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