The civil rights movement was more temporally, geographically, and ideologically capacious than classical narratives convey. Not merely a post-1954 uprising rooted in Cold War liberalism, it was, as the title of this book suggests, a “long civil rights revolution” dedicated to racial and gender equality, global change, and economic justice. The eleven essays that comprise Red Activists and Black Freedom explore the ways in which African American activists Esther and James Jackson enabled and embodied this revolution. Their achievements have been largely dismissed, forgotten, or, in the words of Angela Davis, “subjugated” (103). Celebrating them and freeing those memories serves both to fill a historiographic lacuna and to reinvigorate the struggle in the service of social transformation. As the editors themselves admit, “there is nothing even-handed about these essays,” just as “there was nothing even-handed about the despairing lives of most African-Americans” in the twentieth century (x). This book, like the writings discussed by many of its authors, is a cultural product of the ongoing civil rights revolution.
James and Esther Cooper Jackson were, David Levering Lewis writes, “the dream team of the revolutionary left” (11). In her exploration of that partnership, Sara Rzeszutek persuasively argues that the Jacksons considered a marriage of equals as crucial to the political work they pursued through the Southern Negro Youth Congress and Communist Party. Their view of marriage as politics-in-action grew from their commitments, characterized by Erik McDuffie as “support for civil rights, social justice, internationalism, and radical democracy” (33). Whether organizing Virginia tobacco workers through the SNYC; analyzing the conditions of “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker,” as Esther Jackson did in her 1940 MA thesis; or assessing the corollaries between American white supremacy and European colonialism, as James Jackson did while fighting fascism in World War II, they saw what they thought as connected to what they did, and what they did as a means to achieving what they dreamed of.
Other essays pull back from the Jacksons to consider their place in the historical moment. Johnetta Richards and Robert Korstad see the SNYC and the black radical activism as emerging from the rise of what Korstad cogently has characterized as the “civil rights unionism” of the 1930s and 1940s (86). In a poignant account of a creative life cut short, Michael Anderson considers how the same currents that moved the Jacksons shaped the dynamic radicalism of playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
This volume grows out of a symposium held at New York University's Tamiment Library, and some of the essays still retain the loose, conversational rhythms of a lecture. Indeed, at times the book feels ancillary to the conference, with uneven copy-editing, inconsistent formatting, and some essays eschewing citations for no discernible reason. Nonetheless, the book contains vital ideas and compelling portraits. As Angela Davis notes, these histories continually return to the Jacksons' “personal and political passion,” so fully intertwined “that it would have been impossible to separate the personal from the political” (104). In viewing the fullness of these lives lived politically, one sees the potential for new historiographic vistas.
