Amid the preparations for the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s memorial services, I asked U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, if he had a message for the people who would gather in Chicago, Illinois, on March 6 and 7 to honor the civil rights leader and two-time presidential candidate. “The message from me is that there would be no multiracial, multigenerational progressive movement today without the Reverend Jackson’s groundbreaking campaigns,” came the reply from Sanders. “He was absolutely a transformative figure in American politics.”
For those who chart the story of progressive politics in the United States—as The Progressive has for the past 117 years, and as Sanders has for much of his career —there can be no question about the role Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential bids played in bending the arc of history toward progress.
The preacher from South Carolina who marched beside the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, organized against poverty and machine-politics corruption in Chicago, counseled Presidents, became a roving diplomat with a knack for securing the release of American hostages, challenged the rightward drift of the Reagan era, and forged a Rainbow Coalition that changed the trajectory of the Democratic Party, died February 17 at the age of eighty-four. Jackson’s death provided an opportunity to recognize just how dramatically he redefined what was possible in American politics.
“He paved the road for so many others to follow,” former President Barack Obama told thousands of mourners at the public memorial for Jackson in the amphitheater of Chicago’s House of Hope church on March 6. Obama shared how he was inspired by the 1983 campaign that elected Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago, and by Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, to move to Chicago and enter politics. He recalled a time when few dared to believe that a “young Black Senator from Chicago’s South Side would even be taken seriously as a candidate for the presidential nomination.”
Yet, Obama would win the party’s 2008 nomination, and the presidency. Twice. And, now, he declared, without hesitation, that, “Jackson laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who also spoke at the Chicago memorial service, and showed off the Jackson campaign pins she had worn as a college student, said much the same thing. In fact, so many political figures spoke of the debts of honor that they owed to Jackson that his 1984 and 1988 campaigns came into perspective as bids that—while they may not have secured the largest number of convention delegates in those years—had an epic impact that lingers to this day.
Jackson was not the first Black candidate for the presidency. The Reverend Channing Phillips, a civil rights campaigner from Washington, D.C., had mounted a brief bid for the Democratic nomination at the party’s turbulent 1968 convention— winning 67.5 delegate votes at the same session where a too-young Julian Bond would get 48.5 votes for the vice-presidential nomination. Four years later, U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm, Democrat of New York, campaigned across the country for the 1972 Democratic nod, battling party bosses and media outlets that denied her places on debate stages, to secure 152 delegate votes, roughly 5 percent of the total.
But Jackson’s bids were exponentially more successful, especially in 1988, when his crusade for racial and economic justice sent 1,219 delegates to that year’s Democratic National Convention. His solid second-place finish to nominee Michael Dukakis opened up the party to a new kind of politics.
That new politics inspired a revolution of the mind that cut through prejudices and preconceptions in order to clear the way for new candidacies and coalitions.
A brilliant organizer and strategist who always kept his eye on the next task, Jackson’s message at the 1988 convention was not one of concession or demobilization. While he backed Dukakis, he also extended Rainbow Coalition politics toward the next round of elections, where his delegates would be candidates. “You must not surrender,” Jackson told those delegates. “We must never surrender. America will get better and better.”
And they heard him.
David Dinkins, a key New York City backer of Jackson’s 1988 campaign, would be elected as mayor of that city in 1989—defeating incumbent Mayor Ed Koch in the Democratic primary and a future mayor, Republican Rudy Giuliani, in the November election. Hundreds of other veterans of the Jackson campaign would run and win in the years that followed, spreading the Rainbow across the country.
“A new generation of Black elected leaders was born,” recalled Marc Morial, who in 1994 was elected, at age thirty-six, as mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana.
The current speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, Emanuel “Chris” Welch, remembered Jackson’s 1988 campaign as “an earthquake to American politics” that empowered generations of progressive political campaigners by “showing people their great power, and we are all motivated to march forward in his footsteps.”
What distinguished Jackson was a determination to help disenfranchised and disenchanted Americans conceive, and practice, a politics that would, in the immortal words of British parliamentarian and one-time Labour Party leader Michael Foot, “win the people’s battles for the future.”
At the very heart of that mission was the Rainbow vision that began with the basic premise—outlined in Jackson’s historic address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, California—that, “We are bound by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, crying out from their graves for us to reach common ground. We are bound by shared blood and shared sacrifices. We are much too intelligent; much too bound by our Judeo-Christian heritage; much too victimized by racism, sexism, militarism, and antisemitism; much too threatened as historical scapegoats to go on divided one from another. We must turn from finger pointing to clasped hands. We must share our burdens and our joys with each other once again. We must turn to each other and not on each other and choose higher ground.”
Young progressives heard that message and knew it was right. A Carleton College professor in Minnesota embraced it and, as the co-chair of Jackson’s 1988 campaign in the state, rallied farmers and packinghouse workers, students and their teachers, into a rural-urban, multiracial, multiethnic coalition that was carried forward in one of the most unlikely Senate bids in American history. Running against Democratic Party powerbrokers and an entrenched Republican incumbent, Paul Wellstone won the first of two terms in the U.S. Senate in 1990.
Two years later, building upon the Rainbow Coalition model with a campaign where she took the counsel of Coalition strategists such as Steve Cobble, Carol Moseley Braun beat an incumbent U.S. Senator in the Illinois Democratic primary and became the first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.
A Rainbow Coalition veteran from the neighboring state of Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin, sits in the Senate to this day—recalling Jackson’s legacy by saying, “I’m hopeful that we will carry his dream for a more just and equal nation forward.”
So, too, does Sanders, who has always been clear about the debt his progressive presidential bids in 2016 and 2020 owed to the Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988.
At a time when few white elected officials were supporting Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition run, Sanders came forward in 1988 as one of the most prominent political figures in Vermont—then mayor of Burlington, and an emerging figure in statewide politics who, in 1990, would unseat a Republican Congressmember and move on to the House—to endorse Jackson.
Sanders and his allies were key backers of Jackson in 1988, when the independent mayor told the Burlington caucus: “The candidate we are supporting tonight has stood for us and fought for us for the last twenty-five years of his life. Along with Martin Luther King Jr., he put his life on the line so that all Americans, regardless of color, could receive their basic democratic rights . . . . He was there when we needed him.”
Jackson ran dramatically better than expected in the caucuses of “the whitest state in the nation,” despite the fact that he had no paid staff in Vermont. Later, he would celebrate Sanders, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower (also a columnist for The Progressive), and a handful of other white elected officials who “stepped across the color line” and backed an African American presidential candidate.
The 1988 race had a great influence on Sanders. Years later, as he pondered his own run for the presidency, Sanders spoke about Jackson’s 1988 bid as a model. When I asked him in 2014 about whether he saw a connection between the campaign he was preparing to wage in 2016 and Jackson’s runs, Sanders responded, “Absolutely. I think Jackson has not gotten the credit he deserves. His campaigns were revolutionary: We had an African American minister going to states like Iowa—predominantly white states—and rallying farmers. He came to Vermont; I remember I introduced him, and we had hundreds and hundreds of people out to hear him speak in a state that was then virtually all white. The idea of bringing together people—the Rainbow Coalition concept of whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, and lesbians—is absolutely right, and the emphasis, in my view, can be on economic issues. I happen to believe that the frustration and disgust with the status quo is much, much higher now—much, much higher than many ‘pundits’ understand. The job right now, the main focus, is to bring people together from an economic perspective, on class lines, and talk about an America that works for the vast majority of our people and not just the top 1 percent.”
Jackson made no endorsement in the 2016 contest between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. But he respected the connection between his bids and those of the Senator from Vermont.
After Sanders secured a surprise victory in the Michigan primary on March 8, 2016, Jackson argued that “faulty one-sided trade policies, bank predators, growing student loan debt, loss of jobs, urban abandonment, matter. That is why Bernie Sanders overturned the bandwagon of political expectations, pundits, and polls last night. His primary win in the racially diverse state of Michigan was a stunning upset—a victory for his message of schools not jails, worker’s rights, and the undemocratic dominance of Wall Street over the common people.”
In 2020, Jackson formally endorsed Sanders and campaigned with the Senator. And in both 2016 and 2020, he counseled the pundits not to write off the democratic socialist—speaking as a former contender who, in 1988, had accepted the endorsement of Michael Harrington and the Democratic Socialists of America. “Who said Bernie couldn’t win?” he announced. “Who’s the ‘they’ [that dismiss the Sanders campaign]? Whoever gets the most votes wins.”
On that technical point, Jackson was correct. Whoever gets the most votes is counted as the winner when the ballots are reviewed.
But on the broader point—the measure of our politics not just in the moment of one election but along that long arc of history—the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. prevailed. He built a politics that is as alive today as it was on that remarkable night in July 1988, when he closed his second presidential bid with a message that, while a campaign was finishing, the fight for economic and social and racial justice, for peace and for the planet, would carry on to victory.
“Don’t despair,” he declared. “Pull the patches and the pieces together, bound by a common thread. When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground, we’ll have the power to bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to our nation. We, the people, can win!”