After 13 years in Gardners, and a few other small Georgia towns, the 1948 class salutatorian of Carver High School in Baldwin County, took his graduated knowledge and diploma to Florida Normal Industrial College in St. Augustine, Florida, becoming a student-athlete. Though its football program ended after two years, his playing days had not, and after sending a letter to Alcorn football coach Bud Fisher, who offered him an invitation, Jesse Dixon showed up, tried out, and made the team, as one of the newest Braves on the then Alcorn A & M roster. It was the era of Jack Spinks, and with weighing only 150 pounds, he was the team’s starting center on the offensive line, making each snap of the ball the trigger for the legendary runner. Two years of football, two years of basketball, and two years of track & field, would all be a part of Jesse Dixon’s athletics at Alcorn, before moving on to his next phase of life.
Upon completing his Bachelor’s degree in education, teaching and coaching basketball for a year in Bay St. Louis Mississippi, was interrupted by a call to duty in the U.S. Military, shortly before the end of the Korean War. After two years of service, teaching and coaching resumed by 1955 in Social Circle, Georgia, where he met and married Dorothy Bailey of Decatur, Georgia, also a teacher, they enjoying the birth of three sons, and a marriage of 54 years.
By 1960, and now an elementary school principal, he accepted a position with the Dekalb County Board of Education, the leading school system in Georgia, which would create trailblazing opportunities in his career. In those years, he completed his Master’s Degree in Educational Administration, with Distinction, from the Ivy League’s Columbia University of New York, which at the time commanded the reputation as the nations foremost educational curriculum, and further, was an extremely rare accomplishment for an African American in a segregated United States. In the 1970s, now as an administrator, he was the innovator in Dekalb County for Early Childhood Education, that introduced computers into the classroom, those computers being the first of the Apple I and Apple II models, which have gone on to transform the world’s modern society.
Deciding to retire formally from education in the early 1980s, but still very much community involved, Jesse Dixon was inspired by his Georgia home roots, to launch the business, “D’s Catering Service”, that has continued for 35 plus years. Serving notably, Atlanta’s elite business community for much of that time, among the noteworthy events, was hosting a luncheon of nearly 5,000 delegates at the King Center For Nonviolent Social Change during the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
