Esther Cooper Jackson

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.

Early life and career Jackson was born on August 21, 1917, in Arlington, Virginia, to 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. She earned a bachelor's degree at Oberlin College in 1938 and 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". 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.

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, a Marxist theoretician who would work as a labor organizer and an official in the Communist Party USA.

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.

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.

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). .

Esther Cooper Jackson and Constance Pohl (2000). Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country: Interventions—Theory and Contemporary Politics. Boulder: Westview Press.