CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Jesse Jackson in Michigan

Reverend Jesse Jackson will be remembered for much: His civil rights activism, his presidential campaigns, his early support of the LGBTQ community. His campaigns impacts are readily apparent in the Mitten State. Those two presidential campaigns reflected the changing politics of Michigan, issues of race and class, and a battle over the direction of the Democratic Party.

In 1972, segregationist George Wallace won the Michigan Democratic primary. He won due to white backlash against the Civil Rights movement, as well as a sympathy vote due to the recent attempt on his life. Yet in 1988, Jesse Jackson won the Michigan Democratic caucuses. What changed in those 16 years? How did Michiganders go from voting to a man who stood in the schoolhouse door to protest integration to voting for a Black minister who met with Fidel Castro?

The white backlash didn’t go away. In arch-conservative Livingston County—a hotbed of Klan activity—the following sign appeared: “Don’t shoot Jesse Jackson; we don’t need another national holiday.” Nor did Jackson ever win the support of Detroit’s first Black Mayor Coleman Young. Young considered himself a political kingmaker. He derided Jackson’s first campaign as a “merely symbolic” run that couldn’t win; he endorsed ultimate loser Walter Mondale. The second time, Young was all in for Dukakis, who went down in defeat in November.

It was through a cross-racial, populist appeal that Jackson cut through the backlash and did an end run around the state’s traditional political elite. At housing projects, at shuttered factory gates, at union halls Jackson rallied the dispossessed and the disenfranchised. The state’s large Arab-American community came out for Jackson due to his support for Palestinian human rights and opposition to Israeli aggression. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute reported that Jackson called........

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