Esther Cooper Jackson

Esther Victoria Cooper Jackson (born August 21, 1917 in Arlington, Virginia; died August 23, 2022 in Boston, Massachusetts) was a civil rights activist, social worker, magazine editor and executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress.

Esther was the daughter of George Posea Cooper and Esther Georgia Irving Cooper, who served as president of the Arlington branch of the NAACP. She attended segregated schools as a child, graduating from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington D.C. She earned her bachelor's degree at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio in 1938 and went on to complete a master's degree in sociology from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1940, with a thesis entitled "The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism". After graduating she accepted a Rosenwald Fellowship researching the attitudes of young Black Americans toward World War II.

She had planned to parlay her fellowship research for a doctoral program at the University of Chicago, but during a summer she joined a colleague from Fisk, James E. Jackson at a voting project led by the Southern Negro Youth Conference in Birmingham. They married in 1941.

The couple remained in Birmingham, working with Louis and Dorothy Burnham, Ed Strong, Frank and Sallye Davis and others to promote the organization by organizing local councils, and in a larger sense, to empower Black and White workers. Though the group had no formal ties to the Communist Party, many of them, including James Jackson, had been inspired by socialist political movements. As she put it, "Marxism taught my husband to seek the answer here in an alliance of the Negro people with white workers for immediate social gains and the eventual establishment of a social system in which economic exploitation and Jim Crow oppression would be profitable to no one and would cease to exist."

Her Rosenweld project was the basis for a SNYC delegation to Washington D.C. in May 1942 where she participated in meetings with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Attorney General Francis Biddle and others to advise on efforts to enlist Southern Black youth into the war effort.

Locally, SNYC also worked on efforts to eliminate poll taxes and lobbied the Birmingham Park and Recreation Board to reopen the swimming pool at Tuxedo Park. In January 1946 they organized marches for Black veterans denied voter registration. Esther Jackson served as a delegate to the 1945 World Youth Congress in London, and chaired the American Subcommittee on Problems of Dependent Peoples. In 1948 SNYC supported the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace.

During what became known as the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and 1950s, SNYC, which did have significant overlap with Communist Party organizing, was labeled an enemy of the United States. Most of the Birmingham group relocated to Brooklyn, New York. The Jacksons made the move in 1951. James was indicted under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 and became a fugitive to avoid prosecution. The FBI kept her and her two young daughters under constant surveillance. The law was repealed in 1952. Esther wrote a pamphlet about the family's persecution which was published by the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership in 1953.

Esther was part of the group that launched the monthly newspaper, Freedom, which featured a column by Paul Robeson.

After Louis Burnham's death in 1960, Esther and James Jackson worked with W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, John Oliver Killens, Jack O'Dell, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Lorraine Hansberry and others to bring to life his goal of launching a quarterly literary journal, which was entitled Freedomways. Jackson served as managing editor of the periodical, which had a global influence and has been deemed a key precursor to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Esther Jackson lived in a retirement community in Boston until her death, which came two days after her 105th birthday.

References

• Adams, Oscar W. (March 10, 1946) "What Negroes Are Doing." The Birmingham News, p. 8B
• Willis, Samantha (November 22, 2016) "Q&A: Esther Cooper Jackson." Richmond magazine