Fellows and Fellow Travelers:
A moment to recognize the loss of a great activist. James and Esther's
grandson, Mark Skorupa, attended Macalester in the late 1980s and is today a
doctor in DC. James and Esther figure prominently in Robin Kelley's HAMMER AND
HOE, where he details their courageous voter registration work in rural Alabama
in the 1940s (yes, not the 1950s or 1960s!). Last fall I attended a one day
conference in their honor at the Tamiment Library of NYU on the occasion of the
opening of their personal papers to scholarly research. Angela Davis was the
keynote speaker.
Hambla khale, James Jackson.
Love and Solidarity,
Peter
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James Jackson, Rights Activist, Dies at 92
By DENNIS HEVESI
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/nyregion/07jackson.html>
September 7, 2007
James E. Jackson Jr., a civil rights activist, former
official of the American Communist Party and defendant
in a case that led the Supreme Court to rule that the
Smith Act of 1940 did not prohibit the advocacy of
violent revolution, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He
was 92 and lived in Brooklyn.
The death was announced by his daughter Harriet Jackson.
Mr. Jackson was one of 21 Communist Party members who
were indicted in 1951, at the height of the McCarthy
era, for, among other things, teaching classes on
violent revolution. The case was front-page news around
the country.
He was one of six of those defendants whose conspiracy
convictions under the Smith Act were unanimously
reversed by a federal appeals court in 1958. The
reversal was based on Yates v. United States, a 1957
Supreme Court ruling in the overall case that the mere
teaching or advocacy of an overthrow of the government
did not constitute a "call to action."
Most of the 21 defendants had been convicted and
imprisoned. But Mr. Jackson and five others went into
hiding -- "roaming the country like during the
underground railroad," his wife, Esther Cooper Jackson,
said on Wednesday. Mr. Jackson did not see his family
until 1956, when he surrendered and, with his
colleagues, was convicted of conspiracy.
The next year, with the Red Scare somewhat subsiding,
the Supreme Court issued its Yates v. United States
decision, stating that the Smith Act "requires more than
the teaching and advocacy of an abstract doctrine that
the government should be overthrown by force and
violence." The appeals court overturned the convictions,
ruling that the government had failed to prove that the
defendants had urged people to "do something" rather
than "believe in something."
The Yates decision signaled a shift toward a legal
principle that the advocacy of illegal conduct is
usually constitutionally protected, said Eugene Volokh,
a law professor and First Amendment scholar at the
University of California, Los Angeles. "You can say, 'We
think abortionists should be murdered,' and that is
usually protected," Professor Volokh said.
Mr. Jackson held important positions in the Communist
Party. In the early 1960s, he was editor of The Worker,
the successor to the party's newspaper, The Daily
Worker. Later, he was international affairs secretary
and national educational director. He joined the party
in 1947, and in 1952 became its Southern secretary and a
staunch advocate of civil rights.
"For 300 years as bondsmen and some 93 years as freemen,
under slaver's whip and Jim Crow law," Mr. Jackson wrote
in The Daily Worker in 1958, "Negro Americans have
yielded up their labor and expended their lives for the
upbuilding of this country in yet unfathomed measure."
James Edward Jackson Jr. was born in Richmond, Va., on
Nov. 29, 1914, the son of James and Clara Kersey
Jackson. His father was a pharmacist. The family lived
in a part of Richmond called Jackson Ward, a section set
aside for blacks. In 1931, when he was 16, Mr. Jackson
entered Virginia Union University. He graduated three
years later with a degree in chemistry. In 1937, he
received a degree in pharmacy from Howard University.
But in his last year at Howard, he helped start the
Southern Negro Youth Congress, which organized strikes
by tobacco workers, mostly black women, who were paid $5
a week. A union representing 5,000 tobacco workers soon
gained recognition.
"Historians view the Southern Negro Youth Congress as
the predecessor of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee," a major civil rights force in the 1960s,
said Michael Nash, director of the Tamiment Library at
New York University, where Mr. Jackson's papers are
stored.
In the late 1930s, Mr. Jackson was part of a team
contributing research to "An American Dilemma," the
groundbreaking 1944 study by Gunnar Myrdal, which raised
consciousness about race relations. Mr. Jackson's work
took him to Fisk University in Nashville, where he met
another researcher, Esther Cooper. They married in 1941.
Besides his wife and his daughter Harriet, Mr. Jackson
is survived by another daughter, Kathryn Jackson; a
grandson; and two great-grandsons.
In World War II, Mr. Jackson served in an engineer
battalion, building the Burma Road. It was an all-black
unit led by white officers.
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