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Printed in U.S.A.
First Printing, March 1953
Second Printing, April 1953
[[image: stamp of printing company, Allied Printing Trades Union Label Council New York]] 209

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Foreword

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This pamphlet speaks for itself. It tells of the life, growth and struggles of an American political refugee - Communist leader James Jackson - in language so clear and compelling that it needs no elaboration.

A word must be said, however, about the author, Mrs. Esther Cooper Jackson - a work which, in characteristic selflessness, she has left out of the story.

A century ago, in 1850, the widow of Jacob Harris, a free Negro of Fayetteville, N.C., took her children and made the long journey by wagon train to Ohio. They were part of a great migration of free Negroes and slaves who, in that momentous decade preceding the Civil War, made their way by wagon and on the Underground Railroad to the North and Canada - to "freedom," education for their children, and the abolitionist movement led by Frederick Douglass.

The Harris children began to hew out for themselves careers which made their family one of the most distinguished of the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Sara became a conductor of one of the principal stations of the Underground Railroad. Two of the brothers finished their schooling in Cleveland and returned as teachers to Reconstruction North Carolina. Another, Joseph, became an able surgeon and faculty member at the Howard University Medical School. And Cicero Richardson Harris became a Bishop and "luminary of the AME Zion church and co-founder of Livingston College" at Salisbury, N.C.

A niece of Bishop Harris, Mrs. Esther I. Cooper, served for years as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Arlington, Virginia, and remains to this day a leading figure in all movements for civic and social advance in that area. And in the pages which follow, Esther Cooper Jackson, Bishop Harris' grandniece, transforms her heart-rending personal 

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