A - Z List of Primary Documents: S

A full-text version of a book detailing the involvement of Black Americans in World War I, as written by Emmett J. Scott, Special Adjutant to the Secretary of War. Copyright 1919.

The Southern Literary Messenger enjoyed an impressive thirty-year run and was in its time the South’s most important literary periodical. Avowedly a southern publication, the Southern Literary Messenger was also the one literary periodical published that was widely circulated and respected among a northern readership. Throughout much of its run, the journal avoided sectarian political and religious debates, but, the sectional crisis of the 1850s gave the contents of the magazine an increasingly partisan flavor. By 1860 the magazine’s tone had shifted to a defiantly proslavery and pro-South stance. Scholars and students of history, journalism, and literature can discern much about how the hot-button topics of slavery and secession were presented in southern intellectual and literary culture in the early stages of the Civil War.

James E. and Esther Cooper Jackson are African American communists and civil rights activists, best known for their role in founding and leading the Southern Negro Youth Congress (1937-48). James Jackson was head of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) Louisiana state organization in 1946, and was a Party organizer in the automobile industry in Detroit from 1947-50. He then moved to New York, becoming the Southern Director for the Communist Party. He later served as the Communist Party’s Educational Director and as International Affairs Secretary, retiring in 1991. Esther Cooper Jackson served as Executive Secretary of the Southern Negro Congress from 1942-1946. She also co-founded and served as the managing editor from 1961-1986 of Freedomways, an influential African American political and cultural quarterly.