Rokeby MuseumVideo: Blyden B. Jackson Jr.’s posthumously released novel, “For One Day of Freedom”
On September 29, 2022, Rokeby Museum and Treleven Farm hosted a discussion about the book led by contributors to Jackson’s final publication and the book’s publisher.
For One Day of Freedom, Blyden Jackson’s third and final novel, published posthumously, is an epic tale of a young man’s attempt to escape slavery. Blyden was a civil rights activist in the 1960s who made his home in Vermont from 1981 to 2002.
Discussion Led by:
Jane Clark Jackson (foreword) married Blyden Jackson in 1975. They made their home in New York, Vermont, and New Jersey until Blyden’s death in 2012. As a nurse-midwife she adapted a British medical dictionary for American usage, The New American Pocket Medical Dictionary and wrote and edited a compendium of resource information for nurses, The Whole Nurse Catalog.
Brandyn Adeo, PhD (afterword) is an associate professor of philosophy at Raritan Valley Community College in Somerville, New Jersey. He received his PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. His dissertation is entitled “The Revolution Must Be Funny: The Liberatory and Revolutionary Power of Comedy.” He also performs with his band, Universal Rebel, under the name Adeo.
Aaron B. Jackson, son of Blyden Jackson, is a poet who has been published in more than fifty publications, at times using the pen name Middlepoet. He is the former Poet Laureate of Jersey City, NJ. His poetry has been exhibited in Finland’s Pori Art Museum as part of a multimedia collaboration with photographer Chi Modu and motion artist Jan Tompkins and he has twice been the recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation.
Gabriel Levinson is the publisher and founding editor of ANTIBOOKCLUB, a Brooklyn-based independent press. He teaches in New York University’s Center for Publishing and is a senior production editor for Penguin Random House.
About the Author:
Blyden B. Jackson, Jr. (1936–2012) was a civil rights activist who served as a founder of the New Haven, Connecticut, chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) before founding and becoming chairman of the East River chapter of CORE, located in Harlem. In his life he was a husband and a father, a community organizer, a builder, a marine, an emergency medical technician, a coach, and a teacher, among a plethora of other titles. His previous books are the novels Operation Burning Candle and Totem.
