James E. Jackson (1914-2007) was an African American communist and civil rights activist, best known for his role in founding and leading the Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-1948). Raised in Richmond, Virginia, Jackson graduated from Virginia Union University in 1934, and at Howard University (the alma mater of his parents) graduated from the College of Pharmacy in 1937. He joined the Communist Party in 1931, and met his future wife Esther Cooper in 1939 (they married in 1941) when Jackson was staying at Fisk while working for Ralph Bunche as an investigator for what would become Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

The Southern Negro Youth Congress, a communist-led popular front organization, conceived at the first National Negro Congress in 1936, held its first annual conference, organized by James Jackson and Ed Strong, in Richmond, in February, 1937. Jackson played a leading role throughout the SNYC's first decade, as indicated by its letterhead from 1946, where Esther Cooper is the Executive Secretary, Jackson the Special Projects Director, and their fellow-communists and close friends Louis and Dorothy Burnham were, respectively, Organizational Secretary and Educational Director. In 1938 Jackson helped lead the successful organizing of the United Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers Union Local 279 in Richmond. In 1939 the SNYC moved is headquarters to Birmingham, Alabama, with its large concentration of African American industrial workers. Under is slogan "Freedom, Equality, Opportunity," the SNYC campaigned for the full range civil, economic, political, and social rights for African Americans. Activities and issues included, in addition to supporting labor organizing (including domestic workers), campaigns against lynching, police brutality and the poll tax, for the right to vote and an end to segregation, for an end to employment discrimination (sometimes via consumer boycotts), and during World War II, for enforcement of the U.S. Fair Employment Practices Committee's resolution 8802 barring discrimination in war industries. The SNYC also published the periodical Cavalcade: The March of Southern Youth, and supported educational and cultural activities, including "People's Theaters." The SNYC held its last conference in 1948, and the pressure of Cold War anti-communism led to its subsequent dissolution. However, SNYC members went on to play important roles in the civil rights movement of the 19650s-60s, including E.D. Nixon, and several became elected officials.

Jackson entered the army in 1943 and served in the Burma theatre for some eighteen months, attainting the rank of sergeant. In 1946 Jackson became State Chairman of the Communist Party of Louisiana. In 1947 the Jacksons moved to Detroit, where they shared a house with future Detroit mayor Coleman Young, and where James Jackson began work as a Party organizer among the autoworkers, while Esther Cooper Jackson was active in the local branches of the Progressive Party and of the Civil Rights Congress, another popular front organization. In 1951 the Jacksons moved to New York and James was named Southern Director of the Communist Party. Later that year he was indicted under the Smith Act (charged with advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government) and went underground to avoid arrest. Emerging five years later, Jackson was sentenced to prison, although he did not serve time as the Smith Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Thereafter, James Jackson served as a full-time Party official, including as a member of its leading Political Bureau, and as Education Director and as International Affairs Secretary, in which capacity he traveled throughout the Communist countries and elsewhere. James Jackson retired in 1991, in the aftermath of the 1991 split in the CPUSA.