regular on NBC's Saturday morning television show The First Look. He continues to work as an actor in commercials, industrial films, and TV shows and has served as a board member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).