This post is written by Shannon O’Neill, Curator for Tamiment-Wagner Collections. This post is a part of a series that showcases different parts of Portable Devices, 1574-1998: Notebooks from NYU Special Collections, an exhibition on display April 14-June 21 at NYU Special Collections.

Nestled within the James Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson Papers (TAM.347) are eighty-six of his notebooks created and kept by James Jackson. James Jackson lived a lifetime of radical politics as an official with the Communist Party of the United States of America; a civil rights activist; an editor at The Worker; and one of the founders of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Jackson’s notebooks, often diaristic and scrapbook-like in their nature, trace his life and work; the history of the CPUSA from the 1960s through 1991, when Jackson retired following a split in the Party; his close recording of Party issues for The Worker; and offer us a glimpse into Jackson’s lifetime of study of liberatory praxis. Jackson’s politics were inseparable from any other aspect of life, and, at times, the notebooks read like letters to oneself. 

As a part of Portable Devices, 1574–1998: Notebooks from the NYU Special Collections, Jackson’s notebooks demonstrate the embodied and affective experiences of notebooks. Jackson’s emotions come through to the reader via ripped pages, underlining, doodles, notes tucked away in the recesses of blank pages. Seven of Jackson’s eighty-six notebooks were selected to be included in the exhibition. Two highlights include a notebook with several small doodled portraits under which Jackson has written, “what is the role of the U.S. in the world? Not the world’s policeman.” Tucked alongside this note to himself are a number of disparate pieces of writing. Here, we see how transnational solidarity, and anti-imperialist politics, were central to Jackson’s beliefs. Using his notebook to gather together disparate thoughts on the role of the United States in the world, we see Jackson bring together citations, quotes, and notes to himself, to parse out a draft of his writing. 

Jackson’s feelings are apparent in his interactions with the pages of his notebook. In another notebook, at which Jackson appears to be taking notes to report on the 26th Consultative Delegate Caucus, Jackson writes “A cop in Cleveland who has killed 4 and shot 9. Nothing has happened to him.” Below these lines, the page is ripped, as if Jackson couldn’t bear to write more following these words; or, as if no other words could follow documenting yet another police murder without consequence. One might the emotions that moved through Jackson’s hand as he wrote these words and tore this page in half.

In 1968, Jackson authored The View from Here: Commentaries on Peace and Freedom, a text which compiled Jackson’s editorials in the The Worker on topics such as Black liberation, peace, and transnational solidarities. Jackson begins his author’s note for this text, “Here are some pages from the chronicle of our times.” Jackson’s notebooks, as corporeal and emotional extensions of his politics and political life, are a chronicle of his time: a life as a “dedicated revolutionary.”