The Jacksons / Robin D.G. Kelley -- James and Esther Jackson : a historical assessment / David Levering Lewis -- Fundamentally determined : James E. Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson and the Southern Negro Youth Congress -- 1937-1946 / Johnetta Richards -- Esther V. Cooper's "The Negro woman domestic worker in relation to trade unionism" : Black left feminism and the popular front / Erik S. McDuffie -- "All those rosy dreams we cherish" : James Jackson and Esther Cooper's marriage on the front lines of the double victory campaign / Sara E. Rzeszutek -- FREEDOMWAYS / Michael Nash and Daniel J. Leab -- James and Esther Jackson : a personal perspective / Maruice Jackson -- "Death for Negro lynching!" The Communist party, USA's position on the African American question / Timothy Johnson -- Civil rights unionism and the Black freedom struggle / Robert Korstad -- Lorraine Hansberry's freedom family / Michael Anderson -- James and Esther Jackson : connecting the past to the present / Angela Davis.

"A continuing evolving process" : the predecessors and origins of the civil rights and black power movements -- America's second civil war -- Power to the people : black power -- The art of war : the cultural productions of the 1950s and 1960s era black freedom struggles -- "A larger freedom" : the strengths, weaknesses, and legacies of the civil rights and black power movements

This dual biography “examines the ideas and activism of two of the most committed and significant freedom fighters in twentieth-century America” (Erik Gellman, author of Death Blow to Jim Crow). Growing up in Virginia during the Great Depression, James E. Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson understood that opportunities came differently for blacks and whites, men and women, rich and poor. They devoted their lives to the black freedom movement and saw a path to racial equality through the Communist Party. This political affiliation would come to define not only their activism but also the course of their marriage as the Cold War years unfolded. In this dual biography, Sara Rzeszutek examines the couple's political involvement as well as the evolution of their personal and public lives in the face of ever-shifting contexts. She documents the Jacksons' contributions to the early civil rights movement, discussing their time leading the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which laid the groundwork for youth activists in the 1960s; their writings in periodicals such as Political Affairs; and their editorial involvement in The Worker and the civil rights magazine Freedomways. Drawing upon correspondence, organizational literature, and interviews with the Jacksons themselves, Haviland presents a portrait of a remarkable pair who lived during a transformative period of American history. Their story offers a vital narrative of persistence, love, and activism across the long arc of the black freedom movement.

Sarah C. Dunstan constructs a narrative of black struggles for rights and citizenship that spans most of the twentieth century, encompassing a wide range of people and movements from France and the United States, the French Caribbean and African colonies. She explores how black scholars and activists grappled with the connections between culture, race and citizenship and access to rights, mapping African American and Francophone black intellectual collaborations from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to the March on Washington in 1963. Connecting the independent archives of black activist organizations within America and France with those of international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Comintern, Dunstan situates key black intellectuals in a transnational framework. She reveals how questions of race and nation intersected across national and imperial borders and illuminates the ways in which black intellectuals simultaneously constituted and reconfigured notions of Western civilization.

A groundbreaking collection of essays on the civil rights movement focusing on smaller, regional civil organizations across the country - not just in the South.

In this exciting work of historical recovery, Dayo F. Gore unearths and examines a dynamic, extended community of black radical women during the early Cold War, including established Communist Party activists such as Claudia Jones, artists and writers such as Beulah Richardson, and lesser-known organizers such as Vicki Garvin and Thelma Dale. These women were part of a black left that laid much of the groundwork for both the social movements of 1960s and later strains of black radicalism. --

This book deals with the forgotten history of the civil rights movement. The American Left played a significant part in the origins of that movement, whose history has traditionally been focused on the later 1940's and early 1950's. This approach needs serious re-thinking in light of what took place in the later 1930's with the organization and activity of groups like the Southern Negro Youth Congress that brought both African-American and white workers and students together in the fight for economic and social justice. Thanks to the post-World War II Red Scare such groups as well as Left African-American leaders like Esther and James Jackson have been overlooked or excised from an exciting, controversial, and important story. With all due credit to the churches which played such a pivotal role in finally winning Blacks their civil rights, the early history involving the Left, workers of both races, and the labor unions must be assimilated into America's memory, for there were important continuities between what they did and the later church-based struggle. This book was published as a special issue of American Communist History.