Esther Cooper Jackson

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Esther Cooper Jackson
Arlington, Virginia, U.S.
DiedAugust 23, 2022(2022-08-23) (aged 105)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma mater
Occupation(s)Civil rights activist, social worker
Known forFreedomways
Spouse
James E. Jackson
​
​
(m. 1941; died 2007)​
Children2

Esther Victoria Cooper Jackson (August 21, 1917 – August 23, 2022) was an American civil rights activist, social worker, and communist activist. She worked with Shirley Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Strong, and Louis E. Burnham, and was one of the founding editors of the magazine Freedomways, a theoretical, political and literary journal published from 1961 to 1985. She also served as organizational and executive secretary at the Southern Negro Youth Congress.[1]

Early life and career

Jackson was born on August 21, 1917, in Arlington, Virginia, to George Posea Cooper and

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.[6]

Of her upbringing and family, Jackson recounted:

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.[3]

In 1945 she was a delegate to the World Youth Congress in London and served as the chairman of the American Subcommittee on Problems of Dependent Peoples.[7]

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, a Marxist theoretician who would work as a labor organizer and an official in the Communist Party USA.[4] In a 2004 interview, she explained that her husband and the SNYC had in 1937 helped tobacco workers in Virginia successfully agitate for an eight-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".[8]

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, 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 important in preparation for the struggles later on in the 1950s and 1960s.[6]

Freedomways

In New York of 1961, Jackson became managing editor of Freedomways, created by Esther Jackson, along with Louis Burnham,

Julius K. Nyerere, Agostinho Neto, and Jomo Kenyatta and Caribbean leftist C. L. R. James, as well as African-American authors such as James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Paul Robeson, Nikki Giovanni, and Lorraine Hansberry. The most prominent African-American artists like Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Elizabeth Catlett contributed cover art gratis to support the magazine, which was read worldwide. Uniting the Southern and Northern US civil rights struggles of the 1960s with an international viewpoint taking in Pan-Africanism and other cultural and political currents, the magazine is often viewed as a precursor of the Black Arts Movement.[9]

Personal life

Jackson and her husband, James E. Jackson, married in 1941, and had two children. They moved to Brooklyn in 1951, and remained married until his death in 2007.[4] In 2015, Jackson moved to a retirement facility in Boston,[4] where she died on August 23, 2022, two days after her 105th birthday.[4][10]

Works

  • The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism, M.A. thesis, Fisk University, 1940, excerpts reprinted in Viewpoint Magazine 5 (October 2015).
    OCLC 60976760
    .
  • "This Is My Husband: Fighter for His People, Political Refugee". National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership. 1953.
  • Esther Cooper Jackson and Constance Pohl (2000). Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country: Interventions—Theory and Contemporary Politics. Boulder: Westview Press.

References

  1. ^ "Freedomways (1961-1985) •". December 18, 2009.
  2. ISBN 978-0822350507
    .
  3. ^ a b c "Fighting for Justice – Videos – Esther Cooper Jackson". www.nyc.gov.
  4. ^ a b c d e Roberts, Sam (September 1, 2022). "Esther Cooper Jackson, 105, Dies; Pioneer of Civil Rights Movement". The New York Times. p. B11. Retrieved September 3, 2022.
  5. ^ "Upon These Shoulders: Happy 100th Mrs. Esther Cooper Jackson ..." www.ourtimepress.com. August 25, 2017. Retrieved March 10, 2018.
  6. ^ a b "Esther Cooper Jackson, Social Worker born".
  7. ^ Adams, Oscar W. (March 10, 1946). "What Negroes Are Doing". The Birmingham News. p. 8B.
  8. ^ Rocksborough-Smith, Ian, "Bearing the Seeds of Struggle", MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2005.
  9. ISBN 978-0-8131-6625-4
    .
  10. ^ Johnson, Timothy V. (August 30, 2022). "Esther Jackson, 105: Life reflected the 20th century struggle for equality". People's World. Retrieved September 3, 2022.

Further reading

External links
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