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Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil- and human-rights trailblazer who died on 17 February, imagined a version of America where the marginalized became the center. His was a much more progressive vision than what the Democratic party thought possible after the civil rights movement, and through Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition – launched after his first presidential campaign in 1984 – he laid the groundwork for a new era.
“This Rainbow Coalition is the embodiment of a national politics that is radically inclusive,” Charles McKinney, a professor of history at Rhodes Collegesaid. “He was like: ‘I’ve got something for the middle class, I’ve got something for the elite, and I also have something for working-class folks. To me, that was the embodiment of his politics.”
Considered “capacious” and “transgressive” just four decades ago, said McKinney, Jackson’s vision for the US has been adopted and perpetuated by contemporary politicians, including Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani. Below are some of the details of Jackson’s progressive politics, including the ways they shaped the Democratic party that we know today.
‘The civil rights movement did not die with MLK’
The lessons Jackson learned during his years as an organizer in the civil rights movement shaped him. He participated in the Greensboro sit-ins while a student at North Carolina A&T, and became one of the youngest lieutenants of Martin Luther King Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In 1966, King appointed Jackson to serve as the first director of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, which aimed to improve economic conditions in the city. Jackson would later reshape Operation Breadbasket into Operation Push, the first iteration of his national coalition.
“[It was] an attempt to focus mostly on economics, jobs, boycotts,” Steven Lawson, a history professor at Rutgers, said. “‘Buy only where you can work.’ He reaches some success there. The civil rights movement did not die with Martin Luther King. It continued – not quite in the same form and not quite in the same strength – but the movement does continue into the 1970s.”
Moving Democrats left and encouraging Black voters
During the Reagan era in the 1980s, Lawson said, Jackson was concerned by what he saw as the Democratic party’s shift to the right. After Jimmy Carter was defeated, there was no inherited leader to replace him.
“Jackson saw an opening of creating a multiracial, cross-class coalition within the Democratic party of working-class whites and Blacks, progressive whites, even the college-educated upper classes,” Lawson said. “He thought that that’s really the majority of America. That’s really who Americans are and they needed a voice. And he was going to be that voice within the Democratic party. In 1984, this was really the first time an African American was a serious contender for the nomination.”
In the years after the gains of the civil rights movement, Black voter participation had decreased. But because of Jackson’s efforts to mobilize Black voters, particularly in the south, they are now considered a backbone of the Democrat party. Jackson got involved with voter registration campaigns, helped register about 2 million Black voters, and showed them that they had electoral power.
“The surge of Black voter registration and turnout, particularly in the south, [was in response to Jackson],” said Kevin K Gaines, a professor of civil rights and social justice at the University of Virginia. “The Jesse Jackson effect of increasing Black voter turnout helped Democrats retake the Senate in 1986.”
Support for gay rights
In his 1984 Democratic national convention speech, Jackson became the first person to say “lesbian” and “gay” in such an arena. “The rainbow includes lesbians and gays,” he said. “No American citizen ought [to] be denied equal protection from the law.”
Decades before gay marriage became legal in the country, Jackson committed to following through with his professed support of human and civil rights. “You could say he returned to that role of being an activist and he lent his support to so many movements,” Gaines said. “Jackson was really ahead of his time in endorsing gay rights. He had a very, very strong, uncompromising progressive politics.”
His support for gay rights continued through the decades, from speaking at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, to supporting Massachusetts becoming the first state to legalize gay marriage, to speaking in favor of Obama when he came out in support of gay marriage in 2012.
Fighting for the working class
Jackson mobilized voters across both racial and economic lines. “‘It’s us against the billionaires’ or ‘it’s us against the capitalists’ is a thing that we say explicitly now in politics, but that was implied in what Jackson was saying about a Rainbow Coalition that works for most Americans,” said Keneshia Grant, an associate professor of political science at Howard University. “That’s a really big, important part of his legacy that we don’t even think twice about these days. He is among the first people talking about these diverse groups of people getting together to make politics work for them.”
This stance helped Jackson win Michigan during the Democratic presidential caucus in 1988, something that stunned politicos of the era.
“The week after [the caucus], Time magazine, their front page cover was a picture of Jesse Jackson with the line that said: ‘Jesse!?’,” McKinney said. “He won Michigan because he was like: ‘Look, poor working-class people, union folks, you’re getting screwed right now by Reaganomics. We’re working with an economic plan that is specifically designed to keep poor and marginalized people poor and marginalized. We can do better. We should do better and we should craft a politics that can do better.’ That’s his legacy.”
Support for Palestinian liberation
Jackson’s coalition building extended beyond Black and white Americans. His first campaign for president was also the first campaign to include an Arab American committee. In 1984, Jackson’s representatives pushed the Democratic party’s national platform to favor a plank in support of an independent state for Palestinians. Though that attempt failed, it did not keep Jackson from trying again at the next Democratic party convention in 1988.
Though the plank, which called for “mutual recognition, territorial compromise, and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians”, was unsuccessful, 11 state parties adopted platforms in support of “the rights of the Palestinian people to safety, self-determination and an independent state”. And, for the first time, the Democratic party debated Palestinian rights “from the podium of the convention”.
“He [was] an advocate for the liberation of Palestine,” McKinney said, “way before it was cool to do that in the mainstream of the Democratic party.”
