This story, related by Jackson’s longtime friend Danny Rubin, illustrates Jackson’s spirit of optimistically fighting racism and oppression, a trait he carried with him until September 1, 2007—the day he died.
Today racism remains a critical problem across America. But in the 1930s, Jim Crow segregation still held sway in many states, lynchings were commonplace. It was during this period, in 1937, that Jackson, after graduating pharmacy school at Howard University, went on to organize in the Deep South. In consultation with the YCL, he went on to help found the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and played a leading role in the organization along with his wife of 66 years, Esther, a hero in her own right. Jackson only interrupted this work when he was drafted in 1943.
Rubin stressed that the work of Jackson and others in the SNYC and the Communist movement laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s. “Historians now,” he said, “are just starting to get it right.” For years, they had been treating these groups as irrelevant to the movement of the 1960s.
Many organizations Jackson helped build, including the Communist Party USA and Young Communist League, trained later civil rights leaders, including Rosa Parks. There was no “great divide” between the leaders and organizers of the 1930s and 40s and those of the 1960s; there was, in reality, much overlap. Jackson himself knew or worked with virtually every main organizer and leader of the civil rights movement, including E. D. Nixon, head of the Montgomery bus boycott organization, in the 30s and 40s, and Dr. King in the 1960s.
Until now, historians have tried to downplay a fact that is coming to the fore: The SNYC’s struggles in the 1930s and 40s contributed to and shaped the 1960s. NAACP chair Julian Bond, also a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) said that “SNYC was a model of what Black youth should and ought to do…[it] preceded us, dared as we dared, dreamed as we dreamed.”
The struggle for equality wasn’t easy. If you worked to fight racism in the South in the 1930s, you never knew if you would come home alive. Jackson risked his life escaping would-be assassins while organizing Virginian workers into the Tobacco Workers and Stemmers Industrial Union. He took the same chances organizing New Orleans longshoremen, and registering southern voters.
Jackson was a pillar in the Communist Party. He was editor of The Worker, the predecessor to the People’s Weekly World. He was a theoretician, writing many articles and two books: The Bold, Bad ‘60s (1992) and Revolutionary Tracings (1974). He was a regional organizer in the south as well as Party secretary for Louisiana. He helped build coalitions that elected Communist councilmen in New York City and brought forth New Deal legislation like Social Security. He recruited, trained, and taught many comrades in the Party, including Lieutenant Bob Hammond, whom he served under in Burma from 1943-48 during WWII. Hammond would become a union organizer himself. Jackson seriously impacted the lives of everyone he came across, friend or foe.
At the sixteenth convention of the CPUSA, held in 1957, Jackson, then chair of a special commission on strategy for Black liberation, delivered a report that led to a radical change in the Party’s strategy for African American liberation
Previously, the CPUSA advocated the “Black Belt” strategy, arguing that a section of Southern states formed a Black nation that deserved self-determination, up to and including secession. But in Jackson’s report, he argued that the struggle for African American freedom was everywhere throughout the country. In addition, it was a struggle for full equality—economic, political and social. At the time, the tendency throughout the movement was to call for simple formal equality. But Jackson argued that the conditions that slavery and Jim Crow imposed on the African American people required compensatory measures—making the Communist Party one of, if not the, first organizations in the country to call for compensatory measures to fully equalize their conditions of life. To achieve that, Jackson argued, would require maximum unity of the African American people, with the working class sector in the lead as much as possible. Also necessary was an alliance with other nationally oppressed peoples and with the working class as whole.
He characterized this struggle as “within a broad multiracial coalition of the oppressed and exploited to put an end to the rule of the monopoly successors of the slave power.” He also asserted that in the U.S. racism and capitalism were so intertwined that the African American struggle for equality was central to the struggle for democracy and progress.
This position, immensely important today, was critical when, at the nineteenth convention in 1969, Jackson challenged the strategy of the Black Panther Party. In this speech, Jackson started out by underscoring that the Party was completely opposed to the persecution of the BPP, and the police provocations. Jackson also recognized that throughout the history of this country, especially in the South, African Americans had a gun in the house to protect from lynch mobs, vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan. This was part of a fundamental right of self defense, but different from the Black Panthers’ strategy, which said that the fight for freedom would follow a path of armed struggle. Jackson argued that such a policy did not fit the actual relationship of forces in the United States. Nonetheless, Jackson and the Communist Party stood in solidarity with the Panthers when nearly every major BPP leader was assassinated.
Jackson made a big impact in the Party and in the broader freedom struggles. Perhaps this is why the FBI targeted him, along with other Party leaders, for arrest.
In 1951, under the Smith Act, a second group of national leaders of the Communist Party were indicted for “conspiring to teach the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” While some stood trial, Jackson and others went underground. Jackson emerged in 1956 to stand trial; W. E. B. Dubois testified in his defense and Ralph Bunche, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote a statement in his defense. Still, he was convicted and would have spent years in prison, except that the Supreme Court nullified the penalties of the Smith Act as unconstitutional in 1958.
James Jackson’s life also reflected his unwavering internationalism and commitment to peace. A member of the Executive of the World Peace Council, he visited North Vietnam at the height of U.S. bombing and he was the last American reporter to interview Ho Chi Minh.
“Vietnam was not seeking a military victory over the U.S. but wanted a respectful negotiation for peace and withdrawal, something many in the U.S. peace movement did not understand at the time,” stated Rubin, Jackson’s friend. His role was to express the wishes of the Vietnamese to the American peace movement. He later played another important role: helping to end apartheid in South Africa. He privately met with Oliver Tambo, head of the African National Congress (ANC) while Nelson Mandela was in prison, to discuss the path to freedom in their respective countries. He also helped many emerging Marxist parties in Africa develop a strategic outlook.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and an ensuing disagreement within the Communist Party USA, James Jackson withdrew from the Party. But Jackson never left the struggle for equality. He remained active in educating people about Black struggles in the 1930s and 1940s through speaking events and working with historians to set the record straight. At a National Committee meeting of the Party in 2003, he was recognized for his life’s work and he expressed confidence in the future of the Party and socialism.
At James Jackson’s memorial service, Danny Rubin said, “To me the essence of Jim Jackson was his love for his family, his love for his class and people, for Marxism and socialism, to which he devoted his life … I believe that with the passage of time and struggle, James Jackson and the other giants of our progressive history will come to be household names.”
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