Jesse Jackson’s mixed legacy

The Reverend Jesse Jackson died in February after a lengthy battle with progressive supranuclear palsy. At the services held to honor him, dignitaries including every living Democratic President mixed with community activists to reflect on Jackson’s legacy.

“In 1984, and then, again in 1988, Jesse didn’t just speak to Black folks, he spoke to white folks, and Latinos, and Asian Americans…he spoke to family farmers and environmentalists. He spoke to gay rights activists…and blue-collar workers,” said former President Barack Obama in his eulogy for Jackson. “He invited them to believe, he invited us to believe, in our own power, to change America for the better,” he added.

“Rev. Jesse Jackson . . . was a larger-than-life figure who made enormous and consequential contributions to American life,” wrote James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. “He was the first American political leader to recognize and incorporate into his movement my community of Arab Americans and our domestic and foreign policy concerns.”

Long-time socialist activist Angela Davis, in the introduction to her autobiography, wrote that although Jackson didn’t win the Democratic presidential nomination in his two 1980s campaigns, he “conducted a truly triumphant campaign, one that confirmed and further nurtured progressive thought patterns among the people of our country.”

Jackson was one of the most prominent connections from the 1960s civil rights movement to today’s politics. He also was an early supporter of Palestinian rights when that was even more verboten in the Democratic Party than it is today. And in his role as leader of Rainbow PUSH, he often lent his name and support to causes such as abolition of the death penalty and support for workers’ rights.

But to truly judge Jackson’s political legacy, we must use a critical eye, both about his role in the civil rights and Black Power movement and about his 1980s runs for president. As I’ll argue below, Jackson played a pivotal role in blunting moves among Black radicals to break with the Democratic Party. His presidential campaigns provided a vehicle for a whole generation of radicals to make their peace with the Democrats.

Many sincere activists and antiracists looking for a way to respond to Reaganite retrenchment were drawn to the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns as well as to other “insurgent” local campaigns, such as the one that elected Harold Washington as Chicago’s first African American mayor in 1983. Some on the left argued that the National Rainbow Coalition (NRC) posed a solution to the failure of the 1960s civil rights and Black Power movements to consolidate their gains because of “the separation of the social movements from electoral politics.” Others argued that the Rainbow Coalition assembled a “coalition of the rejected” that, if mobilized in the electoral arena, would push American politics to the left. Still others claimed that the Rainbow Coalition offered a way to reinvigorate the movements of the 1960s.

To many Rainbow supporters, the NRC’s electoralism was secondary to its potential as a “political movement,” a description in the NRC’s founding document that appeared to reach beyond electoral politics. The Rainbow Coalition held the potential to mobilize thousands of the poor and oppressed for progressive ends, Rainbow supporters argued. Rainbow politicians’ electoral ambitions were seen as secondary to the “mass movement,” which would provide the push for real reform struggles. What’s more, they argued, activists could use Jackson’s rhetoric and his access to the media to build “grassroots” struggles, like the movement against apartheid in South Africa.

The 1984 Jackson campaign took about 21 percent of the votes in Democratic primaries as well as several key Southern states. Nevertheless, Democratic Party rules limited the number of Jackson’s convention delegates so that Jackson could count on the support of only 11 percent of delegates. Thus, former Vice President Walter Mondale exacted Jackson’s endorsement. In the process Mondale dismissed all the Rainbow Coalition’s platform proposals, which included only two of seven proposals that comprised a minimum Black political agenda, according to two Jackson advisers.

Nevertheless, some on the left, including organizations like the National Committee for Independent Political Action (NCIPA), viewed the Rainbow Coalition as offering a “mass base” of the oppressed that could form a possible third party. But a Rainbow Coalition break from the Democrats was a highly unlikely proposition, no matter how disdainfully the party treated Jackson and the NRC. As Jackson explained at the 1986 conference that transformed Jackson’s campaign into an on-going organization, “We have too much invested in the Democratic Party. When you have money in the bank you don’t walk away from it.” In essence, the NRC’s strategy was that of a liberal caucus in a Democratic Party moving rapidly rightward.

Jackson’s defense of an electoral strategy within the confines of the Democratic Party was fully in character with his career. Jackson was never a radical. He stood, for example, on the right wing of the mainstream civil rights movement. As one of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s lieutenants in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jackson distinguished himself as an able fundraiser. Politically, however, he represented the SCLC’s wing that opposed King’s emphasis in the 1968 Poor Peoples’ Campaign on demanding measures to address widespread poverty. Jackson supported a version of Black capitalism.

At the same time Jackson acted to undercut the efforts of Black militants to build a political alternative independent of the capitalist parties. In 1972, when more than eight thousand Blacks from every part of the political spectrum gathered for the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, Jackson worked to sabotage militant leaders’ attempts to create an all-Black radical party. The convention passed a Black Political Agenda that condemned both the American system and the Democratic and Republican parties for ignoring Black demands. Jackson repudiated the agenda, insisting to the conservative, heavily Democratic Michigan delegation that it was only a draft. Jackson accused delegates who opposed the convention leadership’s electoralism of undermining Black “unity.”

Jackson later abandoned any pretense of supporting an independent Black initiative by joining up with Senator George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic presidential campaign. Jackson backed Jimmy Carter in 1976. In 1980, after Carter had alienated Blacks with his conservative policies, Jackson said that Blacks “had the responsibility” to listen to appeals from both major parties, implying that Ronald Reagan could offer something positive to Black America.

After giving the Democratic establishment a little discomfort in 1984, the Jackson campaign took a different tack in 1988. Jackson opened the race with much greater support. Rather than running an “insurgent” campaign, Jackson ran a deliberately mainstream race that rested on the support of the Black Democratic establishment. One writer’s description of the 1988 February New Hampshire primary illustrated the difference: “In contrast to 1984, when elected officials and community leaders virtually ignored Jackson, the campaign boasts an impressive list of mainstream endorsements, including Chamber of Commerce officials, four state legislators… and the state president of the Association for the Elderly, among others.” Noting Jackson’s appeal among their constituents, many Black Democratic politicians who had opposed Jackson in 1984—like Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and U.S. Representative Mickey Leland (D-Texas)—either backed Jackson or at least did not back any of his opponents.

In November 1987 Jackson appointed Black California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, one of the most powerful politicians in California, to be chairman of his campaign. Brown said the Jackson campaign would not “appeal excessively to so-called Black concerns,” and Jackson’s campaign manager pledged to run a “centrist” campaign. With experienced Democratic hands in charge of the campaign, it was more difficult than ever to distinguish Jackson’s “movement” from any other mainstream Democratic campaign.

From the start Jackson opted to run a “respectable” campaign, distancing himself from “extreme” positions. Only after the primaries ended in June 1988 did he mention the inequity of the Democratic presidential selection process, which had been the centerpiece of his campaign in 1984. In March 1988, in a bid for Zionist support, he said he would not meet with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yassir Arafat until the PLO recognized Israel and renounced “terrorism.” This position represented an acceptance of the standard American foreign policy formulas for the Middle East.

When campaigning in the New York primary, Jackson avoided comment on a spate of police killings of Blacks and Latinos in New York City. For this reason, New York’s leading Black newspaper at the time, the City Sun, refused to endorse him in the April primary.

After his victory in the 1988 Michigan primary, Jackson dropped references in his campaign speeches to his “poor campaign with a rich message.” This was because his campaign began to attract support from rich donors and business.

When all was said and done, the Democratic Party’s candidate for 1988 was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, a dull technocrat, who went on to lose decisively to President George H.W. Bush.

Jackson’s forces arrived at the Atlanta convention with much fanfare. But within days of the convention’s opening, Jackson pledged his delegates’ backing for the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket in exchange for representation of several of his advisors (including his son) on the Democratic National Committee and in the Dukakis campaign. Any hope that he would bring a progressive influence to the party platform was quashed for the sake of party “unity.” Jackson agreed to withdraw or water down his delegation’s progressive platform planks.

There should never have been any doubt that Jackson would deliver his supporters to Dukakis in the end. That was the whole aim of the operation: Jackson traded his delegates for his own acceptance into the party’s inner circle. A comment from one of Jackson’s advisers summed it up: “We could come into sack and ruin, particularly with the number of delegates we have. But we’re not doing that. We’ve agreed to disagree [with Dukakis], but that in itself is a form of agreement.” In the spirit of party unity, Jackson’s address to the convention endorsed the demands of party conservatives: “Conservatives and progressives, when you fight for what you believe, you are right—but your patch isn’t big enough.”

Activists who gave so much energy to nominate Jesse Jackson then faced the choice of voting for the conservative ticket Jackson endorsed. Such was a stark illustration of the ultimate problem with the Rainbow Coalition strategy. From the start, the NRC only succeeded in binding activists to the big business interests that really control the Democratic Party. As such, the Rainbow Coalition was one more detour away from building a true alternative, independent of the capitalist parties.

While Jackson remained a leading validator of Democratic Party candidates and elected politicians (including two of his sons and his ex-daughter-in-law), the Clintonites who took over the party in the 1990s used Jackson and his supporters as a scapegoat for their shift to the right. Clinton signaled that plan when he attacked the activist/rapper Sister Souljah in a speech to the Rainbow Coalition in 1992. Since, the term “Sister Souljah moment” has come to refer to a politician repudiating “extremes” in their party’s base. Leading Democratic Party “centrists” constantly urge “Sister Souljah” attacks on progressives and activists.

Nevertheless, the Rainbow’s trajectory should sound familiar to many activists today. It closely mirrors that of Bernie Sanders’ primary challenges to the Democratic Party establishment in 2016 and 2020. Jackson’s primary campaigns were arguably more important than Sanders.’ While Jackson had certainly been involved in Democratic Party politics for years before his presidential runs, his campaigns represented the move of someone identified with civil rights and anti-apartheid activism into mainstream party politics. Sanders’ runs came after decades of Sanders’ work as an elected Independent who routinely collaborated with Democrats. It’s also clear that Sanders’ “socialism” hardly differs from Jackson’s social democratic/liberal world view.

The idea that the Democratic Party is the place for leftists didn’t originate with Jackson. But his campaigns provided an entry point for the 1960s/1970s generation of radicals and revolutionaries to be reconciled with mainstream U.S. politics.

By 1968 much of the radical movement had identified the Democratic Party as “the enemy.” For those radicals who rejected electoralism altogether, 1968 is remembered for the Chicago police riot against the young radicals who picketed the Democratic convention held there. Unfortunately, the revolutionary left was unable to offer a strong alternative for those radicals who rejected the Democratic Party.

Those revolutionaries who had viewed Mao’s China as a model of a new society and a leader of anti-imperialist fights were disoriented when in 1972 Mao himself made peace with Nixon, the world’s chief imperialist leader. With their hopes dashed, revolutionary organizations found their energies sapped. By the mid-1970s movement struggle had declined. Significant revolutionary organizations, unable to readjust to the changed circumstances, simply dissolved.

Many embittered ex-members rejected as “sectarian” attempts to build explicitly revolutionary organizations and drifted into Democratic electoral campaigns. A handful of ex-radicals, like former Chicago Eight defendant Tom Hayden, found new careers as Democratic Party politicians. But many others from the “generation of ‘68” became foot soldiers in the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, working to sign up voters for the Democratic Party they had once condemned as the party of Southern segregation and of the Vietnam War.

When socialists call the Democratic Party “the graveyard of social movements,” this is what we mean.