As the world reflects on the life of Jesse Jackson, it’s hard to fully appreciate the impact of his 1984 presidential run, in which Jackson finished third in the Democratic primary, and his 1988 race, in which he won a total of 11 state primaries and caucuses.
It’s not just because few voters and historians alike believe that Jackson could have ever won the general election. It’s also because much of what he pioneered has since become more mainstream. Anti-Blackness may still haunt our elections, but in the 40 years since Jackson ran, Black candidates are now perennial fixtures of the national Democratic Party primary scene. The vision of a class-identified, multi-racial democracy that was promoted by Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition is now being championed by the likes of today’s Working Families Party and other social justice formations.
Long before the Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigns helped inspire millennials and members of Gen Z, the Jackson campaigns shaped the progressive activist sensibilities of a generation of post-civil rights activists. As a wide-eyed college student in 1984, I campaigned for Jackson both on campus and on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, and in New York City. I also went on to register people to vote in the South and in New York in service of his campaign.
For my peers and me, Jackson was an unapologetically Black candidate before we even recognized the need for such a term. He was also the first politician I ever met who explicitly welcomed poor white people, disaffected farmers, Latinos, Asians, immigrants, and LGBTQ folk under the same tent, and named them as refugees from American democracy.
Donna Brazile famously said what is now taken as conventional wisdom: “Without Reverend Jackson, there never would have been Barack Obama.” But it isn’t that straightforward. A complex confluence of historical, cultural, and demographic conditions led to Barack Obama’s acceptance by a plurality of the American electorate. Similarly, Jackson’s candidacy was more nuanced than simply being the second serious Black presidential candidate (after Rep. Shirley Chisholm), and his widening of political discourse is often overlooked. Jackson was the first and only successful presidential candidate to give full expression to an unequivocal revulsion toward and a rejection of South African apartheid. His recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and his meeting with Yasser Arafat helped forge Black and progressive solidarity with the Palestinian people. His diplomacy in areas like Syria, Cuba, and throughout what was known as the “Third World” mainstreamed an identification with the people of the global south.
Yet, Jackson established what is now a prerequisite for Black Democratic Party candidates — who are reflexively cast as angry and counter-American — to gain wide political acceptance. Leveraging the hope and spiritual gravitas of the Civil Rights Movement, Jackson exhorted us to “keep hope alive” and revitalized the Kingian dream of people of diverse backgrounds living in racial and economic harmony — a required campaign message for Black presidential candidates that is rarely demanded of white candidates. Indeed, Obama and those who follow his example use Jackson’s playbook to convince the American electorate that Black candidates are safe and uniquely patriotic.