Esther Cooper Jackson

Interview Description

Oral History Interview with Esther Cooper Jackson

Esther Cooper Jackson was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1917. The younger of two children, her father was an officer in the Army and her mother was a bureaucrat who worked for the Forest Service, as well as an activist. Jackson graduated from Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. She went to Oberlin College and then onto Fisk University, where she received a master's degree in sociology. Jackson moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1940 to work on a voter registration project; spending seven years working there as a community organizer. She met her husband during that era, and they later decided to move to New York City in the early 1950s. Settling in Brooklyn, Jackson began working as an activist and board member with the Committee to Defend Negro Leadership. In 1961, she became a founding member and managing editor of the magazine Freedomways. She continued at the magazine for a quarter century. Jackson followed that with work as an activist and speaker, all while living in the same apartment in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn since 1963. As recently as 2015, she had donated many personal papers to the New York University library.

In the interview, Esther Cooper Jackson begins by describing the lives of her mother and father. Among many of her own biographical details, she talks about her early life in Arlington, Virginia and her education. She notes her thesis at Fisk University has been re-discovered by a number of contemporary academics. Jackson discusses the seven years she spent working as a community organizer in Birmingham, Alabama. She gives a basic picture of the civil inequalities African-Americans faced in the South. Jackson recalls her move to Brooklyn and her involvement in Freedomways magazine, a Black quarterly dedicated to art and culture. Throughout, she shares details and anecdotes about her daughters. The interview ends with her reflections on the change in the racial make-up of the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn in the late 2000s. Interview conducted by Sady Sullivan.

The Voices of Brooklyn oral histories: Community activists series features a dynamic range of narrators. Some are prominent public figures and others are well-known in their communities. This ongoing series focuses on Brooklyn history and the experiences of these narrators who have a history of or were presently supporting an underrepresented segment of society, or forming a social movement, which thereby effected broad change to a neighborhood, much of Brooklyn, or the country. The content relates directly to organized support of those harmed in natural disasters, creating cooperative business models, forming architectural preservation groups, and documenting civil rights and social justice movements. The oldest narrator in this collection was born in 1917.

Citation

Jackson, Esther Cooper, Oral history interview conducted by Sady Sullivan, February 08, 2010, Voices of Brooklyn oral histories: Community activists, 2008.031.4.003; Brooklyn Historical Society.