Ms. Jackson spent decades at the forefront of the racial justice movement—and decades more as a repository of knowledge about the social, political, and intellectual movements that helped shape the United States in the 20th century.
“Esther Cooper Jackson’s activism in the black freedom movement extends [70 years]and her contributions are almost impossible to quantify,” Sara Rzeszutek, a professor of history at St. John’s College, wrote in an email. Francis in Brooklyn and authored a book about Ms. Jackson’s activism.
“During that time, she adapted her approach to the changing times and to suit the different stages of her life, whether she was a grassroots leader in the South, a civil liberties advocate in the fight against McCarthyism, or as an editor. providing a platform for future cultural contributors,” continued Rzeszutek. “As her activism adapted and evolved, she remained steadfast in her commitment to building broad coalitions among leftist and radical leaders and groups, civil rights workers, and ordinary people who would benefit from her efforts. .”
Raised in a middle-class black family in Arlington, Va., Ms. Jackson began her career as a civil rights activist in the 1940s, when she went to Alabama to volunteer with the Southern Negro Youth Congress. She helped organize voter registration drives and became executive secretary of the organization, which was noted for including women in leadership positions. The civil rights group’s work foreshadowed that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.
Mrs. Jackson’s husband, James E. Jackson Jr., had been among the founders of SNYC in 1937. Both joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and saw their lives upended by anti-Communist fervor in the years after World War II.
James Jackson became a party official and spent years on the run after being indicted along with other party members in 1951 under the Smith Act of 1940, which outlawed advocating the violent overthrow of the government. He was convicted in 1956, but was spared prison time after the US Supreme Court essentially struck down the Smith Act in a 1957 decision.
“We tried to pick up where we left off,” Ms. Jackson said in an interview with Richmond magazine years later.
In 1961, working alongside black scholar and author WEB Du Bois, Ms. Jackson helped found Freedomways, a quarterly magazine that for a quarter century served as a showcase for black intellectuals. She became managing editor and a driving force in the periodical after publishing the works of such writers as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Derek Walcott, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Walker.
“As editor of Freedomways magazine, she shined a spotlight on liberation struggles and movements in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. She gave voices old and new a place to write and be heard,” said Maurice Jackson, a professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University after her death in an interview with People’s World, a publication that has its roots in the Daily Worker. .
Esther Victoria Cooper was born in Arlington on August 21, 1917. Her father was an Army lieutenant and her mother, a US Forest Service employee, was president of the local NAACP chapter. Ms. Jackson grew up in relative comfort in a home where learning was valued above all else, recalling that her parents once spent their money on a set of Harvard Classics rather than expensive furniture.
After graduating from Dunbar High School in Washington, Mrs. Jackson enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1938. Two years later, she received a master’s degree, also in sociology, from Fisk University, a historically black institution in Nashville. Her thesis, “The Black Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Unionism,” marked the beginning of her interest in community organizing.
She and her husband were married in 1941. After her work with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Mrs. Jackson was active with organizations including the Progressive Party, the Civil Rights Congress, the National Committee for the Defense of Negro Leadership, and the Families of the Victims of the Smith Act. She spent most of her professional life in New York City.
She and her husband, who died in 2007, were the subject of studies, including Rzeszutek’s book James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement (2015).
Survivors include their two daughters, Harriet Jackson Scarupa of Silver Spring, Md., and Kathryn Jackson of Cambridge, Mass.; a grandson; and two great-grandchildren.
Reflecting on the life of Mrs. from any kind of ideology, but instead … simply channeled the great vitality of the secular left.”
“We’ve made a lot of gains, but there are still a lot of problems,” Ms. Jackson said in 2016. “As we would say then, the fight goes on. From the beginning of this country, black people have been fighting for their rights. And it goes on; it’s different, but it continues.”
