Sara Rzeszutek - James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement

James and Esther Cooper Jackson

SARA RZESZUTEK HAVILAND

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Copyright 2015 by The University Press of Kentucky

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serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
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Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8131-6625-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8131-6626-1 (epub)
ISBN 978-0-8131-6627-8 (pdf)

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Dedicated to the memory
of my grandparents,
Wojciech and Maria Rzeszutek
and Roland and Phyllis Bibeault

When Esther Cooper met James Jackson, or Jack, as his family and friends called him, she was already committed to her principles. By 1939 she was, like Jack, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and eager to do her part to unravel the system of Jim Crow segregation that consumed the South. Over the next sixty-eight years, she and Jack fought together to promote radical change in the United States. The long black freedom movement, spanning the Popular Front, the McCarthy period, the civil rights years, and the postcivil rights era, offered the couple many avenues to navigate in their pursuit of racial and economic justice. They fought for black freedom through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and beyond. Their focus on activism was a prominent part of their marriage and family life. Esther and Jack described themselves as dedicated revolutionaries who recognized that the fight for racial and economic justice was going to be a long struggle. Their lives offer a story of freedom and repression, persistence and change, and love and activism in the long black freedom movement.

Esther and Jacks love and activism illustrate that, in the face of major political transformations, activists responded to new political contexts and drew on personal experiences to frame and reframe conversations about black freedom in the United States. Their relationship offers a way of understanding how individuals developed, adapted, and understood their own politics and participated in the black freedom movement as major events shaped the nation. The Jacksons steered themselves as a couple through difficult circumstances and continued to fight for black freedom in the twentieth-century United States, but their approaches changed as politics shifted, as their family grew, and as their relationship evolved. Their work also influenced their political viewpoints, and Esther and Jack, as individuals and as a couple, changed as a result of their activism. As a collective biography of two people who weathered the twentieth century with one another, James and Esther Cooper Jackson serves as a unique format for connecting political ideology, the black freedom movement, and individuals lives by using personal history as a reflection of and catalyst for political change.

The Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War shaped activist strategies to achieve black freedom across the twentieth century because national priorities in each period differed. While a liberal civil rights mobilization saw successes in the mid-1950s and the 1960s, a number of scholars have argued that the civil rights movement had its roots in a radical southern activist tradition dating back to the New Deal era through such groups as the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), the National Negro Congress, and the CIO. In the years known as the Popular Front period, the CPUSA took an active hand in influencing a wide-ranging progressive and leftist coalition of groups by opening up and reaching out. Activists in these years drew on communism to emphasize radical economic reform, interracial working-class unity, and equal access to opportunities and resources as a way to dismantle Jim Crow. Though these activists no doubt contributed to a long black freedom movement that fought for equality, political enfranchisement, and economic rights, whether they constituted one of the earliest stages of the civil rights movement itself is up for debate.

The context of the Cold War reformulated this early wave of protest in part because the activists in the 1930s and 1940s emphasized radical economic restructuring, a goal out of step with the mounting emphasis on capitalisms benefits after World War II. While these organizations and activists were important in the 1930s and 1940s black freedom movement, many of their strategies and goals, along with the political context in which they operated, distinguished them from the civil rights movement that emerged a decade later. If the Cold War marginalized black radicals, it also provided liberal organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the opportunity for new triumphs. Yet, pushed to the sidelines by the Cold War, these Popular Front radicals did not disappear or disengage. They reconfigured their participation in the black freedom movement as they weathered these changes, aged, and responded to new questions and demands. Their voices remained part of the struggle.

Tracing one couples political evolution across these distinct eras, organizations, and political climates offers the opportunity to study waves of social movements through the distinct lens of two individuals who worked with and loved one another. While studies of organizations or political moments offer insight into how activists mobilized in a given period, following a couple like the Jacksons across a lifetime provides an understanding of how they responded to new developments and adapted their participation in movements as they grew older and as their own needs and goals changed. Not only did dominant contexts, questions, and organizational styles shift as the couple remained active, but their own priorities, as individuals and as a couple, varied on the basis of circumstances in their personal lives. My intent is neither to lionize them nor to condemn their choices but to understand how Esther and Jack saw the various scenarios before them, interpreted their options, considered the range of consequences, and moved forward with that knowledge. This method provides insight into the texture of moments and movements as they unfolded. The Jacksons were historical actors who did great things and made mistakes, and they were also two people who, like everyone else, determined a course of action in response to their interpretation of the information available to them.