James Jackson Jr., rights activist, 92
NEW YORK - James E. Jackson Jr., a civil rights activist, former official of the American Communist Party, and defendant in a case that led the Supreme Court to rule that the Smith Act of 1940 did not prohibit the advocacy of violent revolution, died Sept. 1 in Manhattan. He was 92 and lived in Brooklyn.
Mr. Jackson was one of 21 Communist Party members indicted in 1951, at the height of the McCarthy era, for, among other things, teaching classes on violent revolution.
He was one of six of those defendants whose conspiracy convictions under the Smith Act were unanimously reversed by a federal appeals court in 1958. The reversal was based on Yates v. United States, a 1957 Supreme Court ruling in the overall case that the mere teaching or advocacy of an overthrow of the government did not constitute a "call to action."
Most of the 21 defendants had been convicted and imprisoned. But Mr. Jackson and five others went into hiding - "roaming the country like during the Underground Railroad," his wife, Esther Cooper Jackson, said last week. Mr. Jackson did not see his family until 1956, when he surrendered and, with his colleagues, was convicted of conspiracy.
The next year, with the Red Scare subsiding somewhat, the Supreme Court issued its Yates v. United States decision, stating that the Smith Act "requires more than the teaching and advocacy of an abstract doctrine that the government should be overthrown by force and violence." The Yates decision signaled a shift toward a legal principle that the advocacy of illegal conduct is usually constitutionally protected, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor and First Amendment scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Mr. Jackson held important positions in the Communist Party. In the early 1960s, he was editor of The Worker, the successor to the party's newspaper, The Daily Worker. Later, he was international affairs secretary and national educational director. He joined the party in 1947, and in 1952 became its Southern secretary and a staunch advocate of civil rights.
