Last Saturday, dozens of former aides, friends, supporters and dignitaries gathered at the old synagogue that houses the PUSH Rainbow Union headquarters in South Chicago to celebrate Rev. Jesse Jackson 35 years ago. The organization’s founder, once a college football star at over six feet tall with broad shoulders, is now turned around by a team of trusted aides. Parkinson’s disease ravaged Mr. Jackson’s body and left him unable to speak — although, according to those around him, it did not impair his mind.
Fifty-two years ago at the age of 30, Mr. Jackson broke away from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, organized by Pastor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leadership before his death, to form his own organization, Operation PUSH, originally short for People United to Save Humanity and later, People United to Service Humanity (and later merged with Rainbow Alliance). Mr. Jackson, now 81, announced that he would hand over the day-to-day leadership of the organization to Pastor Dr. Frederick Haynes III, a 62-year-old pastor in Texas.
It’s been 39 years since Mr. Jackson first ran for office, but what he stands for – a living connection to the civil rights movement and a symbol of the work that remains to fulfill that movement’s dream of complete equality for Blacks in America – is something precious. It is perhaps all the more clear that Mr. Jackson remains a complex, enigmatic figure whose work is misunderstood as much as it seems popular.
Mr. Jackson left the seminary to march alongside Dr. King in Selma, Ala., Finally, he entered the inner circle. He was there the day Dr. King was killed, wearing the famous shirt he said was stained with Dr. King’s blood. From that point on, he will use his extraordinary oratory skills and knack for attracting media attention to become one of the most famous Negroes in America and perhaps the world.
Mr. Jackson was sent to Chicago by Dr. King in 1966 to manage Operation Breadbasket. It had a bold mission: to address the economic conditions of the Negro. Tasked with advancing the movement beyond sit-ins and rallies to ensure basic decency for Blacks in the South, Breadbasket targets substandard housing conditions, de facto and statutory racial exclusion, and the diversity of products on display on store shelves in minority communities.
Mr. Jackson learned and expanded on the tactics that Dr. King pioneered. In 1966, Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, lived briefly in a dilapidated housing project in Chicago to highlight how landlords treated poor Blacks, forcing the city to address substandard living conditions. Months later, the threat of peaceful marches through the all-white Chicago suburb of Cicero sparked the fury of the Nazi Party of America, which sought to form a protest. The march was adjourned after Dr. King reached an agreement with Chicago leaders to open more housing in the city to Blacks. President Lyndon Johnson used the momentum of national mourning following the assassination of Dr. King to push Congress to pass the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
In the years after Dr. King was murdered, the Operation Breadbasket boycotts and Mr. Jackson’s pickiness about local businesses became legendary. The organization’s ambitions then grew, and after Jackson parted ways with SCLC, he began aiming for stronger interests, turning to national companies like Pepsico and grocery store A&P. A similar pattern has played out in dozens of meetings with countless corporate organizations over the decades. There was a time when the simple threat of a meeting with Mr. Jackson would set off a cascade of events that would lead to new opportunities for Black business owners looking to buy franchises and executives, who had been removed from board and C-suite positions. At other times, seeking to avoid the heat, corporations have actively moved to diversify their board or corporate hierarchy.
Mr. Jackson often says that he considers himself “a tree shaker, not a jelly maker”. The people who work for him know the saying: After all, they are the ones responsible for picking up fruit from the floor to make jelly.
Can anyone else shake a tree like Jesse Jackson? And even if they could, would America still take it seriously? At a time when diversity is once again under political attack, the tactics Mr. Jackson pioneered and the doors of opportunity he opened for countless women and people of color in corporate America are also coming under attack.
Almost immediately after Dr. King’s death, Mr. Jackson moved to fill the void left in the civil rights movement. But it wasn’t until more than a decade later that he began to look at politics. Jackson’s efforts to register voters in Chicago helped bring Harold Washington to power in 1983, making him the city’s first Black mayor. Mr. Jackson traveled across the country to register voters, especially across the South. It will ultimately boost his uncertain national bid for the presidency. Despite his years living in Chicago, he has never lost his South Carolina drawl or his connection to the network of Southern Black churches that have sustained his ministry and activity. Mr. Jackson never actually pastored a congregation that served a traveling flock, preaching the virtues of civic engagement. His allegory of unregistered voters (mostly in the South) like the pebbles in David’s slingshot in his fight against Goliath became the cornerstone of his presidential campaigns.
Mr. Jackson’s political influence is felt most acutely on the left, shaped by the ideas he implemented in his presidential campaigns, his emphasis on increasing voter turnout through the widespread voter registration of youth and people of color, and by the number of people who at some point overtook his orbit. Among them are: cabinet members such as former labor secretary Alexis Herman, Representative Maxine Waters, political strategist Donna Brazile and Housing and Urban Development secretary Marcia Fudge.
Many Americans, especially Blacks, remember the spectacle of Jackson’s presidential ambitions: mass rallies, chants of “Run, Jesse, run!” But those campaigns also unite a single foundation of economic populism, social justice, and moral urgency. Although Mr. Jackson successfully mobilized and invigorated Black voters, his candidacy is best remembered for mobilizing voters not on the basis of race but on moral imperatives and policy prescriptions that, when compared with the policies of the Democratic Party today, appear to predate.
Jackson’s historical candidacy in the 1980s called him the most powerful Black candidate for president until Barack Obama’s rise two decades later. But Mr. Jackson’s greatest achievement is not race, as some think, but the policy foundation he has built. In 1984 and 1988, he ran to end economic inequality, introduce universal health care, and advance America-first policies that would resonate for decades to come. He envisioned a coalition of Black, White, Asian, Indigenous, rural, urban, gay and heterosexual people working together to achieve social justice as well as economic justice.
“As we form a united body and common ground, we will have the power to bring health care, housing, jobs, education and hope to our nation,” Jackson said in a statement. his speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention. His unsuccessful campaigns led to one particular consequence: Mr. Jackson negotiated permanent changes to the Democratic nomination process, including ending the winner-take-all primary system that enabled Barack Obama to win his first Democratic primary. By the time Mr. Obama ran for office, an entire generation of black Americans had seen and hoped for a black man in the White House. Recently, Mr. Jackson mused to me: “We raised the low ceiling higher. “We raised the ceiling on Black possibility.”
Abby D. Phillip is a senior political reporter and host of the program “Inside Politics” on CNN. She’s writing a book about Jesse Jackson’s legacy in American politics.
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