The Memo: Jesse Jackson’s legacy resonates as political world grapples with his death

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The Memo: Jesse Jackson’s legacy resonates as political world grapples with his death

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the two-time presidential candidate and activist who was the dominant figure in Black politics from the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. until the emergence of former President Obama, died on Tuesday. He was 84.

Perhaps the greatest political orator of his generation, Jackson’s words enraptured crowds at rallies and national conventions, especially during his 1980s peak.

His skill with language could take flight in more incongruous surroundings, too. His 1972 recitation of the affirming “I Am — Somebody” poem to a group of young children on “Sesame Street” went viral in the hours after his death.

The poem serves as an expression of self-respect and a demand for dignity. As such, it reflects battles Jackson fought in his own life, growing up as the child of an unmarried mother in South Carolina, seeing Dr. King shot dead, and leading a movement aimed at knitting together the diverse panels of what he spoke of as the “quilt” of the American experience.

“Michelle and I were deeply saddened to hear about the passing of a true giant,” Obama said in a statement Tuesday, hailing Jackson for having “helped lead some of the most significant movements for change in human history.”

Former Presidents Biden and Clinton also paid tribute. So too did President Trump — with few of the barbs that might have been expected regarding a figure with starkly different politics.

Trump praised Jackson as “a good man with lots of personality, grit and ‘street smarts.’” Trump also went on to post a number of old photos of him and Jackson together.

Jackson had been ill for some time, and his passing reignited a reckoning with his legacy.

In an earlier era, Jackson’s detractors derided him as a self-promoter and emphasized that he never actually held elected office.

The critics were mostly on the right — but not always. Former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry, who died in 2014, once derided the possibility of Jackson running for the office in the District by saying, “Jesse don’t want to run nothing but his mouth.”

With time, however, there has been a broader acceptance of Jackson’s major historical significance — an impact often centered on his near-unique ability to draw marginalized or ignored groups into the political process.

“Jesse Jackson really understood and executed coalition politics,” Abby Phillip, the anchor of CNN’s “NewsNight with Abby Phillip” and the author of “A Dream Deferred,” a recent book about Jackson, told this column.

“What he saw was all the groups — Arab Americans, farmers, Asian Americans, Native Americans — on the outskirts of politics. He was willing to speak to those people directly, and he was one of the first major candidates to do that in a serious way,” Phillip added.

Jerry Austin, the campaign manager of Jackson’s 1988 presidential run, said simply: “There’s never going to be anybody else like him.”

Austin, like Phillip, emphasized Jackson’s capacity to reach out to those otherwise left in the shadows.

Jackson, he recalled, would go to “places that other candidates never would — Native American reservations, small coal-mining communities — knowing full well there were very few votes there. But people needed to be recognized.”

Austin recalled one instance during the 1988 campaign when Jackson arrived in darkness to an event in Meridian, Miss.

“There were maybe 200 people late at night, waiting for him for two or three hours, because they couldn’t believe that the Jesse Jackson they saw on television was going to come to their church in Meridian, Mississippi.”

Jackson voiced the emotional power of these dynamics in his famous 1988 address to the Democratic National Convention.

“Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects, on the corners, I understand,” he said. “[They] call you outcast, low down, you can’t make it, you’re nothing, you’re from nobody, subclass, underclass. When you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.”

At the time — and for years afterward — the Democratic Party establishment treated Jackson with deep wariness, partly because of his left-wing views, often expressed in the language of moral imperative; and partly because of controversies like the reference to New York as “Hymietown,” which always dogged him. Jackson used the term, derogatory to Jewish people, in a 1984 conversation with a reporter, fueling skepticism about him among Jewish Americans that lingered for years.

For about 20 years after his final campaign, the Democratic Party leadership pursued a more centrist, corporate-friendly direction. Jackson, for his part, recognized how hard fundamental change could be — even after Obama’s 2008 victory.

Imagery of Jackson weeping at Obama’s election night event in Chicago, struck by the historic import of the moment, became famous — even if it failed to erase speculation as to whether Jackson felt some degree of envy about Obama’s rise.

This reporter interviewed Jackson in his Chicago offices just days after Obama’s victory. Then, Jackson questioned whether, for all the symbolism of Obama’s barrier-breaking win, the nation was “willing to invest in evening the playing field, willing to invest in addressing structural inequalities in health care and education?”

“Our spirits are soaring high, but we want to go from hope to fulfillment,” Jackson added.

An answer, of a kind, to Jackson’s question came when Obama was succeeded by Trump, a figure whose politics are antithetical to Jackson. The shift raised the question of the extent to which Trump’s rise was driven by a white backlash against the nation’s first Black president, much as Democratic leaders of the 1980s fretted about a similar, racially based backlash to Jackson’s prominence.

At the same time, recent years have brought a resurgence in the kind of left-leaning populism that Jackson favored. His longtime ally Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) mounted two presidential runs of his own, and there were plenty of echoes of Jackson’s appeal to marginalized groups in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) victory last year.

“He marched, he ran, he organized and he preached justice without apology,” Mamdani wrote of Jackson on social media on Tuesday. “May we honor him not just in words but in struggle.”

For all that, Jackson’s special resonance in the Black community cannot be overstated.

“I remember watching him in ’84 and ’88 imploring the party to be more responsive to people who looked like him — which meant people who looked like me,” New York-based Democratic strategist Basil Smikle told this column.

Phillip said of Jackson: “I’ll tell you how he put it — as his candidacy lifted the ceiling on Black possibility. What he meant by that was, for so many years, Black Americans felt there was this ceiling on what they could achieve because of the racism and racial violence in this country.”

The CNN anchor added, “He gave an entire generation of Black Americans a new, fresh sense of hope they had never had before — that someone like them could do the things they had seen white Americans do, and ascend to all the positions they had seen white Americans ascend to.”

Jackson never got there himself, but few now doubt he helped pave the way.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

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