Esther Cooper Jackson

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.

Jackson came from a family active in their community. Throughout Esther's youth, her mother 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." . Two years later, she earned a Master of Arts degree in sociology from Fisk University, where she wrote her thesis on domestic workers in relation to trade. 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.

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.

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.

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