Abstract
Esther Cooper Jackson was uneasy. Someone was knocking on the front door of her apartment in the predominately black Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Was it the FBI, she wondered? For seven months, agents had been trailing her and her two daughters wherever they went, in search of her missing husband, James E. Jackson, Jr., a black U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) leader and a longtime advocate for racial justice and equality Jackson had gone underground to avoid arrest soon after his June 1951 indictment—along with eleven other “second string” Communist leaders—for allegedly violating the 1940 Smith Act, a law that forbade the advocacy of violently overthrowing the U.S. government.1 Neither he nor his comrades advocated such a program. However, it was the height of the McCarthy period, when cold warriors viewed demands for civil rights and peace and criticisms of U.S. cold war domestic and foreign policy as subversive. Jackson remained underground until December 1955. During his nearly five years in hiding, neither his wife nor their two young daughters had any contact with him.2
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Notes
Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCathyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 145–147
Ellen Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Palgrave, 2002)
Esther Cooper Jackson, This Is My Husband: Fighter for His People, Political Refugee (Brooklyn: National Committee for the Defense of Negro Leadership, 1953)
James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Communism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 238–242.
Esther Cooper Jackson and James E. Jackson, Jr., interview by author, April 2, 1998, Brooklyn, NY (hereafter Jackson interview April 2, 1998); Esther Cooper Jackson and James E. Jackson, Jr., interview by author, August 13, 1998, Brooklyn, NY (hereafter Jackson interview August 13, 1998); For how cold warriors interpreted peace as subversive, see Robbie Lieberman, The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism and the U.S. Peace Movement 1945–1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000)
Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 151–199.
For a useful discussion of the Popular Front, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997).
Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality Since 1865 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), 158
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 200–202
Augusta Strong, “Southern Youth’s Proud Heritage,” Freedomways 4 (Winter 1964): 35–50.
For example, black women radicals receive only superficial treatment in canonical texts on African American women’s protest, such as historian Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999)
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Quill, 1984).
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 97–113
Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (New York: Grove Press, 1983)
Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
Erik S. McDuffie, “A ‘new freedom movement of Negro women’: Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights during the Early Cold War,” Radical History Review 101 (Spring 2008): 81–106
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)
Mary Helen Washington, “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 185
Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 69.
Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43 (April 2000): 11–45
Brent Hayes Edwards, “‘Unfinished Migrations’: Commentary and Response,” African Studies Review 43 (April 2000): 47–68
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)
Earl Lewis, “‘To Turn as on a Pivot’: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 765–787.
With some variations in their arguments and often mindful that some veteran black radicals politically survived the 1950s, these texts view the Cold War as a key turning point in the black freedom movement, see Horne, Black and Red; Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956 (London: Associated University Press, 1988)
Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York: New York University Press, 2005)
Gerald Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994)
Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008)
Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 58–59
Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)
James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3
James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 54–56
The term “personal cost” of activism is taken from Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
Elaine Tyler May, “Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb,” in Recasting America, Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) quoted in Deborah A. Gerson, “‘Is Family Devotion Now Subversive?’ Familialism against McCarthyism,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed., Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 166
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
McDuffie, “Long Journeys,” 285–302; Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 33–68
Della Scott, “An Interview with Esther Jackson,” Abafazi: The Simmons College Journal of Women of African Descent 9 (Fall/Winter 1999): 4
Jacksons, by author, August 13, 1998, 6; Jacksons, by author, April 2, 1998, 3–7; Cooper Jackson, telephone interview by author, November 17, 2002; Esther Cooper Jackson, telephone conversation by author, January 23, 2003; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 204; David L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 518–519
Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 200–201; Augusta Jackson (Strong), “A New Deal for Tobacco Workers,” Crisis 45 (October 1938): 322–324
Danielle McGuire, “‘It Was like All of US Had Been Raped’: Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle,” Journal of American History 91 (December 2004): 911–912.
McAdory initially worked as a clerical worker in the SNYC office, where she gained her first experience as a writer. She eventually moved to New York in the late 1940s and joined the writing staff of the CPUSA’s Daily Worker newspaper. Communist Party of the USA Records: Biographical Files on Communist Activists and Leaders, Box 5, Folder 47, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York; “Youth Leader Jailed and Beaten by Alabama Police,” December 12, 1942, Jackson Papers, SNYC Box, SNYC: Documents, Publications, and Clippings, 1942; Dorothy Burnham, interview by author, August 10, 1999; Brooklyn; “Mildred McAdory Edelman,” memorial service program, Dorothy Burnham personal papers, in author’s possession; E. D. Nixon to Esther Cooper, September 8, 1944, Jackson personal papers; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 74
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home, Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 90–91
Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–35.
Athena D. Mutua, Progressive Black Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Mark Antony Neal, New Black Man (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Jacksons, interview August 13, 1998; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 206; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 105–147
For discussions of more traditionally defined gender roles in black protest movements and masculinist articulations of black freedom during the twentieth century, see Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 288–301
Ula Y. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
Barbara Bair, “True Women, Real Men: Gender, Ideology, and Social Roles in the Garvey Movement,” in Gender Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, ed., Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)
Rhonda M. Williams, “Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality, Sexuality, and Gender,” in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 136–156
E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter-Discourse and African American Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 2 (Spring 1990): 73–97.
Flyer for the Jackson’s appearance at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, March 17, 1946, Esther I. Cooper Papers, Box 4, Esther V. Cooper folder, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Louis E. Burnham to Rev. H. C. Carter, March 4, 1946; Louis E. Burnham to Mrs. Annie Belle Weston, March 13, 1946; Louis E. Burnham to Dr. F. D. Patterson, March 4, 1946, Louis E. Burnham to Ms. Winifred Norman, March 4, 1946; Modjeska M. Simpkins to Louis E. Burnham, March 17, 1946; SNYC Papers, Box 2, Jackson Lecture Tour folder; Barbara Woods, “Modjeska Simkins and the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, 1939–1957,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, ed. Vicki Crawford, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 99–120
Du Bois’ speech eloquently argued that the South “was the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 332
Jacksons, interview by author, April 10, 1999; McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 50–51, 62–64, 95, 98; Dorothy Burnham, interview by author, April 10, 1999, Brooklyn, NY; Dorothy Burnham, interview by author, October 26, 2001, Brooklyn, NY; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 220–231; Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 12–48
George Lewis, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004).
Ibid., 158, Jackson, interview by author August 13, 1998; Esther Cooper Jackson, conversation with author, June 10, 2007; Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life, 1925–1975 (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1977), 194–204.
I should note that this author did request interviews of Harriet Jackson Scarupa and Kathryn Jackson; however, they respectfully declined my invitation. Several studies such as Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro’s edited anthology, Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)
Bettina F. Aptheker’s memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006)
Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 3
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 145–147
For a discussion of the Communist Left’s silence on matters of sexuality and antipathy toward homosexuality during the 1950s, see Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 103; Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1982), 149
Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party, USA, 1930–1940,” Socialist Review 45 (May–June 1979): 106–107
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 184–188.
One exception to this assertion was author and playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose lesbian identity and pro-gay stance in her writings, especially in the Ladder, the magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis, have recently gained some attention from scholars. See LNH, untitled letter The Ladder (May 1957): 26–28 Lorraine Hansberry, “Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex, An Unfinished Essay-in-Progress,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed., Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 128–142
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 185–229
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 912–920.
Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 130–138
Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121
Andrea Friedman, “The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and McCarthyism,” Journal of American History 94 (September 2007): 456.
E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 6.
Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, 45. The initial idea for a progressive black political and literary quarterly originated with Cooper Jackson’s old SNYC comrades—Louis Burnham and Ed Strong, both of whom died tragically before Freedomways started. She followed through with the idea. Advised by W. E. B. Du Bois, she organized a collective to launch the journal’s first issue in the spring of 1961. Esther Cooper Jackson, ed., Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), XIX–XXX.
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© 2009 Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang
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McDuffie, E.S. (2009). The March of Young Southern Black Women: Esther Cooper Jackson, Black Left Feminism, and the Personal and Political Costs of Cold War Repression. In: Lieberman, R., Lang, C. (eds) Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620742_4
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