Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Communist Party
James E. Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson, African American communists and civil rights activists, are best known for their role in founding and leading the Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-48). The papers contain correspondence of both Esther Cooper and James E. Jackson, James Jackson's lectures, research notebooks, speeches, and writings (published and unpublished). They also include subject files, correspondence, internal documents and printed ephemera pertaining to the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and to Freedomways, as well as legal and other materials pertaining to the Smith Act indictments of James Jackson and other communists, Communist Party internal documents, many of a programmatic nature, and clippings (articles by and about Jackson).