Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition Created Today’s Democratic Politics
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DEMOCRATSSOCIAL JUSTICEJESSE JACKSONJesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition Created Today’s Democratic PoliticsJackson turns 77 this year, after almost six decades of fighting for the dispossessed and disenfranchised.
By Steve CobbleOCTOBER 2, 2018
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Rev. Jesse Jackson in Jena, Louisiana, 2007. (Reuters / Sean Gardner)
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As the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr. eulogized Aretha Franklin last month, I was reminded that he turns 77 in early October. And as he spoke of her service to the movement, I thought about his almost six decades of fighting for the dispossessed and disenfranchised.
Jesse was first arrested in a civil-rights action to integrate the public library in Greenville, South Carolina, in the summer of 1960—and he has never stopped marching since. Even with Parkinson’s, he gets up every day to take the early bus to fight for justice.
At his peak, he was known all around the world by his first name. He was regarded as the best campaign speaker of his era, carried on Dr. King’s advocacy of nonviolent resistance, and helped lead the progressive movement during the dark days of Ronald Reagan and the right-wing counter-revolution. With little money and no institutional backing, he ran for president twice, and in 1988 won 13 states, 7 million votes, and more than 1,200 delegates at the Democratic
National Convention in Atlanta—at the time, the highest second-place finish since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.
He put flesh on the spirit of Dr. King’s 1957 cry to “give us the ballot,” by registering to vote African Americans and the young everywhere he went, for literally decades. Even as he eulogized the great Aretha Franklin, he pointed out “the short lines for voting” that had helped elect Donald Trump.
Until perhaps the 2008 Obama campaign, no individual had inspired more new young and minority voters to register than Jesse Jackson—which means that he has played a direct role in electing Democrats and progressives at every level, in every part of the nation, for years.
The Jackson presidential campaigns of the 1980s opened the door to Barack Obama’s victory. Obama himself once told Jackson that after watching him debate in 1984, he knew it was possible for a black candidate to win.
But Jesse didn’t just inspire a young, talented candidate; nor did he stop with registering uncounted African Americans and young people to vote—he also forced the Democratic Party to change its rules during his campaigns, in ways that made them fairer and more proportional, thus opening the door to an African-American presidential nominee in the future. Jackson’s rules changes made delegate selection more proportional, and less winner-take-all, and thus made it possible for Barack Obama to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2008.
Jesse changed the Democratic Party, helping it evolve into its modern configuration as a diverse party, not a Dixiecrat party. In the 1980s, the prevailing pundit theory was that the ticket back to
relevance for the Democratic Party was to follow the lead of the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council, or as Jesse suggested, the Democrats for the Leisure Class): to try to win back white Southerners, reach out to “moderates,” and appeal to the corporate class.
But Jackson proposed a different way forward: the idea of the Rainbow Coalition, expanding the party to fully include a new party base of the young, African Americans, Latinos, women, labor union members, gays and lesbians, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, students, peace activists, environmentalists, all unified into one winning voting coalition.
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