In 1969, nineteen-year-old Jacqueline leaves Port Arthur, Texas, armed with a suitcase, a Bible, and her father’s sobering warning about race relations in America. Raised in a disciplined, faith-filled family that built its own business complex in the shadow of Jim Crow, Jacqueline has been taught to “start where you are, use what you have, and do what you can.”

But leaving home means confronting more than college classes. It means reconciling her private dreams of love, marriage and family with her father’s ambition that she become a lawyer to fight injustice. It means surviving humiliations of segregation, a devastating surgical mistake that steals her voice, and seasons of loneliness that test her faith. Through it all—through disability, discrimination, and doubt—grace proves stronger than circumstance.

Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow? is a powerful story of legacy, resilience, and agape love—a testament that from the hardest soil, something beautiful can indeed grow.

My beloved wife, Jacqueline Smith, of thirty-eight years and counting, was born in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised during the Jim Crow (segregation) era. She graduated from Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, and earned her master’s degree in Public Relations from Boston University.

She has two special-needs siblings (now living in the presence of our Lord) who never walked or talked. Since age nineteen, she is surviving the severing of her vocal cords from the errant surgeon’s scalpel during an orderly thyroidectomy. He committed suicide shortly after this surgical procedure.

In her professional career, she worked as a writer and editor for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Research Center in Waltham, MA, and as Executive Director of St. Elizabeth Hospital of Houston Foundation, the development arm for the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word.

After being a “full-time homemaker” and either pregnant or breastfeeding for seven straight years, she re-entered the working world as a part-time Bible teacher and curriculum writer for the highly rated Second Baptist Church Preschool of Houston, Texas, for ten years and for seven years at the Yellowstone Academy, a private Christian School for the lowest-income kids in Houston.

Jacqueline is a humbled, broken, and sold-out servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. She is the mother of three adult children (Ruth Abigail ’09, Furman University; Rufus the Fifth, the US Naval Academy and the University of Memphis; and Rhoda ’13, Agnes Scott College) and the grandmother of three boys, Malachi (eleven), Isaac (five), and Shiloh (eighteen months). Her style is direct rather than delicate. She is truthful but tempered by grace, and her life and lordship experience lend themselves perfectly to telling her story inCan Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow?I trust you will learn as much from her attitude toward our life-giver king as I have learned.

-Pastor Rufus Smith, her unbiased lover and admirer.