CREDIT: Associated Press/Kathy Willens
ONE OF the most famous photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. shows him standing on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, with three of his top aides—Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, and Jesse Jackson. The next night (April 4, 1968), on that same balcony, King was murdered. Jackson was one of several staffers with King at the hotel that fatal night.
Jackson had been drawn into King’s inner circle at a young age. After King’s death, some activists considered Jackson to be the slain leader’s heir apparent, although others considered Jackson too young, inexperienced, and brash to assume King’s mantle. By the 1970s, however, Jackson had become the nation’s most visible civil rights leader. By the time he ran for president in 1984 and 1988, he had transcended the “civil rights” label to become the most visible progressive leader in the country, with a racially and economically diverse following that he called a “rainbow coalition.”
Twenty years later, in 2008, another photo of Jackson symbolized the long journey that Jackson, and the nation, had taken. It was of Jackson standing in Chicago’s Grant Park, holding a small American flag, with tears in his eyes, as he listened to Barack Obama speak to a huge crowd on the night he was elected president of the United States. The photo did not require a caption. Jackson had clearly paved the way for Obama’s victory.
In the forty years that separated King’s assassination and Obama’s election, Jackson played a pivotal role in progressive politics, as a movement builder, a spokesperson, and a candidate for office.
Jackson was born in Greenville, North Carolina, in 1941 to high school student Helen Burns and Noah Robinson, a thirty-three-year-old married man who lived next door. When Jesse was a year old, his mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office worker. He adopted Jesse, who eventually changed his last name from Burns to Jackson.
Jackson attended Sterling High School, a segregated high school, where he was a good student and a football star. He graduated in 1959 and went to the University of Illinois on a football scholarship.
During the winter break of his freshman year, Jackson returned to Greenville and went to the city’s segregated “colored” branch library to borrow books for a college assignment. The black library did not have the books he needed, but the librarian told Jackson that the all-white main library had them. She called her counterpart at the main library, who told her that the books would be there waiting for Jackson to pick up. He came in through the rear entrance and saw several police officers talking to the librarian. The librarian told Jackson that none of the books was available, and the police told him to leave the library.
Angry and humiliated, Jackson stared at the sign “Greenville Public Library” and cried. When he returned from Illinois the next summer, he and seven other students, under the tutelage of Rev. James Hall, an activist minister, staged a forty-minute sit-in at Greenville’s downtown library. They were arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, and held for forty-five minutes in jail before Hall posted bail. The protest made the local television news that night.
Frustrated that he was not allowed to play quarterback at Illinois, he transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, which gave him a chance to play the position. Although the campus was a hotbed of civil rights activism—its students had triggered the sit-in movement in February 1960—Jackson did not immediately join the movement, focusing on his demic and athletic endeavors. But leaders of the campus Congress of Racial Equality chapter recruited Jackson—who was student-body president and a football star—as they were planning to protest segregation in Greensboro’s downtown businesses in the spring of 1963. As a gifted orator and charismatic figure, Jackson quickly became a leader of the demonstrations to integrate the theaters and cafeterias. For the second time in his life, Jackson was arrested, this time for “inciting to riot.”
After completing a degree in sociology in 1964, Jackson attended the Chicago Theological Seminary. But Jackson’s interest in activism won out over his formal studies. In March 1965 he traveled to Selma, Alabama, to participate in the civil rights marches. There he met King for the first time, and he was soon hired as an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
After Jackson had helped organize the open housing marches in 1966 to challenge racial discrimination by landlords and real estate agents, King put him in charge of Chicago’s Operation Breadbasket, an SCLC project to increase employment opportunities for blacks. Within a year, the project had obtained 2,200 jobs for African Americans in white-owned businesses.
By 1967 Jackson was Operation Breadbasket’s national director. To secure agreements regarding fair employment practices, Jackson organized protests and boycotts of corporations that were heavily patronized by black consumers. To avoid bad publicity, some companies signed agreements to hire more African American employees and to do business with black-owned firms as suppliers. Conservative critics blasted such agreements as “shakedowns,” but the civil rights movement had a long tradition of such boycotts, starting with the “Don’t shop where you can’t work” campaigns of the 1930s.
After King’s death, SCLC leaders resented Jackson’s visibility and ambition. Jackson, who was ordained as a minister in 1968, left SCLC in 1971 and founded Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) in Chicago. He would direct that organization until his 1984 run for the White House. It expanded Jackson’s strategy of using the threat of boycotts to pressure companies to hire and promote black employees and to do business with black-owned firms. Operation PUSH signed agreements with many high-profile companies, including Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Southland Corporation, Heublein, Burger King, and Seven Up.
By the end of the 1970s Jackson had became a household name and was a major spokesperson for progressive views on a range of policy issues.
He condemned the Republican attacks on social spending and their support for increased military budgets. He also tied together the struggles for self-determination at home and around the world in a universal message of morality and self-respect.
As more blacks were elected to public office, white Americans got used to seeing blacks in powerful positions. A growing number of whites began to vote for black candidates. These trends and momentum made it possible for Jackson to consider running for president.
Jackson already had a track record of pushing the Democratic Party to be more inclusive. In 1972 he and Chicago alderman William Singer unseated Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s Cook County delegate slate at the Democratic convention in Miami, Florida, replacing it with a more diverse group.
In 1983 Jackson gave a speech highlighting blacks’ unrealized political influence, referring to the results of the 1980 election: “Reagan won Alabama by 17,500 votes, but there were 272,000 unregistered blacks. He won Arkansas by 5,000 votes, with 85,000 unregistered blacks. He won Kentucky by 17,800 votes, with 62,000 unregistered blacks. The numbers show that Reagan won through a perverse coalition of the rich and the registered. But this is a new day.”
A growing segment of the Democratic Party’s leaders were obsessed with winning back white middle-class suburban voters and attracting campaign contributions from business groups. Jackson wanted to stem the party’s rightward shift and the growing influence of its “centrist” wing, embodied by the Democratic Leadership Council. His presidential runs in 1984 and 1988 achieved far more than many pundits had predicted. In 1984 he won over 3 million votes in Democratic primaries—nearly 20 percent of the total primary votes cast—finishing third (behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart) in a field of eight candidates. He won about 80 percent of the black vote. He won several primaries in southern states with large black populations. The large black turnout for Jackson helped elect other Democrats to Congress, giving Jackson leverage as a party power broker.
By 1988 Jackson had become a crossover politician, appealing to black voters but also winning support from white voters, particularly white workers thrown out of their jobs by corporate mergers and outsourcing, and white farmers losing customers to food imports from abroad. He stressed the theme of economic opportunity for all Americans and the undue influence of big business.
In early 1988, two weeks after Chrysler announced it would be closing a large car assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jackson organized a rally outside the plant. He attacked Chrysler, saying, “We have to put the focus on Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the place, here and now, where we draw the line to end economic violence!” He compared the workers’ fight to that of the civil rights movement. The United Auto Workers union local voted to endorse Jackson.
Jackson vigorously attacked American-based multinational companies that built plants in Asia, sending jobs overseas. He argued that the weakness of trade unions in Third World countries should be considered an unfair trade practice. “Let’s stop mergin’ corporations, purgin’ workers,” he told the Teamsters at their annual convention. “Let’s shift, to reinvestment in America.” As the New York Times reported in November 1987, “The overwhelmingly white audience roared its approval of Jesse Jackson, as most audiences he speaks to, black and white, generally do these days.”
In 1988 Jackson won thirteen Democratic primaries and caucuses, doubled his total votes to 7 million, and garnered 29 percent of the total vote, finishing second to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. He won the Michigan primary with 55 percent of the vote. Again, he won almost the entire black vote, but he also won 22 percent of the white vote in Connecticut and almost one out of four white votes in Wisconsin. Exit polls showed that more than half of Wisconsin’s white voters had a favorable view of Jackson. Overall, he significantly increased his support among white voters. About 40 percent of the white voters who supported Jackson in 1988 had voted for Ronald Reagan four years earlier, indicating that his appeal was broadening beyond white liberals.
Jackson’s campaign mobilized many activists around the country, which Jackson described as a “rainbow coalition” tying together diverse constituencies and causes. The campaign made Jackson an influential figure within the Democratic Party, but the campaign did not succeed in building a permanent progressive organization.
Jackson has remained a visible presence in American politics, speaking out on a wide range of issues. He has probably walked more picket lines and spoken at more labor rallies than any recent public figure. He traveled to Asia to investigate treatment of workers in the Japanese automobile industry and in apparel factories in Indonesia. He has played mediator in a whole host of hostage cases, most famously when he helped secure the release of hundreds of foreign nationals held in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein.
Jackson has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. His son Jesse Jackson Jr. has served Chicago in Congress since 1995.