Active in the New Negro Movement and prominent in Washington, D.C.'s African American intellectual circle in the period 1910–30, she was known as "one of the first black sculptors to...deliberately use America's racial problems" as the theme of her art.

[2] She continued her art training, with the support of a full scholarship, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1895), as the first African American woman to attend PAFA,[3] studying under various known artists including the renowned American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, Paris-trained academic sculptor Charles Grafly, and John J. Boyle (who had been a student of former PAFA faculty member Thomas Eakins).

1877), offered Jackson the opportunity to accompany her and study abroad in France during this time (Fuller herself had enrolled in classes at the École des Beaux Arts).

[5] After four years of study at PAFA, Howard met and "married well" a mathematics teacher and future high school principal, William Sherman Jackson.

Because of these circumstances, in the first decade of the new century, the M Street High School found itself center stage for the nation's debate about the future of Black education.

Washington, approved to speak at the 1904 M Street Graduation,[7] recommended that Blacks focus on gaining "common school and industrial training," first and foremost.

Principal Anna J. Cooper countered this by inviting Du Bois to deliver a speech at the M Street School, in the winter of 1903, opposing vocational education as an acceptable standard for Black Americans.

Although the in-person sessions were discontinued before her portrait bust was finished, Du Bois arranged for photographs to be sent from New York so she could bring the piece to successful completion.

[13] She received a positive review from The Washington Star commending the work's structure: "the expression is vital and good, the turn of surface, the intimation of mobility are well rendered.

"[14] The Star, reviewing her bust of Assistant Attorney General WIlliam H. Lewis, later that same fall, took the compliment further, "A portrait to deserve the name must be more than a likeness; it must interpret character; it must have personality.

"[10] In 1917, Jackson exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, from whose art school, she had been rejected, on a racial basis, on her arrival in DC fifteen years before.

The event was written up in a brief newspaper piece ("First Recognition for the Race") that ran in papers across the United States as widespread as Omaha[16] and Salt Lake City.

[17] "What is said to be the first recognition of colored talent by that institution is the exhibition in Corcoran Art Gallery, at Washington, D.C. of a child's head modeled by Mrs. May Howard Jackson.

Leslie King-Hammond, an art historian, later praised Jackson's "efforts to address...without compromise and without sentimentality, the issues of race and class, especially as they affected mulattos".

She cooperated with pioneering African American anthropologist Caroline Bond Day, providing details (including photos) regarding the Howard family's racial background that would later be published in Day's 1932 Harvard University Master's thesis, ""A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States"[26] (the year following Jackson's death) Her personal experiences of racism were ongoing through her life and sour: whether her initial rejection from Corcoran Gallery or her experience with the National Academy of Design.

After showings in 1916 and 1918, the academy sent a representative to Jackson's home to ask if she was of "Negro blood"—and, on receiving an affirmative response, subsequently excluded her work from future exhibits.

[28] The Harmon Foundation exhibits, intended to showcase the works of Black female artists in America, virtually coincided with events of the Great Depression.

[30] Du Bois memorialized her death in his closing notes to the October 1931 issue of The Crisis: "With her sensitive soul, she needed encouragement and contacts and delicate appreciation.

Her "completely American" training, initially derided as a lost opportunity to study with European masters, is now seen as an element vital to her status as a woman, if not a sculptor, of "intense and lucid temperament.