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After his legal battles subsided, Jack and Esther worked to reestablish their family life. In so doing, they took on independent careers. Esther stopped participating in Communist Party functions and established Freedomways, a quarterly journal of the black freedom movement, with Shirley Graham DuBois. She became the journal’s managing editor, a position she held for twenty-five years. Jack became the editor of the Communist party newspaper The Worker. Both used their editorial positions to comment on the black freedom movement, offer encouragement to young activists, and promote dialogue between freedom movement workers from different generations and perspectives. Esther and Jack’s independent careers reflected the success of their egalitarian approach to marriage and inaugurated a new period of stability in their lives.

James Jackson and Esther Cooper were raised in similar middle-class, talented-tenth black households with politically engaged parents. Jack grew aware of race, segregation, and economic inequality by engaging with the tobacco workers in his community, whom he later organized into a union, and by protesting segregation in the Boy Scouts of America. Esther was active in college organizations dedicated to supporting the opposition in the Spanish American War and then worked in a segregated Methodist settlement house in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was exposed to extreme poverty. They each attended college during the Great Depression and joined the Communist Party before meeting. They met in 1939 and worked with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which Jack founded, before marrying in 1941.

As the civil rights movement gave way to black nationalism, Black Power, and urban unrest, Freedomways and the Communist Party worked to navigate these changes. Jack remained committed to Party work despite its waning relevance, but his writings on the Angela Davis case and on Vietnam offer examples of his commitment to pressing issues. For Esther, a Popular Front approach to her work at the Freedomways allowed discussion, debate, and the promotion of a range of views on the journal’s pages. Freedomways also became a central part of the transformation of black history and black studies in the 1970s and 1980s. As managing editor, Esther shaped the journal by soliciting, selecting, and publishing articles and responding to correspondence. Esther and Jack continued to support one another while they developed their independent careers and activism.

In the World War II years, Esther and Jack defined their marriage in relation to their activism. Jack served in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, and Esther worked as executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. The couple corresponded daily during the war, mapping plans for their future together around their participation in the black freedom movement. Their plans offer insight into how black Communists envisioned the postwar world. Their Popular Front approach to activism in the black freedom movement would, they believed, continue, and they hoped to be at the helm of an international left-wing movement for racial justice. Their correspondence also helped hone their approach to gender egalitarianism within their marriage. They did not anticipate the coming of the Cold War.

Jack continued his activist work while he was underground, only covertly. After his 1951 indictment, he wrote for Communist Party publications under a pseudonym, critiquing the Party’s position on race and relationship with mainstream civil rights leaders. His work underground became central in the Party’s revision of its official position on the Negro Question in 1959. Jack also used his trial in 1956 as an opportunity to defend his communism by tying it to his role in the black freedom movement, and his legal strategy illustrates connections and collaboration among lawyers, activists, and thinkers of a range of political viewpoints.

The vision Esther and Jack had for the postwar years did not materialize, and they found themselves navigating increasingly intense anti-Communist trends in US politics. The Cold War inaugurated a period of fear and anxiety that intersected with the black freedom movement in the South. No longer able to sustain a movement that fused leftist economic reform and racial equality, the Southern Negro Youth Congress folded in 1949. Jack worked briefly for the Louisiana Communist Party, and the family then moved to Detroit, Michigan. There, Jack worked with the Communist Party to organize autoworkers, and Esther was an activist with the Civil Rights Congress and the Progressive Party. In 1951, the couple moved to New York City, where Jack was indicted under the Smith Act.

In retirement, Esther and Jack continued to be active and were committed to preserving and disseminating the history of the black Left. Increasingly, they worked with scholars to educate the public about the long, complex, and varied history of the black freedom movement. The regeneration of interest in the black Left in the late 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century reflects a triumph in their life’s work.

James and Esther Cooper Jackson’s marriage, commitment to communism, and devotion to the black freedom movement evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Their experiences were shaped by major events like the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the civil rights movement. The couple’s relationship, gender dynamics, and leftist activism offer unique insight into the influence major political and social changes had on the long black freedom movement. It also provides a new look at the relationship between Communists, communism, and the civil rights movement. The couple’s love informed their activism, and their activism shaped their love.