During a visit to Zimbabwe in 1989, Jesse Jackson was walking down the dirt trail leading to Victoria Falls when a group of three African men hunkered in the shade of a scrubby tree stood up to point at him. One asked, “Is this… is this the great Reverend Jesse Jackson?”

His fame was global. He popped up in the most unlikely places: negotiating the release of hostages in Lebanon, lobbying for earthquake relief in Armenia, criticizing factory conditions in Japan. A photo spread of his career would show him face-to-face with Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević. He hosted Saturday Night Live and appeared on Sesame Street, and he had a talk show on CNN that ran for eight years. 

By the time of his death, the world seemed to have passed Jackson by. The multiracial “Rainbow Coalition” that he championed – “Red, yellow, brown, black and white, and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” as he said at the 1984 Democratic National Convention – was replaced by a Democratic party that holds “Black Lives Matter” as a sacred phrase never to be modified by reference to lives of any other color. 

Barack Obama bears much of the blame for marginalizing Jackson, although his reasons were as much personal as ideological. Back in Chicago, the Obamas and the Jacksons had been close. Jesse’s daughter Santita was maid of honor at Michelle and Barack’s wedding. But during the 2008 presidential campaign, Jackson was critical of Obama’s handling of racial issues, and those frustrations became disastrously public when Jackson........

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