Contemporary Authors

• James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 2015

• Kentucky Press - http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=3644#.WMi3MxIrJR0

  Sara Rzeszutek Haviland is assistant professor of history at St. Francis College. She has contributed chapters to Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement and Red Activists and Black Freedom: James and Esther Jackson and the Long Civil Rights Revolution.

• American Historical Association - https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/tuning-the-history-discipline/tuning-participants/sara-haviland

  Sara Haviland

  Sara HavilandSara Rzeszutek Haviland earned her PhD in US history from Rutgers University in 2009. She has been an assistant professor of history at St. Francis College in Brooklyn since 2011. Her teaching and research interests focus on the intersections of politics and social movements in the United States. Her current project explores how the Cold War influenced the personal and family lives of black Communists and, in turn, shaped the course of the civil rights movement. Her interest in the Tuning Project comes from her current work with Dr. Eric Platt to revise the St. Francis history curriculum so that it reflects the diversity of the student body, takes full advantage of the abundant historical and cultural resources in Brooklyn, and produces majors who can articulate the benefits of a history degree and apply it to their careers and community lives.

• Mount Holyoke - https://www.mtholyoke.edu/stories/62839/thesis-book

  From Thesis to Book

  Sara R. Haviland visiting Esther Jackson at her home in Brooklyn, New York

  Sara Rzeszutek Haviland '03, Assistant Professor of History
  Major: History, Spanish minor

  Awards: Almara Grant

  Advanced degrees: Ph.D., History, Rutgers University

  Employer: Department of Economics, History, and Political Science, St. Francis College

  My first book, James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement, comes out later this year. This project is the culmination of 13 years of work, and it started as my senior thesis in the Mount Holyoke History Department.

  The thesis, a study of an organization James and Esther Cooper Jackson ran called the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), grew out of a paper I wrote during my junior year on black internationalism in World War II. I had a vague sense of how historians conducted research and I knew that I wanted to do the same. But like most other skills, historical research is something you really only learn by doing, and I was lucky that Mount Holyoke provided the opportunity to realize my goal.

  As I was planning to expand the project, Professor Holly Hanson and Professor Mary Renda encouraged me to try oral history. I reached out to others who had written on related topics, one of whom put me in touch with James and Esther Cooper Jackson. I applied for and won an Almara grant in the fall of my senior year, which gave me the opportunity to travel to conduct research and oral histories without financial or geographic limitations.

  I purchased a tape recorder and visited James and Esther Cooper Jackson in their Brooklyn apartment. I was nervous, and I felt a bit out of my depth at first. I was a very quiet twenty-one year old, and I was talking with two people in their eighties who had spent their lives working with important organizations, who had been friends with W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis, and who had used their lives to fight for change.

  They directed me to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, and I spent about a week there using the SNYC papers. I had not done my own research in an archive before, and I learned not just about the SNYC, but also about research itself, as the visit progressed. With each step, I felt more and more legitimate as a historian. When I defended the final project, and I found the sense of accomplishment a bit addictive, and it solidified my interest in pursuing a Ph.D. in history.

  In the fall of 2004, I arrived at graduate school with a strong research background and a usable project framework in my thesis. Because of my research experience at Mount Holyoke I was, without question, ready for the challenges of my Ph.D. program. I kept in touch with the Jacksons who, it turned out, were looking for someone to help them organize over two hundred boxes of their personal papers for donation to an archive. I spent nearly a year visiting their apartment, weeding through mountains of amazing material that no scholar had yet used. The SNYC was just one facet of their expansive activist careers.

  My thesis project provided the seed for my dissertation, a biographical study of James and Esther Cooper Jackson, which then grew into my book. I am grateful that I was challenged to conduct thorough, solid research and work like a real historian as an undergraduate. I continue to draw on that background in new research projects, and I routinely refer back to my experience as an undergraduate researcher to guide the college students I now teach.

Haviland, Sara Rzeszutek. James and Esther Cooper
Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom
Movement
John Rodzvilla
Library Journal.
140.16 (Oct. 1, 2015): p88.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
* Haviland, Sara Rzeszutek. James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement. Univ. Pr. of Kentucky. Nov.
2015. 376p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780813166254. $45; ebk. ISBN 9780813166261. BIOG
Haviland (history, St. Francis Coll.) has written a duel biography on James E. Jackson (1914-2007) and his wife, Esther Cooper (b. 1917),
freedom fighters who helped birth the civil rights movement. The couple met while working in the Southern Negro Youth Congress and later as
members of the American Communist Party and were key figures in the struggle for racial and economic equality during the Cold War.
Haviland's accessible history examines the strains of early 20th-century communism that influenced mid-century thinking about civil rights.
Seven chapters follow the couple from the Great Depression through World War II, in which James served in a segregated military, to the Cold
War and their work on magazines including Freedomways. The author draws upon the rich archive of the couple's correspondence during wartime
and the McCarthy investigations that hounded James, as well as interviews and organizational literature, ultimately presenting two people who
gleaned strength from each other to fight social injustice on several fronts. VERDICT Haviland's use of personal correspondence brings this
important period of history to life and shows the cost of those who worked in the black freedom movement. Highly recommended.--John
Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
Rodzvilla, John
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
3/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1489549018063 2/2
Rodzvilla, John. "Haviland, Sara Rzeszutek. James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement." Library
Journal, 1 Oct. 2015, p. 88. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA430497019&it=r&asid=26bed60b2f8123e09dbd0aec5c488b2a. Accessed 14 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430497019

• Brooklyn Daily Eagle
  http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/2015/10/26/st-francis-prof-authors-book-james-and-esther-cooper-jackson
  Word count: 412

  St. Francis prof. authors book on James and Esther Cooper Jackson

  Brooklyn BookBeat
  Brooklyn Daily Eagle
  Oct 26, 2015
  What began as an undergraduate oral history project is now a freshly published book on a Virginia couple that sat at the vanguard of the black civil rights movement from the 1930s and for decades later.
  St. Francis College history Professor Sara Rzeszutek Haviland’s work, “James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement” (University Press of Kentucky), is rich with first-person accounts and archival material straight from the Jacksons that sheds new light on the intertwining and unwinding of the communist and civil rights movements.
  Haviland says civil rights is really the background for the book, but at its core, she’s telling a love story. “What came through was an authentic marriage of a couple that was deeply in love. They fought for their love as much as they fought for everything else.”
  Much of the Jacksons’ work was done while they were apart, because James was in hiding. They were instrumental in the founding of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which laid the groundwork for youth activists in the 1960s and helped launch the magazine Freedomways, which established noted authors and activists including Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni.
  “I knew telling their story was a unique opportunity, and that it would contribute to the historiography of the black freedom movement in an important way,” added Haviland. “Following the Jacksons through six decades of love and activism is a way to offer new insight into the changing black freedom movement."
  Haviland is assistant professor of history at St. Francis College. She has contributed chapters to “Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement and Red Activists” and “Black Freedom: James and Esther Jackson and the Long Civil Rights Revolution”.
  In addition, she has worked with the Brooklyn Historical Society’s students and faculty in the Archives Project to teach history students about using archives as a tool to study civil rights in Brooklyn (www.teacharchives.org). Professor Haviland was also part of the American Historical Association’s Tuning Project, which helps promote the importance and relevance of being a history major. She was also named to the “40 under 40: Professors Who Inspire 2015” list by Nerd Scholar.
  Professor Haviland earned her bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

• People’s World
  http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/james-and-esther-cooper-jackson-african-american-activists-in-a-joint-biography/
  Word count: 1079

  James and Esther Cooper Jackson, African American activists in a joint biography
  December 12, 2016 1:48 PM CDT BY TONY PECINOVSKY
  Tony Pecinovsky
  101
  James and Esther Cooper Jackson were mainstays of the struggle for African American equality for decades. Their work spanned the 1930s era National Negro Congress (NNC), the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), the fight against fascism in World War II, and the emergence of the 1960s Civil Rights, Black Power and peace movements.
  Though their career paths eventually diverged, both James E. Jackson, Jr. and Esther Cooper initially found their political compass guided by the Communist Party USA. For during the 1930s it was the CPUSA, more than any other organization that was not African American as such, that championed African American equality and Black Liberation. As a result, thousands of African Americans, including the Jacksons, found a home in the Communist Party and/or party-led organizations like the NNC, the SNYC, or the Sharecroppers Union.
  Additionally, it was Communists, like James and Esther Cooper, who helped broaden and expand the antiracist trade unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), unlike the then almost entirely white, segregated and often racist policies of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The antiracist contributions by Communists – both Black and white – to the growth of the CIO will likely be studied for years to come.
  James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement, by Sara Rzeszutek Haviland, isn’t just a political history. It is a joint biography of the highest order.
  Haviland not only writes about the couple with an eye toward their many political contributions in the struggle for African American equality and socialism, she also analyzes how their radical commitment to equality in the household, under the trying conditions of World War II, and then McCarthy Era repression, evolved to fit the needs of a collective familial unit.
  James and Esther Cooper Jackson weren’t just committed to the class struggle. They were committed to each other over the course of what some historians have rightly referred to as the Long Civil Rights Revolution.
  We learn from Haviland that James’ commitment to equality started early. When he was about twelve, “Jack organized the first black troop to be admitted into the Boy Scouts of America in Virginia.” However, the Scout uniform did not garner him the same respect shown white youth, as he was accosted by a white couple wielding James’ very own Boy Scout ax. His crime: “inadvertently” sitting beside them on the bus. Other indignities followed, which eventually led James to recall to Esther Cooper that he had “a ferocious hatred for the haters of my people — later to be enlarged to embrace all the oppressed of the world.”
  He joined the CPUSA in 1931, initiating “wonderful years heralding the revolution and toppling the gods of bourgeois respectability in every direction.” James would remain in the party, holding a series of responsible positions in it until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, when he withdrew, though remaining on friendly terms. He died in 2007 just short of his 93rd birthday.
  Esther Cooper came to the Party during college, where she was introduced to Marx and the Daily Worker by leftist professors. Additionally, she was acquainted with students who had fought and died defending the Spanish Republic from Franco’s fascism. In her master’s thesis, The Negro Woman Domestic Workers in Relation to Trade Unionism, she suggested that “organizing domestic workers into labor unions would help redefine black women as employees who were embedded in the national economy, both through their own income and by allowing the white women who employed them the leisure time to consume.”
  Though her own path to socialism was uniquely feminist and largely intellectual, Esther Cooper nonetheless took-on the challenges of organizing Black workers in Alabama, becoming the administrative mainstay of the SNYC and “the embodiment of the organization’s position on women’s leadership.”
  While the SNYC was not immune to sexism, under its largely Communist leadership, it “consistently pressed for the full participation of women in leadership roles and speaking positions,” often encouraging male leaders, like James, to take-on non-traditional gender roles, like housework and child care.
  It was this foundation of equality that James and Esther Cooper Jackson embraced in their political and familial life. The two budding revolutionaries married in spring 1941. However, by 1943, the couple, now with an infant daughter, were separated, as James was drafted into the Army.
  The Jacksons were not immune to the strains and tensions of war-time separation and post-war political repression, as Esther was for many years left to raise their daughter on her own – first during the war and then during McCarthyism. However, their correspondence often conveyed a deep longing for each other, respect and admiration for each other’s work, a desire for warmth and love, and for the commitment they shared to equality and socialism.
  Through it all, Esther “remained uncompromising in her belief that her husband had a democratic right to his Communist political beliefs and that his absence was a severe blow to the black freedom movement.”
  After long years of political repression, James entrenched himself in the party and its publications as editor of The Worker, while Esther organized more broadly through Freedomways magazine, a journal of Black liberation she helped to found, and in which she carried her popular front politics of the 1930s into a new era.
  As Haviland notes, “The Jacksons’ lives reveal that Cold War anticommunism influenced the direction and methods of the civil rights movement in the 1960s but it did not prevent Communists from contributing to the broad ideological struggle against racial injustice…,” primarily through “editorial work” that “points to a more fluid collaboration among activists across the political spectrum.”
  Both James and Esther Cooper Jackson influenced the Civil Rights movement in their own ways; their contributions are acknowledged and appreciated in Haviland’s book. The author captures the life and times of two of the most important African American leaders of the Long Civil Rights Revolution, portraying their endearing love for each other over a marriage that lasted 66 years, and shows how their commitment translated into their public life.
  A 2014 interview with Esther Cooper Jackson can be viewed here. Born August 21, 1917, she is living in Brooklyn, in her 100th year.