James and Esther Jackson: Connecting the Past to the Present
Abstract
James and Esther Jackson have given us a magnificent legacy. Their papers will be in very good company at the Tamiment Library, sharing space with the papers of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Eugene Debs, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Communist Party, and many other progressive individuals and organizations and movements. Researchers and activists will have the opportunity to explore these archives and discover important dimensions of the history of our country that have gone unrecorded: the history of the Left, the history of civil rights struggles, labor organizing, anti-racist organizing, and anti-war organizing. I began by referring to the extraordinary legacy of James and Esther Jackson. How might we define “legacy” in this context? What is our relationship to the past? What are our negotiations through history? How do we manage different and sometimes conflicting temporalities? Legacy can be defined in two ways: one, a gift by law, especially of money or some personal property; two, something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past. In both instances there is an assumption that somehow the past is securely segregated from the present. Of course in law the originator of the legacy must first die