Jackson, Esther Cooper, 1917-2022

James E. Jackson (1914-2007) and Esther Cooper Jackson (1917- ) are African American communists and civil rights activists, best known for their role in founding and leading the Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-1948). Both were raised in middle-class families with histories of civil rights activism. James Jackson, Sr. was a druggist in Richmond, Virginia. Raised in Arlington, Virginia, Esther Cooper's father was a lieutenant in the U.S. army, and her mother worked in the U.S. Forestry Service during World War I and later became actively involved in the Arlington, Virginia chapter of the NAACP and in local school desegregation campaigns. James Jackson graduated from Virginia Union University in 1934, and at Howard University (the alma mater of his parents) graduated from the College of Pharmacy in 1937. After attending Dunbar High School in Washington D.C., Esther Cooper graduated from Oberlin College in 1938, then completed her master's degree at Fisk University in 1940, writing as her thesis Negro Women Domestic Workers in Relation to Trade Unionism. James Jackson joined the Communist Party in 1931, and Esther Cooper joined in 1939. The couple met in 1939 (they married in 1941) when Jackson was staying at Fisk while working for Ralph Bunche as an investigator for what would become Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

The Southern Negro Youth Congress, a communist-led popular front organization, conceived at the first National Negro Congress in 1936, held its first annual conference, organized by James Jackson and Ed Strong, in Richmond, in February, 1937. Jackson and Cooper played leading roles throughout the SNYC's first decade, as indicated by its letterhead from 1946, where Cooper is the Executive Secretary, Jackson the Special Projects Director, and their fellow-communists and close friends Louis and Dorothy Burnham were, respectively, Organizational Secretary and Educational Director. In 1938 Jackson helped lead the successful organizing of the United Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers Union Local 279 in Richmond. In 1939 the SNYC moved is headquarters to Birmingham, Alabama, with its large concentration of African American industrial workers. Under is slogan "Freedom, Equality, Opportunity," the SNYC campaigned for the full range civil, economic, political, and social rights for African Americans. Activities and issues included, in addition to supporting labor organizing (including domestic workers), campaigns against lynching, police brutality and the poll tax, for the right to vote and an end to segregation, for an end to employment discrimination (sometimes via consumer boycotts), and during World War II, for enforcement of the U.S. Fair Employment Practices Committee's resolution 8802 barring discrimination in war industries. The SNYC also published the periodical Cavalcade: The March of Southern Youth, and supported educational and cultural activities, including "People's Theaters." The SNYC held its last conference in 1948, and the pressure of Cold War anti-communism led to its subsequent dissolution. However, SNYC members went on to play important roles in the civil rights movement of the 19650s-60s, including E.D. Nixon, and several became elected officials.

Jackson entered the army in 1943 and served in the Burma theatre for some eighteen months, attainting the rank of sergeant, and during which time he and Esther corresponded daily. In the fall of 1945, Esther attended the World Youth Congress in London, where she met W.E.B. Du Bois, beginning a close association with the Jacksons culminating in his decision to join the Communist Party in 1961. In 1946 Jackson became State Chairman of the Communist Party of Louisiana. In 1947 the Jacksons moved to Detroit, where they shared a house with future Detroit mayor Coleman Young, and where James Jackson began work as a Party organizer among the autoworkers, while Esther Cooper Jackson was active in the local branches of the Progressive Party and of the Civil Rights Congress, another popular front organization. In 1951 the Jacksons moved to New York and James was named Southern Director of the Communist Party. Later that year he was indicted under the Smith Act (charged with advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government) and went underground to avoid arrest, while Esther Cooper Jackson worked for the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership and the Families of Smith Act Victims. Emerging five years later, Jackson was sentenced to prison, although he did not serve time as the Smith Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
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Thereafter, James Jackson served as a full-time Party official, including as a member of its leading Political Bureau, and as Education Director and as International Affairs Secretary, in which capacity he traveled throughout the Communist countries and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Esther Cooper Jackson helped found in 1961 the influential African American political and cultural quarterly, Freedomways, and served as its editor throughout its publication, from 1961 to 1986. James Jackson retired in 1991, in the aftermath of the 1991 split in the CPUSA.

<p>Esther Cooper Jackson (born August 21, 1917 in Arlington, Virginia) is an African-American civil rights activist, former social worker and, along with Shirley Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Strong, and Louis E. Burnham, was one of the founding editors of the magazine Freedomways, a theoretical, political and literary journal published from 1961 to 1985. She was married to James E. Jackson (1914–2007), an influential labor activist.</p>

<p>Jackson came from a family active in their community. Throughout Esther's youth, her mother Esther Georgia Irving Cooper served as President of the Arlington branch of the NAACP and was involved in the struggle for civil rights, particularly in efforts to achieve equality in the quality of children's education. Esther attended segregated schools as a child but went on to study at Oberlin College and to earn a master's degree in sociology from Fisk University in 1940. Her 1940 thesis was "The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism." Upon graduation, she received a Rosenwald Fellowship to support a study on the attitudes of black youth toward World War II. She had been planning to conduct the study as part of her studies for a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. Her life went into a different direction when she instead decided joined the Southern Negro Youth Congress.</p>

<p>Of her upbringing and family, Jackson recounted:</p>
<p>Our parents always told us that if we got the grades, and passed the tests, that they would make sure that we would go to any college of our choice. So, they didn't go in for a lot of expensive furniture or anything else - we had lots of books, and at home reading of poetry, we had the Harvard Classics and all that. Their values were passed on to us.</p>
<p>After graduate school, Jackson became a member of the staff of the Voting Project in Birmingham, Alabama for the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). While working with SNYC she met her future husband James E. Jackson. In an interview with Ian Rocksborough-Smith in 2004, Jackson explained that her husband James Jackson and the SNYC had in 1937 helped tobacco workers in Virginia successfully agitate for an 8-hour day and pay increases. The tobacco workers held the first strike in Virginia since 1905, and their gains, according to C. Alvin Hughes, "helped SNYC earn a following among the black working class in the South". Originally intending only to stay for one summer, Jackson remained in Alabama for seven years, engaged in the struggle to bring down Jim Crow segregation. For seven years as a prominent leader of SNYC, Esther Cooper Jackson worked with her husband, James Jackson, a prominent labor organizer and Marxist theoretician, Louis and Dorothy Burnham, Ed Strong, Sallye and Frank Davis – parents of the Davis sisters, Angela and Fania – and numerous others, conducting many campaigns promoting the rights of Blacks and poor whites. SNYC's agitation for the integration of the public transportation systems was expected of the work it did digging the Southern soil which became important in preparation for the struggles later on in the 1950s and 1960s.</p>

<p>In 1952, she moved to New York City. She turned 100 in August 2017.</p>