[The civil rights icon speaks with TNR about the 2024 race, his
legacy, and how he’s not actually retiring.]
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JESSE JACKSON: THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL RACE  
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David Masciotra
August 1, 2023
The New Republic
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_ The civil rights icon speaks with TNR about the 2024 race, his
legacy, and how he’s not actually retiring. _

Jackson during a Moral Mondays march to the Hart Senate Building on
August 2, 2021, Zach Brien/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

 

“I’m traumatized by the highs and lows of our struggle,” the
Reverend Jesse Jackson told me during a recent conversation in his
Chicago home. His wife of 61 years, Jacqueline, had prompted his
confession with a critical assessment of the violence central to
American history and the cultural inadequacies that inhibit political
debate. “We often talk about ‘wounded warriors,’” she said,
“but we don’t have the vocabulary to discuss those who served and
who died in the domestic wars of our country—the wars to advance our
country toward democracy.”

“I had a protective Chicago police detail outside my home and office
for 30 years,” Jackson told me. The threat of death followed him no
matter where he marched, spoke, or even slept. He watched his friend
and mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, die from an assassin’s bullet to
the neck. In the speech that King gave the night before his death, he
reflected on his own mortality and the escalating hatred and menace he
confronted on a daily basis, testifying that “longevity has its
place”—but confessing that he did not expect to experience it.

While America is not yet the “promised land,” it has undergone a
profound transformation since King shared his mountaintop vision
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in 1968. Jackson played no small part in that progress. He has lived
as a warrior and commanding general in many of the most critical
battles for the realization of a multiracial democracy. He has enjoyed
the very blessing that was so cruelly stolen from King, Malcom X,
Medgar Evers, and many other civil rights veterans: longevity. He is
now 81 years old and the father of six children, one of whom,
Representative Jonathan Jackson, was elected to Congress in 2022.

Jesse Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017. With
challenges to his mobility and speech, he is stepping back
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at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the human rights and political advocacy
organization he founded. At first, in the press announcement
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he called it “retirement,” but now he prefers the word
“pivot.” Frederick Haynes III, a Texas-based minister, was named
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the new president and CEO of the coalition.

Jackson’s announcement comes at a time—the primary campaign
season—when he twice made his mark on U.S. election history, with
racially unprecedented and groundbreaking primary campaigns for
president. So he knows all about insurgent candidacies—and he is
concerned at what he’s seeing on the Democratic side today. He
supports Biden’s reelection but worries about the influence of
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “He’s wacky,” Jackson said. “He’s
using the great legacy of his name to become Trump-lite.” 

His assessment of Cornel West, who is running for president on the
Green Party ticket, is kinder: “He is a man of substance. He has a
contribution to make to the dialogue, but he should do that within the
party, not against it. In the 1980s, I won millions of votes and
raised millions of dollars. There were people who advised me to go
third party. But I expanded the Democratic Party. I could have broken
away, but I thought that would only help the right.”

The Republican Party, Jackson suggests, has become too dangerous for
such electoral distractions. “We’ll win if we vote our numbers,
but if we don’t, we risk losing our democracy,” he said. “Trump
wants to pull us back into white supremacy. DeSantis is even worse.
He’s a Harvard and Yale man. He knows better. There’s something
more insidious about that.” 

Spending time in discussion with Jackson doubles as a vivid tour of
American history and engagement in the converging crises of the
present. As he reflected on the triumphs and devastation he’s
experienced, he  represented and articulated the ongoing urgency of
America’s long struggle for equality and justice. I detected worry
that his life’s work to help advance American democracy could be
undone in an election or two. 

The year was 1960. At home in Greenville, South Carolina, during a
break in his first semester at North Carolina A&T University, he went
to the “Black” library in town to check out a book he needed to
write a term paper. The librarian told him that they didn’t have it
in their collection but assured him that her friend, a librarian at
the “white” library, would break policy and allow him to take the
book. At the larger, more modern library across town, he was
attempting to check out the book when a police officer forcibly
ejected him from the library and threw him down on the curb. Jackson
told me that he sat and cried. But he later joined with seven other
students to form what historians call the “Greenville Eight,”
which led an ultimately victorious movement to integrate library
services in the city.

At North Carolina A&T, Jackson led protests against police brutality
and organized with a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality,
or CORE. In 1965, he interrupted his graduate studies at the
University of Chicago to lead a delegation down to Alabama to
participate in the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights. It
was there that Jackson met Dr. Martin Luther King and earned a
position on his staff. For the next half-century, despite the risks
and pain associated with civil rights activism, Jackson led efforts to
integrate an apartheid economy. His fight against redlining, hiring
discrimination, and exclusion of racial minorities from trade unions
earned him the nickname the “apostle of economics
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He led protests and boycotts against corporations like General Motors
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and Burger King
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the giants of Silicon Valley
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securing thousands of jobs for Black workers and millions of dollars
of ancillary benefits for Black professionals and entrepreneurs.

In the 1980s, the Democratic Party was also in desperate need of
reform. One might say that Jackson helped Democrats become “woke.”
When party leaders, including Senators Edward Kennedy and Walter
Mondale, endorsed white opponents of Harold Washington in the
Democratic primary for Chicago mayor in 1983, Jackson searched for a
Black leader to run for president as a challenge to the
“indifference and mediocrity of the white establishment within the
party.” When they all declined, Jackson himself ran. The mainstream
press predicted Jackson would register as a mere asterisk in the 1984
race, but he defied expectations by winning nearly one out of every
five votes. In 1988, he outperformed Joe Biden and Al Gore to take
second place in the Democratic primary, ushering millions of new
voters into the party. “We built a multiracial, multilingual,
multigendered coalition,” Jackson said to me, flashing a smile.

The Jackson coalition was also international. Uniquely successful in
American history as an unofficial diplomat, he has negotiated the
release of hostages and political prisoners in Syria, Cuba, Iraq,
Serbia, Gambia, and Algeria. 

Many political observers, including Steve Kornacki
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and Bernie Sanders
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attribute Democratic control of the Senate during the Reagan years,
and subsequent victories for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, at least
partially to new constituencies that Jackson brought to the party. He
spoke directly to Latinos with Spanish translators, visited Asian
immigrant neighborhoods in San Francisco and other cities, made
campaign appearances on Native American reservations, and was the
first presidential candidate to make gay rights central to his agenda
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Jackson’s vision of a “rainbow coalition” was 20 years ahead of
its time. “We prevailed in changing the Democratic Party’s
cultural power,” he said. “Now we must build a movement for
economic power.” While he celebrates Democrats’ leftward shift on
economic policy, Jackson yearns for a popular social welfare movement
similar in size and strength to the labor movement of the 1930s that
encouraged President Roosevelt to enact the New Deal. As in the 1980s,
Jackson today advocates for universal health care, tuition-free
community and state colleges, paid family leave, subsidized childcare,
raising the minimum wage to a living wage.

While much of what he’s fought for remains a dream rather than
reality, Jackson provided me with an appraisal of the quiet aspects of
revolutionary change that many Americans now take for granted. “When
Dr. King was leading us, there was only one Black elected official in
the South,” he said. “Now, there are Black mayors, Black
congressmen and women, Black senators, Black city council members. And
whites are voting for progressive Blacks. Hundreds of thousands of
white people—in _Georgia_—voted for [Senator Raphael] Warnock.”

Jackson pointed to the television, which was tuned to CNN. “We now
have access to information,” he said. “Black, Latino, progressive
scholars and journalists appear on television, write for major papers,
teach in academia. Dr. King fought against a very hostile national
press.”

When I asked what he considers his greatest achievement, he said,
“We raised Black consciousness and enlarged the white conscience.”

He then told a story from his 1984 campaign. An antagonist of big
agriculture, he was scheduled to speak to family farmers in a rural
area on the outskirts of Columbia, Missouri. When he and his staff
arrived, they paused in horror to find an audience of white men in
hoods. His fear quickly morphed into shock and relief when he learned
that they had disguised their faces to prevent the Bureau of Farmers,
which set farmer insurance rates, from identifying them as supporters
of the Jackson campaign. (They worried the bureau would penalize
them.) 

“We went into hotbeds of white nationalism and Black nationalism,”
Jackson concluded, “from the fields of Iowa and Missouri to Harlem
and the Black neighborhoods of Chicago and Detroit, and converted many
people from nationalism to the rainbow.”

Even if he will no longer work out of the Rainbow/PUSH offices six
days a week, as he did until recently, and even though will spend more
time seeing to his health, Jackson is not yet ready to truly retire.
“I plan to teach seminars for seminarians and young ministers on how
to fight injustice,” he said. “I especially want to help Black and
Latino ministers work together for social justice. We need to strive
more toward a Black-brown alliance for social justice, because we’re
in the same fight.”

I closed our conversation by asking Jackson about his personal battle
with Parkinson’s disease, which also afflicted his father. Every
day, he says, people with Parkinson’s write him to thank him for his
example of perseverance. “I’m happy that I can inspire people,”
he said.

“I used to speak at middle schools and high schools,” he added,
“and I told them the same thing that I now tell people with
Parkinson’s.” His words should guide anyone who still believes in
the promise of American democracy, even as powerful forces gather to
suffocate it: “You only drown if you stop kicking.” 

David Masciotra [[link removed]]

David Masciotra [[link removed]] is the author of several
books, including _I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters,_
_Mellencamp: American Troubadour,_ and a forthcoming examination of
the politics of exurbia and suburbia.

* Jesse Jackson; Democratic Party; Rainbow Coalition;
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