Welcome to this episode of the Award-Winning Best of the Left Podcast.
Today we examine the life and legacy of Reverend Jesse Jackson civil rights
icon, two-time presidential candidate and one of the most consequential
political figures of the 20th century.
We'll hear Jackson's own soaring words from the 1984 and
1988 Democratic Conventions.
Reflections on how he transformed the Democratic Party from the inside, and
analysis of why his Rainbow Coalition vision feels more urgent than ever
in the current political moment.
For those.
Looking for a quick overview.
The sources providing our top takes in about 45 minutes today.
Include here and now.
Anytime.
Sesame Street takes by Jamelle Bouie, Roland s Martin,
the zero hour and CBS news.
Then in the additional deeper dives, half of the show there will be more in four
sections, section A, presidential runs, section B, rainbow Coalition, section
C, the Man and Section D, his legacy.
But first, a reminder to check out our new show solved on the
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Linked in the show notes and now onto the show.
A mighty lion has fallen.
And he was indeed a line for justice.
He protected people and he brought a lot of people along.
He knew that civil rights was bigger than just black.
You know that speech in 63 is one of 'em, but the speech a lot of
people need to listen to today is 84.
At the presidential, uh, convention.
It's the kind of speech we need to hear today.
The kind of agenda to take on this authoritarian now, because he said,
what we really need is a rainbow, where we bring together black and
white and brown and the Asian and indigenous all people together
around our deepest moral of values.
And Jesse was able to do that.
He, he built a political movement.
He was, say he didn't win, but he did in some ways 7 million more in the party.
Change the party rules, push things into the agenda for poor and low wealth
people that wouldn't have been there and really gave the kind of progressive
agenda that we actually need today, uh, to push back against authoritarianism.
'cause he knew that politics needed to be more than about Democrat versus
Republican, but about right versus wrong and about lifting from the bottom.
You know, well earlier on, uh, in his life, Jesse Jackson joined
lunch, counter sit-ins, marched in Montgomery, Selma, Alabama, founded
organizations for social justice.
Um, and then you mentioned, uh, him running for president.
So let's listen to him speaking in 1984 at the Tindley Temple United Methodist
Church in Philadelphia.
It's time for a new course, a new coalition.
Leadership, somebody.
Got the rise above race, rise above sex or new leadership, A choice, a chance.
Don't cry by what you don't have.
Use what you got.
Jackson.
You ain't got more votes than any other black candidate, uh, at the time in 1988.
Came in second in the Democratic primary.
But to reflect on what we just heard, what did you hear?
Yeah, he got more votes than many white candidates he beat.
I mean, he won in South Carolina, Mississippi came in second Tennessee won
in Virginia, came second, North Carolina.
What I hear is him saying, and you know, this is right after Reaganism
and uh, or during that time when Reagan was, was robbed, and he's
saying he's given a hope notice.
He's not just doing a list of grievances, he's giving people
a vision, a vision of hope.
If you listen to him deeper, he goes straight into policy
and that's what we need today.
'cause just having grievances about Trump, what he does, we already know
what he's gonna do and what he has done.
But politicians, they need to turn now to.
If you get elected, what are you gonna do?
What's your hope?
What's gonna happen to the man who doesn't make a living wage, woman
that doesn't have healthcare, or the child that needs more education?
Jesse had a way of keeping hope alive.
Even when he criticized, he didn't even criticize people's personally.
He criticized their policy.
But he didn't just stay on the grievances.
He lifted out, as he said, there a chance, not just crying about what
you don't have, but what you can have and what you must fight for.
And everywhere he went when I was with him, he would sometimes register
more voters than he would take more time doing that than he would speaking
because he understood how to build power.
People have to be clear about their vision, clear about the moral, uh,
implications, and then they must bring in those who have been pushed
out in order to expand the, the possibilities of power and the party.
Yeah.
Well, taking us to the issues of, of today, the policy issues of today,
you have called Jesse Jackson, a living bridge between eras.
Just briefly tell us what you mean by that.
Well, in some ways, um, like in the Bible, Samson was a bridge between Saul and sa,
uh uh, and, and David Jesse Jackson was the best of both the civil rights of the
sixties and the new politics post, the Civil Rights movement post of life of Dr.
King.
He took seriously what Dr. King said.
The greatest fear of the greedy oligarch in this nation would be for the masses of
black people in brown and white to join together and form a political alliance.
That could reshape the economic architecture of this country.
He knew that we had to do race and economics.
It's not either or, it's both and, and we miss him.
But the way we honor him is pick up the baton where he dropped it and carried on,
which is what we're gonna try to do and have been trying to do through repairs of
the breach and the moral fusion movement.
You ready on the stop?
Yes.
Okay.
Here we go.
I am.
I'm somebody, somebody.
I'm, I'm somebody.
Somebody.
I may be poor, I may be poor, but I'm somebody.
Somebody, I may be young, but I am.
Somebody, somebody.
I may be on welfare.
I may be on welfare, but I'm, but I'm somebody, somebody.
I may be small.
I may be small, but I am, but I'm somebody.
Somebody, I may make a mistake.
I may make mistake, but I'm, but I'm somebody.
Somebody.
My clothes are different.
My face is different.
My hair is different.
My dad, but I am.
But I'm somebody.
Somebody.
I am black.
I'm black.
Brown, brown, white, white.
I speak a different language.
But I must be respected.
But respected.
Protected it.
Never rejected, never reject it.
I am.
I'm God's child.
God's I am.
Somebody give yourself a big hand.
Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is rainbow, red,
yellow, brown, black and white.
We are all precious in God's sight.
America, America's not like a blanket, one piece of unbroken cloth, the same
color, the same texture, the same size.
America's more like a quilt.
Many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes.
All woven and held together by a common thread.
It is worth taking a moment to talk about Jesse Jackson's legacy.
I think if you are of a certain age, Jackson, uh, was presented in
media as something of a punchline, uh, someone to make light of.
But in my view, Jesse Jackson was one of the most consequential political
figures of the post-war United States.
So for some quick background, he grows up in Jim Crow.
He is.
One of the younger members, younger leadership in the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the SCLC, he is widely considered to be kind of
one of the potential heirs to MLK.
He is with MLK, uh, when King is assassinated in 1968.
Internal conflict at the SCLC after King's Death pushes Jackson out and he
forms, uh, the PUSH Coalition, which becomes the main vehicle for his activism.
He is a prominent black activist in the 1970s and in 1984, kind of making
a transition from the world of activism to the world of electoral politics.
He makes a run for the Democratic nomination for President, and in that 1984
campaign, he comes surprisingly close.
To not winning the nomination, but being one of the stronger runner ups.
And four years later, in 1988, he makes a second run that is all the
more successful and earns him enough delegates to make him a serious contender.
So Jackson's two campaigns for the presidency, uh, end up being
the furthest of Black American.
Prior to Barack Obama came to getting a major party nomination and
successful enough to really shape the response of the entire party to him.
So.
Why is Jackson so significant?
The first, I think the first major thing, the obvious thing is that there is no
Barack Obama without Jesse Jackson.
There is no Barack Obama candidacy.
Jackson again, made it clear in the 1980s that a black person, a black
man at the very least, could win.
A major party nomination and Obama's effort rests on Jesse Jackson.
There simply is no Obama without Jackson, but if you wanna look
broader than that, Jesse Jackson's two campaigns for the presidency were
genuinely social democratic in nature.
He deployed this metaphor in his campaigns of a quilt of the American electorate,
of the broad people being both.
Particular communities with particular identities and particular
problems, but yet knitted together that those problems are connected,
that the problems of the farmer.
And in 84, he's running his campaign in the midst of a major farm crisis.
The problems of the Iowa Farmer.
Aren't too different than the problems of the inner city, African American
and that a kind of policy approach, a politics that can address the concerns
and the challenges of the inner city.
Black American is attuned also to the challenges of the farmer Jackson.
Urged his listeners urged his supporters to not silo themselves out, but but
recognize their struggles in each other and build a politics around shared
struggle and around shared efforts to build a more egalitarian country.
Our choice, full participation in the democratic government,
a more abandonment and neglect.
And so this night we choose not a false sense of independence.
Not our capacity to survive and endure the not.
We choose interdependency and our capacity to act and unite for the greater good
in the urchin to recognize that egalitarianism for some cannot be
egalitarianism for all that one must.
Both be attuned, again, attuned to the particular conditions of particular people
in particular groups with an awareness of the whole and the importance of
building a more equal society overall.
And it's that message from Jackson's campaigns that you can see in the
Sanders campaign in 2016, in 2020, that you can see in the Mamdani
campaign for New York Mayor in 2025.
And that, I think, and I've thought this for some time now,
I wrote about this back in 2016.
I think that this message.
Is still quite powerful and still could form a useful template for
thinking about how to build a durable, egalitarian politics.
Now, Jackson was not perfect.
He was often inattentive to the struggles of women in particular,
and intersectionality as a. An intellectual idea as discipline emerges
out of dissatisfaction with civil rights leaders like Jackson and their
inability to bring a gender analysis into their thinking about the world.
So Jackson, not perfect Jackson.
A complicated manatees been the subject of various controversies.
So we're not holding them up as a saint or anything, but simply noting that
he is a political figure that is very influential, who is very important.
Uh, and whose ideas and approach I think still have a lot to teach us.
Uh, and there's still a lot from which we can learn, uh, when it
comes to not just combating all of this, uh, but also thinking
about how to forge a better world.
House speaker Mike Johnson declined the request, uh, by Democrats for
Reverend Jesse Jackson seeking to lie in honor at the US Capitol Rotunda.
Now, keep in mind, uh, there's only four times in American history, uh,
that citizens have, uh, lied in honor.
Now an official lies in state, uh, sentences lie in honor.
Rosa Parks was the first, Billy Graham was the second, and the two cops.
Uh, who died in the aftermath of January 6th.
They also got that honor as well in terms of politicians, black politicians,
uh, former congressman, uh, Congressman Elijah Cummings was first Congressman.
John Lewis was second.
Uh, Congressman Cummings, uh, lied in honor in Statuary Hall, um, Lewis,
that happened during C so they had him on the East steps, uh, because he
was supposed to, initially supposed to be in the Capitol rotunda, but he was
in the east steps of, of the capitol.
Uh, and so, uh, so media's been reporting in left and right.
Uh, but the reality is, uh, I, I broke it last night.
I got a so who told me that and I got confirmed, uh, on Capitol Hill as well.
Uh, and keep in mind that these Republicans, Donald Trump lore the
flags in this country, Lord, uh, to have staff in honor of Charlie Kirk.
A lot of people have been commenting on social media.
Charlie Kirk did not lie in honor at the US Capitol, but flags were, Lord
Trump has made no such declaration.
I mean, the reality is, so this is what a Speaker Johnson said.
They, they, they claimed, they really went back to the old rules that only
presidents the honor of lying in state or lying in honor, uh, was only reserved for
former presidents, uh, who passed away.
And, but the reality is leadership can change the rule.
They want to.
Uh, Democrats did that.
They made other exceptions.
And so those things have happened.
Uh, but that was the decision that was made.
Uh, and so, uh, been lot talk, lot chatter on social media about
how, uh, republicans, uh, are, you know, frankly, uh, not properly
acknowledging the contributions of Reverend Jesse Jackson Senior.
But there's no, there's no shock to me that they would do this, that
they would not, uh, honor Reverend Jackson, uh, in this way, uh,
because he was a thorn in their heel.
Uh, and so, but in the reality is they're not gonna go above,
uh, partisanship, uh, at all.
And so, so you got that going on.
Also, keep in mind, we told you last night we had Congressman
Jonathan Jackson on the show.
And so the funeral plans, uh, of Reverend Jackson, uh, have been released.
They're still affirming up, so we're still waiting to get the details of when
he's going to lie, uh, in state at the South Carolina Capitol and what's gonna
be happening here in Washington, dc.
Uh, but.
Uh, he will be lying in the state rainbow push in Chicago on Friday, uh,
February 27th, and then of course the following week, March 4th, March 5th.
Then on March 6th, you're gonna have the people celebration taking place
at the House of Hope in Chicago.
That's where all of the dignitaries in the main speakers, former
presidents are going to be.
And on, on March 7th, there's gonna be a private, um.
Funeral taking place at Rainbow Push, uh, as well.
So that's what's going on, uh, there.
So, uh, do we have, uh, Matt, uh, Michael and Win univac?
Okay.
Uh, so Win Kuni.
Uh, so we got you there.
Just, I just wanna get your, your thoughts on, uh, the Republicans,
uh, not granting Democrats.
The, uh, their request to have Reverend Jackson lie in honor at the US Capitol.
Honest.
Honestly, Roland, I think it's just another ex, uh, explanation of how
bipartisan, how, how nonpartisan this, uh, house has become.
It's really, really scary when you're.
Pushing this hyper-partisan this to a level where people can't even
respect people who have worked their entire, entire career, um,
for equality in this country.
And I think it's just another exemplification of the fact that the
Republican party is not the Republican party that we've known it to be.
Historically.
I think now we've seen it turn into a party of white supremacists.
And although some people may contest that that's what it was before, I think we
used to see there was an era of a more.
Moderate Republican.
I think now what we're seeing in the Republican party is, is a lot
of people that are, you know, UNC cloaked as I would colloquially put it.
And so they are really, really less, less of Republicans and more of people
that are lying in what this MAGA party.
And so I think when we, when we are thinking more so about
the Republican of today's era.
This doesn't actually surprise me, but it is a slap in the face to Jesse Jackson.
It's a slap in the face to all of the things that he's
accomplished over the years.
It's a slap in the face to black America.
But quite frankly, I think that's exactly what it's intended as
everybody talks about the Bernie voters who didn't vote for Hillary or whatever.
They don't talk about the democratic voters, uh, base voters, black
voters, other voters who stayed home and swing states and argue,
very arguably made the difference.
So it seems as if this whole turnout versus, uh, appealing to the center
has been, uh, generations along division in the Democratic party.
Is that true?
Yeah.
Yeah, very much.
Um, even as, like I said, even as Clinton benefited from it, um, you
know, in, in 1992 when he was running a, you know, uh, most people are familiar
with the sister soldier moment, or at least they know that it, it means, um.
That you're, you're kind of turning on your own base.
Um, and this was a, this was a famous thing that Clinton did during his 92
campaign, but what I think a lot of people don't know is that, uh, the,
the, the, the stage he chose to do that was at the Rainbow Coalition 1992,
uh, conference, the, the summer of 92.
So it's the height, he's the presidential nominee.
It's the height of the presidential contest.
Jesse Jackson's sitting on stage.
Um, while Clinton pulls off this ambush, which is for people that don't
know about it, uh, a a totally obscure rapper named Sister Soldier, who, um,
has since become a talented writer and and poet, but she was a teenage,
uh, rapper at the time, had never been above, I think like 88 on, on Billboard.
Um, he said, you know.
Uh, a lot of people follow the words of Sister Soldier, which was not true.
Like most people had never even heard of her at this point.
And she had said in an interview that somebody asked her, why are,
why are, why, why is the black community kind of burning its own
neighborhoods in the LA riots right now?
That's the thing that white people are always asking.
Why is, why, why are, why are black people doing this?
Um.
And she said, you know, if you put yourself in the, in the mindset of, uh,
uh, of, of those people, this is, this is not at all to be un uh, unexpected.
You know, you could, you can find her quote.
Um, but he, he essentially, you know, go, goes on stage and compares her
and he literally compares her to David Duke and says that it's important,
um, you know, for all, you know, for everybody to condemn Sister Soulja.
And I think one, but one of his targets really was Jesse Jackson
and the, and the wing of the party, uh, that, that he represented.
He wanted to show that, that the Clinton wing was, was dominant now.
And, uh, you know, Jesse Jackson demanded an apology, uh, for, uh, for
what he did on stage at his conference.
And, and he never delivered the apology, which is another power move to say that.
No.
Um.
I, you know, I'm running things now.
This is, this is my party.
So, uh, you know, so part of it was to show he's gonna stand up to his base,
and by his base it meant black voters.
Um, the other part was to like, try to smash this, uh, this, this forming,
uh, rainbow coalition, which was the biggest threat to dominance, you know,
within, within the Democratic party.
Well, you know, first of all, if I'd been cis soldier and someone
had asked me why, uh, and I had been a member of the black community
and somebody asked me why you were burning your own community, I would've
said, because I can't get to yours.
But that's, that's why I am not, uh.
In a position of responsibility anywhere.
'cause they say things like that.
The second, but the second and more important point is, so you
have basically Bill Clinton doing a power move against his own base.
It's a, it seems like it's appealing to the worst instincts of white.
Voters who wanna be distanced from that kind of politics.
Well, at the same time, as you point out benefiting from the, uh, the voter
turnout that, uh, that Jesse Jackson, that Jesse Jackson and his organization
and his wing of the party, uh, was able to generate for the party, and this
seems to me to be an ongoing tension.
Mm-hmm.
Attention that goes to this state, but, but Brian, I wanted to go back to
this point about evolving that you made earlier and that Harry Reid evolved.
It seems to me that there are ways in which the Democratic establishment ha
evolves and ways in which it doesn't, and that, to me is interesting.
It seems to me that it is very capable of evolving on issues of marriage equality.
Of reproductive rights of, of, uh, we'll see about feminism in the age
of me too, now that Joe Biden's in the race because he seemed to say I'll
evolve, but then make some, although
let's let, let's take a couple of those because those are interesting.
Um, and I, and I go over this history in the book of the, of
the LGBT movement, for instance.
Uh, that evolution was kind of forced on them.
Mm-hmm.
You know, if, you know, if you think back to 2009, 2010.
Uh, the, uh, you know, the gay community had to, you know, get equal.
Came around and, and was protesting Obama everywhere he went.
Protesting, protesting Reed at Net Roots Nation.
Um.
Didn't have to push Pelosi as much.
Um, but, but generally like direct action, you know, taking, you know, taking
serious, um, making serious moves to, to show that the status quo isn't work
anymore because, um, they left to their own devices, uh, they were not going to
evolve and on, uh, on abortion rights.
Uh, if you look at the, the fight that Chuck Schumer didn't want to put up
against Gorsuch, against the Circuit Court judges against Kavanaugh, uh, you
know, the, the, the, that's a, that's a hangover from, from the 1980s when,
when people like Schumer believed that that's social issues, uh, gay rights,
um, women's rights, civil rights, um.
Uh, were, were, you know, abortion rights were kind of hung around the
party's neck, and, and they, you know, they blame these kind of social issues.
They, they believe that like the white working glass felt, that felt that
Democrats had gotten too liberal.
Um, and were trying to foist the social agenda onto the American public.
And you can show Chuck Schumer all the polls in the world that show him 80 plus
percent support for abortion rights.
It, it doesn't.
It doesn't matter.
The, his lizard brain from the eighties tells him that it's controversial.
Mm-hmm.
And he needs to, and he needs to run away from this issue as fast as he possibly
can, you know, and get back on, uh, you know, baggage fees, you know, or, or
what, whatever else he, you know, he, he, he, wherever he feels more comfortable.
And so.
Yes.
You know, they've been capable of, uh, evolving on some of those issues,
but only, only when they've been, been forced to and not because they, they,
they, they really changed on the issue.
I think one of the great examples is, is the debt and deficit.
You know, in, in the 1980s they all got, uh, tarred as tax and spend liberals,
and if you talk to them today about this, they're still scarred from that, that
time that, that, that stings today like.
Yeah, the newer generation of progressives is like, what are you talking about?
Like, that's a joke.
Tax and spend liberal.
Get outta here.
Um, who, who are you?
Who are you?
Who do you think you're offending with?
Who do you think you're bothering with this?
But if you say, if you call a Chuck Schumer, a tax and spend liberal,
or a Nancy Pelosi, a tax and spend liberal, it's kryptonite to them.
You know, they, they, they melt before you.
Uh, they believe that they didn't take the debt and deficit seriously enough
in the 1980s and 1970s, and they were spending too much and that, and that,
that cost them the, the support of the American people and allowed Republicans
to, uh, become the party of fiscal rectitude, even though they were, you
know, you know, they were jacking up the.
Military budget, they were cutting taxes, they were running up the deficit,
but their rhetoric was different.
So they, they, they are convinced that if they can win that rhetorical debate
around government spending the debt and the deficit, uh, that their, that
that's their path back to power and.
I'm not gonna re-litigate the 1980s, but we're not living in the 1980s anymore.
You know, that's, that's, that's not the conversation that the American
public is, is having anymore.
But because, you know, their politics were forged in that time,
they, they can't move past it.
And so you have, you know, Nancy Pelosi coming in in January of 2019 and pushing
PayGo Pay as you go, uh, back onto.
Her caucus.
And the only way to understand that is that this, this, these are scars from
the eighties that are still healing.
he didn't like to talk very much about tactics and about, um, even his feelings.
About certain things.
He was very thematic.
He, he talked a lot about power.
Mm-hmm.
About empowerment, about the goal of his campaigns being to show people what their
vote could do, being that goal, being to show the democratic party that they
had to do more than just pander mm-hmm.
To voters of color.
So he, he had a very.
Kind of strong sense of what he wanted to talk to, talk about.
Yeah.
And um, it was, I think largely unchanged from how he's been for many, many years.
And when I went with him to his hometown in Greenville, South Carolina, we drove
around in a car to around his neighborhood and he was giving turn by turn
directions, turn, turn right, turn left.
And uh, this is where I grew up.
This is where I went to school.
Like you didn't, this is my high school.
Didn't skip, didn't skip a beat.
And that was amazing to see.
Yeah.
Uh, so Chicago.
I think it's easy to say, made Jesse Jackson.
Right.
But it also challenged him.
Yes.
What did you learn about how this city's.
Politics, it's big personalities and the power that lies here in Chicago
and the power struggles, how all of that defined who Jesse Jackson
became as this national figure.
You are so right to say that this city made him, because this is where he,
uh, by was given a task by Dr. King to create Operation Breadbasket, which was
the economic arm of, uh, uh, the SCLC.
Um.
The Southern leadership, uh, uh, Christian Coalition, and that was the first time
that that organization had really said, we're gonna go into specific cities and
we're gonna build up coalition politics, not just around basic rights, like the
right to vote or the right to walk into an establishment and, and sit at the counter.
Yeah.
But, but of the.
To participate in the economic life of a community.
And Jesse Jackson was extremely successful in that task.
But then after Dr. King died, he had, he tried to turn his attention
to politics and he was set back.
By the Chicago machine.
Mm-hmm.
At the time, um, by, uh, mayor Daley, who was an incredibly
powerful political force.
And at that time, you know, black voters in Chicago were a part of the machine,
but they weren't empowered by the machine.
And so it was a. Yeah.
More than 20 years struggle.
Yeah.
You know, between when, you know, let's call it 1970 to 1983, when
Harold Washington was elected for that to really come to fruition.
And one, one question that I had for, for Reverend Jackson was, why?
Why didn't you ever really run for mayor of the city?
Because you would seem logical, right?
That he might want to.
Run a city that he was such a part of, did that he had actually so
much power in, what did he say?
Well, I think the answer was that he did not see himself as a
politician for a very long time.
Interesting.
That even his political advisors kind of proposed to him on several occasions.
Here's how you could do it.
Here's what it would look like.
He saw himself as a religious leader, as an organizer.
Um, he.
He, one, one of his more famous rhyming quotes that people, uh, people often
cite is he used to say he was the jelly shaker, not the jelly maker.
So there was something about him Yeah.
That he felt like his job was to, to rally, to shake the establishment,
to get them to pay attention.
Mm. And other people.
Would make the sausage.
It wasn't until he ran for president that he really fully contemplated what
it would be like to have to actually run something in politics and not just be.
Um, a political, uh, not just be a religious leader, but a
political leader, a movement leader.
Yeah.
And as we've kind of already discussed, I mean, there's no historical figure,
especially one as grand as Jesse Jackson that is without any kind of
tension or, or, or somewhat complicated story when you sum it all up.
As you were writing the book, Abby, what were maybe his most
challenging life moments that you, you maybe wondered whether.
Or how to include?
Well, the most pivotal moment of controversy in these campaigns
came in 19, in the 1984 campaign.
This was at the, be almost the beginning of 1983.
Right?
84. When.
It was revealed that he had used the term Hymietown in a private conversation,
and that is for those who don't know, um, kind of I guess somewhat old
time, uh, slur against Jewish people.
Um, and.
Uh, that was, I think, an unavoidable part of his history to write about, because
you can't tell the story of the 1984 campaign without telling the story of what
happened when he had to confront that.
Mm. And it, it, it was really, i, I think a story of, um, his decision to.
First, deny that he said it and then own up to it.
And dealing with some of the figures, the controversial figures around him.
Like Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader.
Yeah.
Who made it even more difficult for him to move past it.
And even before those campaigns, he had struggled with his relationship
with Jewish American leaders and um.
And that's because of his support for the Palestinian cause.
Mm-hmm.
And so that drama in the 1984 campaign is the principle drama of that campaign.
Yeah.
And, and the way I like to frame it is that.
He started out that campaign actually at an enormous high.
He had just come back from Syria where he went to the Middle East
and single handedly brought back an American prisoner of war who was being
held captive by the Assad regime.
Mm-hmm.
When the Reagan administration couldn't do it, he came back home to a hero's welcome.
Ronald Reagan invited him to the White House.
And that's how he started the 1984 campaign.
It was the kind of press that any camp candidate would've only dreamed of.
What a
high,
what an a, a massive high it has had not been seen before,
and it has not been seen since.
Seen again.
Mm-hmm.
That, that a candidate would do something like that.
And then just a few weeks after that high, the Hymietown controversy
explodes, and he was never able.
To get past it.
Mm-hmm.
But what I will say, Sasha, is that his speech, he gave a speech at a, at a, um,
at a synagogue in New Hampshire explaining and apologizing for those comments.
Yeah.
And it was one of those moments when having.
You know, covered several campaigns in this modern time, and I'm sure
you remember when President Obama had to give that big speech about race?
Oh, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Um, after, um, you know, Reverend Wright was revealed to be his
pastor and all of that controversy.
Mm-hmm.
And that speech was such a pivotal moment for his campaign.
This speech for Jesse Jackson at the synagogue was a very similar
moment, but because of the media environment, I think it did not.
Get that far.
Yeah.
A lot of Americans didn't hear the apology.
They didn't hear the contrition.
They didn't hear him use this really powerful, powerful analogy of Jacob
wrestling with the angel in the Bible.
Right.
And how he had fallen short.
And I think that.
In part because of that, it, it, it did not allow him really
to move past that moment.
Yeah.
And as I hear you talk about that, Abby, I, I think about that final chapter in
your book, appropriately titled Legacy.
Yeah.
And, uh, it, that sounds like a single moment, uh, of Jesse Jackson's
life that Well, I will certainly now always reflect on after hearing
you sort of lay that out for us.
I spent time with Reverend Jackson and his family in writing the book,
and I wanted it to really reflect the people who actually were there.
Mm-hmm.
But it's a, it's a piece of journalism and it, it tells a
real story, not one that's overly.
You know, saccharin or papers over anything.
Right.
Uh, it it, and, but it's, it's also focused on, I think, a part
of his life that I think most people don't know very much about.
Yeah.
They might remember those campaigns, but they don't know, I think as much
about them as I think we ought to know.
Oh yeah.
You
go inside.
Yeah, for sure.
There are so many lessons for right now.
Yeah.
I mean, even, you know, I finished writing the book earlier this year
before a lot of this happened.
Yeah.
And, um, Zohran Mamdani.
Running in New York right, is a perfect example of a very Jacksonian candidate
and a very Jacksonian campaign.
Our foreign policy must be characterized by mutual respect,
not by gunboat diplomacy.
Big stick diplomacy and threats.
Our nation at its best feeds the hungry our nation, at its
worst, at its worst will mine.
the harbors of Nicaragua at its worst will try to overthrow that government.
At its worst will cut aid to American education and increase aid to El Salvador.
At its worst, our nation will have partnership with South Africa.
That's a moral disgrace.
It's a moral disgrace.
People in Africa, we cannot just focus on apartheid in Southern Africa.
We must fight for trade with Africa and not just aid to Africa.
We cannot stand out the by and say we will not relate.
To Nicaragua, Lester, have elections there and then embrace
military regime in Africa.
Overthrowing democratic governments in Nigeria and Liberia and Ghana.
We must fight for democracy all around the world and play
the game by one set of rules.
Peace.
In this world, our present form for peace in the Middle East is inadequate.
It will not work.
There are 22 nations in the Middle East.
Our nation must be able to talk and act and influence all of them.
We must build upon Camp David and measure human rights by
one yardstick in that region.
We have too many interests and too few friends.
There's a way out jobs.
Put America back to work, and I was a child growing up in
Greenville, South Carolina.
The Reverend Sample he used to preach ever so often a sermon relating to
Jesus and he said, if I be lifted up, I'll draw old man unto me.
I didn't quite understand what he meant as a child growing up, but I understand a
little better now if you raise up truth.
It's magnetic.
It has a way of drawing people.
With all this confusion and this conviction that bright lights
and parties and big fun, we must raise up the simple proposition.
If we lift up a program to feed the hungry, they'll come running.
If we lift up a program to study war, no more our youth.
Will come running.
If we lift up a program to put America back to work as an alternative to the
welfare and de spare, they will come working if we cut that military budget
without cutting out the fence and use that money to rebuild bridges and put
steel workers back to work and use that money and provide jobs for our cities.
And use that money to build schools and pay teachers and educate our
children and build hospitals and.
Trained doctor, then trained nurses, the whole nation will come running to us.
As,
as I leave you now and we vote in this convention and get ready to
go back across this nation in a couple of days in this campaign, I
tried to be faithful to my promise.
I lived in El Barrios, get those union reservations and housing projects.
Yes, I have a message for our youth.
I challenge them to put hope in their brains and not dope in their veins.
I told them,
but like Jesus, I too was born in the slum, but just because
you are born in the slum.
It does not mean the slum is born in you and you can rise
above it if your mind is made up.
I told them in every slum there are two sides.
When I see a broken window, that's the Islamic side.
Train some youth to become a glazer.
That's the sunny side.
When.
I see a missing brick.
That's the sluggish side.
Let that child in the union and become a brick mason and build.
That's the Sunday side.
When I see a missing door, that's the slum side.
Train some youth to become a carpenter.
That's the Sunday side.
When.
I see the vulgar words and hieroglyphics of destitution on the walls.
That's the slum side.
Train some youth to become a painter and artist.
That's the sunny side.
We leave this place looking for the sunny side because there's
a brother's side somewhere.
I'm more convinced than ever that we can win.
We'll fought.
Up the rough side of the mountain, we can win.
I just want young America to do me one favor.
Just one favor.
Exercise.
The right to dream.
You must face reality.
That's which is, but then dream of the reality.
That ought to be.
That must be.
Live beyond the pain of reality with the dream of a bright tomorrow.
Use hope and imagination as weapons of survival and progress.
Use love to motivate you and and obligate you to serve the human family.
Young America Dream.
Choose the human race.
Over the nuclear race, bury the weapons and don't burn the people dream.
Dream of a new value system.
Teach us who teach for life and not just for a living.
Teach because they can't help it.
Dream of lawyers.
More concerned about justice than a judge dream
of doctors.
More concerned about public health than personal wealth.
Dream
of preachers and priests who will prophesy and not just.
Preach and dream.
Our time has come.
Our time has come suffering.
Breathe.
Character.
Breathe.
Faith, Indian faith will not disappoint.
Our time has come.
Our faith hopes and dreams will prevail.
Our time has come Weeping.
Has endured for a night, but now joy.
Come in the morning, our time has come.
No grave can hold our body down.
Our time has come.
No lie can live forever.
Our time has come.
We must leave racial battleground and come the economic common ground
and moral higher ground America.
Our time has come.
We've come from this grace.
To amazing grace, our time has come.
Gimme your tide, gimme your poor, your huddle masses who learn to breathe free.
And come November there will be a change because our time.
Has come.
Thank you and God bless you.
We've just heard clips starting with
Here & Now Anytime remembering Jesse Jackson as a lion for justice who built
a rainbow coalition uniting Black, white, brown, Asian, and indigenous
people around shared moral values
Appearing on Sesame Street, Jackson reminded children that differences in
appearance, language, and background never make a person less deserving of dignity
Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie drew a line from Jackson's social democratic campaigns
through Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Zohran Mamdani in 2025, arguing that Jackson's
coalition-building approach remains a powerful political template today
Roland S. Martin argued that Johnson's refusal to honor Rev. Jackson is a
deliberate slap in the face to Black America, reflecting the increasingly
extreme nature of today's Republican Party
The Zero Hour pointed to Nancy Pelosi reinstating pay-as-you-go rules in
2019 as a prime example of how 1980s political wounds still shape the
Democratic establishment's behavior today
In the Loop described how Chicago's political machine, led by Mayor Daley,
blocked Jackson's ambitions for over 20 years until Harold Washington's
1983 election finally brought Black political empowerment to the city
And CBS News played Jackson’s 1984 DNC speech, where he declared that
the time had come for Americans to move from racial battlegrounds to
economic and moral common ground
And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support
of our members who get this show ad-free as well as early and ad-free
access to our other show, SOLVED!
Including a members-only backstage segment, all via podcast.
We've also launched SOLVED!
on the Best of the Left YouTube channel but episodes are delayed there.
The show features our team of producers discussing a carefully curated selection
of articles and ideas to then SOLVE!
some of the biggest issues of our day.
It's important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left
takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce and, SOLVED!
isn't too far behind.
So, if you get value out of the show and want to support all of the work that
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But, as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot
me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't
let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can
record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by
tapping the link in the show notes,
You can also message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,
or you can simply email me to jay@bestoftheleft.com
As for today's topic, I want to build on something we’re hearing about today.
In 2008, Obama's entire delegate strategy depended on a feature of Democratic
primaries that most voters didn't think about; proportional allocation.
Meaning delegates get split based on vote share instead of all going to the winner.
Obama didn't need to win every big state.
He just needed to stay close, accumulate delegates everywhere,
and let the math work over time.
Under the old rules, Clinton's big-state victories would
have ended the race outright.
But those rules no longer existed.
They had been dismantled in large part because of Jesse Jackson, building on
reforms that had been underway since the early 1970s but that Jackson, more
than anyone, pushed to completion.
That's the story everyone tells about Jackson's legacy right now.
And they should, because it's remarkable.
But I think there's a deeper lesson in it that's worth pulling out.
"Rebuild the Rainbow Coalition" has become a kind of shorthand in
the weeks since Jackson's death.
And it's shorthand for something real and correct.
Bishop Barber has talked about Jackson's agenda as exactly what we need to
push back against authoritarianism.
Organizers in Chicago point to Brandon Johnson's mayoral win
as proof the model still works.
Hy Thurman, one of the original Rainbow Coalition organizers from Fred Hampton's
era, is talking about building a new version with a council of elders.
The leaders saying this know better than I do what the full
scope of the work looks like.
But shorthand can flatten.
It can make something sound simpler than it is.
And what I want to do today is unpack what's inside that phrase.
Not because the people using it are wrong, but because I think
the full version of what they're calling for is more demanding,
more interesting, and honestly more inspiring than the shorthand suggests.
Because the Rainbow Coalition was built on specific material conditions
that no longer exist in the same form.
Jackson's coalition ran on the institutional Black church
as its logistical backbone.
Not just moral authority, but phone trees, meeting spaces, transportation
networks, trusted leaders who could turn out entire congregations.
As one Baptist leader put it in 1984, the church was "the
springboard" of Jackson's campaign.
That institution still has real power, but Black church membership has dropped
nearly 20 percentage points among Black adults in the last two decades.
It can't carry that weight alone the way it once did.
The coalition was built on industrial labor markets and strong unions that
gave working-class people of different races a shared material identity.
Over a third of Black men in the private sector belonged to
unions through the early 1980s.
The gig economy has since fragmented that identity into isolated,
precarious, individual experiences.
Your Uber driver and your Amazon warehouse worker are both struggling, but they
don't share a break room, a union hall, or a common employer to organize against.
And the economic precarity that should unite people across racial lines has
been made harder to organize around by decades of credit expansion and
the erosion of stable employment.
When people experience economic hardship individually, as personal debt, as a gig
that doesn't quite pay enough, rather than collectively as a shared condition with a
visible shared cause, the raw material for class-based coalition is harder to access.
This isn't about willpower or political courage.
The material conditions that made that coalition possible have changed.
So if the model can't simply be copied and pasted, what's the
real lesson of Jackson's legacy?
After 1984, Jackson had won more than three million votes but
received a disproportionately small share of delegates.
Between '84 and '88, Jackson's team successfully pushed the party to
adopt what became known as "pure proportional representation,"
eliminating the distortions that had made that kind of gap possible.
That rule change is what made Obama's path exist.
His team recognized early that under proportional rules, you didn't need to
win big, you needed to compete everywhere.
That everywhere-at-once strategy is what kept Obama in the race when Clinton's
big-state wins would have buried any challenger under the old system.
Jackson's most consequential achievement wasn't a speech.
It wasn't a rally.
It wasn't even the coalition itself.
It was a procedural rule change.
Unsexy, technical, the kind of thing that makes your eyes glaze over.
And it literally altered the trajectory of American history.
There's a pattern here, and it works on two levels; inside
the system and outside it.
On both levels, it's the unglamorous work that actually builds power.
Inside, it's changing the rules of the game.
Jackson changed delegate allocation.
That's the inside game.
What's the equivalent today?
Ballot initiatives to end gerrymandering, which citizens can run
even in states where the legislature will never do it voluntarily.
Pro-democracy voting reforms like automatic voter registration
and ranked choice voting.
Publicly funded campaigns that break the stranglehold of big donors over
who even gets to run for office.
These things are happening right now, in real places, producing real results.
And almost nobody talks about them outside of wonky political podcasts.
Jackson didn't get famous for changing delegate rules either.
He got famous for the speeches but the rule change is what
ended up mattering most.
Outside, it's building coalitions for the world we actually live in.
If the old infrastructure can't carry the weight alone the way it once did,
the work isn't to mourn what's gone.
It's to figure out what new connective tissue looks like and build it.
Some of this is already happening.
Tenant organizing is growing in cities and suburbs where housing costs have
become the great cross-racial equalizer.
And not just in the usual places.
Organizers are building tenant power in the Midwest and the South, in
scattered single-family rentals, not just big urban apartment buildings.
The Debt Collective is organizing people around student, medical, and credit
card debt as a shared identity, turning private shame into collective leverage.
That's a form of organizing that literally didn't exist
in Jackson's era, built around conditions that didn't exist either.
None of these look like the Rainbow Coalition.
They're smaller, messier, more fragmented.
They don't have a charismatic preacher at the center.
That's the point.
The conditions that produced that model have changed, and the new
coalitions have to be built for the world we actually live in.
Not the one that existed in 1984.
Inside and outside, the work that actually builds power is the work
nobody writes eulogies about.
The rule changes and the tenant meetings.
The ballot initiatives and the slow, unglamorous trust-building
across lines of difference.
For anyone looking to honor Jackson's legacy, honor the
vision, but learn from the method.
The method was never "give a great speech and hope." The method was;
assess the terrain, find the structural lever, build the coalition that
current conditions allow, and pull.
The terrain has changed.
Some of the old levers are rusted shut.
Others haven't been built yet.
That's not a reason for despair.
It's a job description.
Jackson, standing in Grant Park on election night 2008,
tears streaming down his face.
Watching the result of work he'd done twenty years earlier.
A rule change most people had never heard of, making possible a moment
most people thought they'd never see.
The question for everyone listening isn't how do we get another Jesse Jackson.
It’s; what are you building right now, in your community, in your state, in
whatever institution you have access to, that someone you've never met might
benefit from twenty years from now?
You probably won't get credit but that's the job.
Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if
you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them!
Link in the show notes.
And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today.
Next up section A. Presidential runs followed by section B,
rainbow Coalition, section C, the man and section D, his legacy.
for our children, young America, hold your head high.
Now we can win.
We must not lose you to drugs and violence, premature pregnancy, suicide,
cynicism, pessimism and despair.
We can win wherever you are tonight, I'll challenge you to hope and the dream.
Don't submerge your dreams.
Exercise above all else, even on drugs.
Dream of the day you're drug free.
Even in the gutter dream of the day that you'll be up on your feet
again, you must never stop dreaming.
Face reality, yes, but don't stop with the way things are, dream
of things as they ought to be.
Dream face pain, but love, hope, faith and dreams will help you rise above the pain.
Use hope and imagination.
As weapons of survival and progress, but you keep on dreaming.
Young America dream of peace.
Peace is rational and reasonable.
War is iration in this age and unwinnable dream of teachers who
teach for life and not for living.
Dream of doctors who are concerned more about public health than private wealth.
Dream of lawyers more concerned about justice than a judgeship.
Dream of preachers.
Were concerned more about prophecy than profiteering.
Dream on the high road with sound values, and then America
as we go forth to September, October, November, and then beyond.
America must never surrender to a high moral challenge.
Do not surrender to drugs.
The best drug policy is a no first use.
Don't surrender with needles and citizens.
Let's have no fresh use.
On the one hand, our clinics on the other never surrender.
Young America, go forward.
America must never surrender to malnutrition.
We can feed the hungry and clothe the naked.
We must never surrender.
We must go forward.
We must never surrender to illiteracy.
Invest in our children never surrender and go forward.
We must never surrender to inequality.
Women cannot compromise ERA or comparable worth.
Women are making 60 cents on a dollar what a man makes.
Women cannot buy meat cheaper.
Women cannot buy bread cheaper.
Women cannot buy milk cheaper.
Women deserve to get paid for the work that you do.
It's right and.
Don't surrender.
My friends,
those who have AIDS tonight, you deserve our compassion.
Even with aids, you must not surrender in your will chance.
I see you sitting here tonight in those wheelchairs.
I've stayed with you.
I've reached out to you across our nation, and don't you give up.
I know it's tough.
Sometimes people look down on you.
It took you a little more effort to get here tonight, and no one should look down
on you, but sometimes mean people do.
The only justification we have for looking down on someone is that we
are gonna stop and pick them up.
But even in your wheelchairs, don't you give up.
We cannot forget 50 years ago when our backs were against the wall,
Roosevelt was in a wheelchair.
I would rather have Roosevelt in a wheelchair than
Reagan and Bush on a horse.
Don't you surrender and don't you give up.
Don't surrender and don't give up.
Why can I challenge you this way, Jesse Jackson.
You don't understand my situation.
You'll be on television.
You don't understand.
I see what you, with the big people.
You don't.
You don't understand my situation.
I understand
you see me on tv, but you don't know the me.
That makes me me.
They wonder why does Jesse run?
Because they see me running for the White House.
They don't see the house I'm running from.
I have a story.
I wasn't always on television.
Writers were not always outside my door.
And I was born late one afternoon, October 8th in Greenville, South Carolina.
No writers asked my mother her name.
Nobody chose to write down our address.
A mama was not supposed to make it and I was not supposed to make it.
You see, I was born a teenage mother who was born a teenage mother.
I, I understand.
I know abandonment and people being mean to you.
And saying You're nothing and nobody and can never be anything.
I understand.
Jesse Jackson is my third name.
I'm adopted when I had no name.
My grandmother gave me her name.
My name was Jesse Burns, so I was 12 so I wouldn't have a blank space.
She gave me a name to hold me over.
I understand when nobody knows your name.
I understand when you have no name.
I understand.
I wasn't born in the hospital.
Mama didn't have insurance.
I was born in the bed at house.
I really do understand.
Born in a three room house.
Bathroom in the backyard.
Slop job out the bed.
No.
Hot and cold running water.
I understand
wallpaper used for decoration.
No.
For a windbreaker.
I understand.
I'm a working person's person.
That's why I understand you.
Whether you're black or white.
I understand Work.
I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
I had a shovel programmed for my hand.
My mother, a working woman so many days, she went to work early Roger and
her stockings, she knew better, but she wrote Rons and her stockings so that
my brother and I could have matching socks and not be laughed at at school.
I understand.
At three o'clock on Thanksgiving day, we couldn't eat Turkey because mama
was preparing somebody else's Turkey.
At three o'clock, we had to play football to entertain ourselves, and
then around six o'clock she would get off the Alta Vista bus and we would
bring up the leftovers and eat our Turkey leftovers, the caucus, the cranberries,
around eight o'clock at night.
I really do understand every one of these funny labels they put on you.
Those of you who are watching this broadcast of night in the projects
on the corners, I understand.
Call your outcast low down.
You can't make it.
You're nothing.
You're from nobody.
Subclass under class.
When you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination,
your name goes in nomination.
I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me, and it wasn't born in you.
And you can make it wherever you are tonight.
You can make it hold your head high, stick your chest out.
You can make it, it gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes, don't you?
Surrender, suffering.
Priest.
Character, character, priest, faith in the end, faith will not the support.
You must not surrender.
You may or may not get there, but just know that you are qualified
and you hold on and hold out.
We must never surrender.
America will get better and better.
Keep hope alive.
I voted for Jesse in 1984, and I also ran a program in 1984 called
Churches United for Voter Registration.
That was.
Included about 10 churches between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
I can name the churches if you have time.
And then in 1988, I had a 4-year-old daughter whom I took into the voting
booth with me so that she could pull the lever for Jesse Jackson.
What was the importance of him to you?
The importance was that as an African American, as someone who was at the.
I, at the end of the civil rights movement was to continue the struggle
that my, an, my parents and ancestors had begun to gain equal rights in
this country and the right to vote.
I had a mother who had to pay poll taxes in Montgomery.
Um.
In order to register to vote.
So voting has always been high on our priority list as a family.
Thank you, Ora.
Thank you very much.
More oral history.
Rachel in Middlebury, Connecticut.
You're on WNYC.
Hi Rachel.
Thanks for having me.
I just want to share a memory that I had when I was 21 and I was living in San
Francisco with in a house with a bunch of my friends and we were so excited to.
Support Jesse Jackson.
We went to downtown San Francisco and heard him speak and we were
just crying with joy and hope.
Hope for what?
Can you
put it into words in the context of the year 84?
It just was a time, it felt like a time of great change and great looking
forward to things being better when we lived in Oakland and it just was.
Rough for a lot of people and we wanted there to be services and,
um, mm-hmm.
Progress.
I lost my train of thought and, and hope.
We just, we wanted, we wanted there to be, you know, people to not be homeless.
We wanted people to have equal opportunities.
We wanted people to have, be empowered.
We wanted people to have jobs, we wanted to stop wars.
We wanted, you know, it's just.
It just felt like it could happen.
Rachel, thank you so much.
And I think that kind of sets up this other clip we have of Reverend Jackson
from his 1984 convention speech saying who he believed he was representing.
My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited,
the disrespected and the despise.
They are restless and seek relief.
They have voted in record numbers.
They have invested the faith.
Hope and trust that they have in us.
The Democratic Party must send them a signal that we care.
I pledge my best not to let them down.
Reverend Jesse Jackson in his 1984 Democratic Convention Speech.
Dr.
Hussein, we also have to acknowledge when we talk about 84.
The controversy, which was very much an issue here in New York
when Jackson got caught referring to New York as Hymietown, because
there were so many Jews in the city.
He apologized for what he called the thoughtless remark that was wrong, but
wasn't intended to be mean or bigoted.
He said Some Jewish leaders and voted voters accepted the apology in the
context of a long working relationship.
Some did not.
It haunted him through the 88 campaign too.
My question to you is.
Um, how do you think that affected his relationship with
Mondale in 84 when that happened?
Or his influence on the party nationally?
So, uh, Jackson admitted as you, as you indicated, uh, that it was a mistake.
Uh, and, uh, he, as you said, he apologized for it.
Uh, but I think the broader context is that, uh, as your callers, uh,
indicated is that Jackson was trying to build a broad coalition, uh, because
it was felt that the Democratic party at the time, uh, was pretty much.
Uh, focus on, you know, we had a very narrow focus.
And so Jackson, uh, which had been, uh, unexpected for a black candidate.
Uh, there was a sense that he would just only focus on
issues related to civil rights.
But he talked about the environment, he talked about workers' rights.
He talked about a coalition that not only would include black people, but Native
Americans, Latinos, Jews, Arab Americans.
Kind of across the board.
So, uh, even though that was, you know, as, as happened in
campaigns, candidates will often say something that's really wrong.
Uh, but Jackson, you know, tried to balance that, uh, with both his
experience in terms of leading up to that as well as, uh, in the platform
that he put forth, both in 84 and 88.
And, uh, like you recall, I actually lived in Oakland, uh, in 83 and 84.
So I was out there for the convention.
Uh, and it was very much as the speaker said that there was a hope
that because Jackson was targeting issues that the candidates generally
did not, uh, that there there was some, uh, way in which the Democratic
party could become more progressive,
more oral history.
Jonathan and Sunset Park, you're on WNYC.
Hi, Jonathan.
Hello.
Sorry.
Just eating my breakfast, um, late.
Yeah, I, uh, I am, uh, I was a student at, uh, Columbia in 1984, and I was, uh,
working on, um, like voter registration and mostly we would go out into Harlem.
And try to register people.
And, um, it was just, it was a good experience.
Just people were just very excited about, you know, the chance of, uh,
to be able to vote for Jesse Jackson.
And a lot of them had not voted like since, you know, JFK or something.
So, um, I did that and then in 1988 I was living in San Francisco
and I was volunteering on the camp, the Jackson campaign.
And, um, it was, I mean, it was great experience because being in this
room with all these people, it was.
You know, the Jews for Jackson and the Arabs for Jackson were, you
know, right there with each other and, you know, Latino, the nations
and gay people and all of this.
It, it, you know, I think that was really what he was so much about
was like trying to bring people together, you know, and reaching out
to all these different communities.
Um, and as far as that thing about that Hymietown, there was.
I remember at one point there was a woman who called into the campaign, and
she was not Jewish, but she had Jewish friends and she was concerned about this.
And you know, and I got on the phone and was talking to her and telling her like,
you know, that was, you know, that was something that was unfortunate, you know?
But you know, people sometimes say things that are, you know,
you know, not proper, not correct.
No, we don't like, but you have to look at the big picture
of what was he talking about?
You know, he was talking about every, you know, including people, um.
And, uh, I, I just remembered as there being this great experience
of just working together with.
This very diverse group of people who are all focused on this guy.
And, um,
Jonathan tha thank, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Mm-hmm.
Enjoy the rest of your breakfast.
Um, and so, Dr. Lusane, in 88, Jackson came in a strong second in
delegates, around 30% of delegates to around 40% for the nominee
Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
What changed between 84 and 88?
That Jackson got about 700 more delegates, had so much more success.
So that's a really important question.
So the 84 came and 84 campaign really was grassroots, uh, generated, uh,
the year before in 1983 at the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington.
The March in 63, where King delivered his I Have a Dream speech.
There was a big commemoration.
But it was also a call to, uh, to organize and to mobilize.
And the major, one of the major themes that came from that, um, mo
that, uh, event was run, Jesse Run.
So there was a ground up pressure because most of the black leadership at the time,
in 83 and 84 civil rights leadership, black elected officials were all
backing Mondale or some other Democrat.
Saw Jesse as kind of an upstart, but Jesse had support from black churches.
He had support from black community organizations.
Uh, so that changed in 88 when Jesse ran in 88.
Virtually the entire black leadership from the Congressional Black Caucus
members to black mayors to, uh, black civil rights leaders all
back Jackson, uh, in that period.
So he had a very different kind of, uh, energy in 1988.
He had the grassroots as well as, uh, what some would call
the rooftops, uh, behind him.
in 2011.
I spoke with him shortly after the unveiling of the Martin Luther
King Jr. Memorial in Washington DC.
I think we would do well to use the stature as an occasion to
deal with his unfenced business.
He was shot down assassin at age 39.
Here's the last agenda.
Items included a poor people's campaign, uh, the question in the war in Vietnam
and stopped the radical, uh, escalation of capital in the hands of the real welfare.
And today, here we are with too few people with too much wealth
subsidized by the government.
Too many unnecessary awards and too many people in poverty.
So in some sense, this memorial gives us a rallying point to keep going with
his unfinished, unfinished business.
We, we bail out the banks, but length without length
to linking and reinvestment.
For example, the Bush tax cut extension is more money than all of the state
budget debt that has combined.
So clearly Wall Street has made out big time, but the poor
are, the poor are expanding.
And we're losing jobs in mass and we must, in fact turn it around.
He died a very unpopular man, attacked by our government, attacked by the media,
shunned by many blacks themselves, for example, civil Rights Act because he
had dared to deal with the issue of, of.
Unjust unnecessary wars.
They were spending a trillion dollars in Iraq on the wrong target.
Uh, overthrowing the government in Libya.
Well, billion than billions.
More to restore it.
Or 2 billion a week in Afghanistan.
And yet we're laying off teachers, firemen.
Policemen.
He would be distress by that.
He would be weeping.
About that, uh, the bailout for these banks who drove us in the hole
and then they get bail out without links to kind of any reinvestment.
We refortify them, not restructure them.
These issues that Dr. King would would've raised would be troubling,
but it is his sense of out raising conscience, uh, that make us better today.
And I would hope, as Vince said that.
The interpretation must lead us to his unfinished business.
The dream only makes sense if it's connected to the broken promise
that had been unfulfilled 400 years.
And today, the dream has to put every American back to work.
That means reinvesting in the coming people Bottom up.
We are cutting public transportation, the not access to jobs re segregating.
Our schools are most segregated, uh, the biggest growth industry in most
states, the jail industrial complex.
So he would see me raising troubling questions of conscience, so I would see
this monument as an opportunity to raise issues of jobs and peace and justice.
The late Reverend Jesse Jackson speaking on Democracy Now in 2011.
He died earlier today at the age of 84.
In 2008, Reverend Jackson appeared on Democracy Now just after
Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus.
First and historic significance.
I mean, an African American winning hour or white ours were mature enough in their
thinking to choose message, uh, and, uh, relationships over race is a big deal.
Um, because there were those who would say, don't go to Iowa, New Hampshire.
'cause they're not representative of the multicultural states.
But, so that said a lot to me about the maturing of America.
Uh, I could not have to think about the struggle to get to that point.
Many journalists that think it came down from the sky and it
started, you know, in Boston.
But this.
Journey from the fifth fourth Supreme Court decision to end legal apartheid
in this country, having succeeded.
Slavery was a big moment in American history.
And then in 55, the the lynching of Emmett Till, which
traumatized and woke up America.
And then out of that, four months later, the sit-in of Rosa
Parks in the emergence of Dr.
King, and then the 1960s students coming alive and risking and
sitting in and going to jail.
Leading toward the 63 March where Dr. King landed his dream of hope for the nation
and the climax in the next year in the 64 public, 64 public accommodation bill.
But then, then the same 64 says, hope kept rising politically, found
a little hammer and that group at the Democratic Convention in, um,
in the Atlantic City of New Jersey.
Challenging the liberal democratic structure of Mondale
and, and Humphrey and Johnson.
And in 64, and then we, while we, we supported the Democrats, they didn't
have as their platform the Voting Rights Act, Johnson said to Dr. King,
uh, when asked about the voting Right Act, Dr. He not like it very much.
But you can't get the Voting Rights Act.
The reality is politically that if we get the Voting Rights Act, we'll lose
the South for a quarter of a century.
Dr. King said, well, we have to get the Voting Rights Act.
And so we marched in Selma, Alabama to get the Voting Rights Act,
uh, and the blood of the people.
And of course, that struggle has spawn everything politically,
the 65 Wooden Rights Act.
And then the Hatch victim at that time, a black male of, of, uh, of.
Here was a national story.
The Black Mayor of Cleveland, uh, Carl Stokes was a novel, it was
a national story at that time, and it continued to, to grow.
And by 72, we challenged the, the McGovern rules.
You you recall.
We unseed the day, the delegation as we sought to have a more multicultural
seating of delegates from states in 72.
Uh, and by.
83, Harold Washington was running for Mayor and Mondale and, uh,
Kennedy came to defeat him with, with, uh, supporting Jane Byrne.
And, um.
And daily.
And we resisted that and it was this tension between our
growth, uh, and in the process.
And out of that it drove me, in fact, to run in 84 and 88, and we
kept expanding it on that coalition.
And we won.
But with new registered voters, new voters, new voters, Democrats were
getting Senate in 86, uh, in the south.
We won North Carolina and Louisiana and Alabama, and, and Florida.
By 88, we expanded that base and the, Wilder became governor
in 89, we won Virginia in 80.
Wilder David Dinkins became mayor of New York, and they
denied me, won New York in 88.
And so this thing has just continued.
So when the media says, well, uh, uh, Barack was not a part
of the civil rights struggle.
He's a beneficiary of it.
Now the benefactor of it, but each generation becomes beneficiary and
then benefactor that this year, he's the beneficiary of that struggle.
Next time.
Those who came in because of him, he'll, they'll be the beneficiaries,
he'll be the benefactor.
But the struggle continues.
And so from the 54th end of Apartheid to the Voting Rights Act, to the
Urban Breakthroughs, to Harold Washington native campaigns.
To me this historic a, a unbroken line and, and I might add even, uh, the
party resisted supporting free Mandela.
We won the side of the South African government.
We thought that was our security.
So I think it's a great moment for American democracy.
This is not a perfect party will.
We are not the perfect people yet.
We are called to a perfect mission.
Jackson did not win the nomination.
Early in the primaries, an anti-Semitic remark derailed.
His campaign
reports surfaced that Jackson had privately referred to Jews as Hymies.
After a week of denials, Jackson tonight admitted making that remark.
It cost him at the polls and ended with an apology.
If there were occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my draw bell
lost its resonance, please forgive me, charge it to my head and not to my heart.
But Jackson originally considered a fringe candidate, did win four
state contests and 3.2 million votes.
He was just the second African American to run a nationwide campaign for president.
And he finished third
in 1984.
I believe that Jesse Jackson was right on the issues, but I
didn't vote for him because I didn't think he could win in 1988.
Jesse Jackson is right on the issues, and I think that he's the
best candidate for working men and women of the state of New Hampshire.
In 1988, he ran again and more than doubled his prior successes.
For the future.
He won 11 state contests and briefly led the pack of Democratic candidates,
Jesse Jackson for president,
but he lost in 88 as well.
His last campaign for the presidency,
Jesse Jackson, was Sommely defeated in Pennsylvania, getting
less than a third of the votes
at the Democratic National Convention that year.
He delivered one of the most celebrated speeches of his career.
I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me, and it wasn't
born in you and you can make it.
It was a spectacular speech.
I, I, I really was moved to tears.
It was incredible.
If
Jesse can come from nowhere and be somebody, I can be somebody too.
Pull your head high, stick your chest out.
You can make it.
Before Obama, Jackson was the first black man to have a serious shot at
winning the office of the presidency.
He's the first to win a major party primary.
So Frank, I'll start with you.
What memories do you have from that first campaign in 1984?
Well, the first memory I have, um.
In 84, they had a winner take all system, Democrats did.
So if you got 49% of the vote in a state, you didn't get any delegates.
If the other person got 51%, we changed the rules in the
Democratic party to proportionality.
So when you saw in all the races leading up, and especially in 2020.
People were talking about the 15% threshold.
They were really talking about the Jackson rule, which is what
we changed between 84 and 88.
It's what allowed Barack Obama to win the nomination and then eventually become
the President of the United States.
Yeah, really seeing that impact there, Jonathan, what memories do
you have from that 84 campaign?
So in 1984 to see Mayor Marion Barry give my father a, a head of state.
Entourage to go through the same Constitution street that hosted
the Klan now many years later.
And then by 1988 I started, um, finishing college and I realized since 1619,
it's 369 years later and the African American is now, uh, seeking the highest.
Office in the land and you can see the, the rotunda and the
Capitol and know all the history.
And, um, my father had a leg up.
And so, and the community began to believe in itself.
Many people did not know the voting rules, how we could vote.
So he had to do years of voter education and voter registration
to lay the groundwork.
And then people believe, and so sure by a will of force, he was able to do that.
Coming out of Michigan, I want to go back to your montage, is, uh,
ultimately my father won Michigan.
The press had already left town because it was a foregone conclusion
that, uh, someone else would win.
And then it was a shocker.
So we were leaving Michigan, going into New York, and there was a writer.
Um, who said that?
Reverend Jackson said Hymietown.
And then the world got turned upside down.
No recording, no video, no tape.
Um, this is his word, working for a white media outlet that had all this gravitas
and this person's word, and then that's what happened going into New York.
There's not any anti in my father's body or bones at all.
And then the script was flipped, you know, slight of hand.
And so.
Although he apologized, we were all in that area of the Senate.
That's not his spirit.
But when blacks work for certain white papers, you gotta watch them
because they have to come down with a majority white opinion on describing
blacks to help earn their salaries.
So, and there's nothing new about that, you know, and, uh,
well this was, this was definitely a, a pivotal moment in that campaign.
No doubt.
Um, Barbara, I'll bring you in here.
Uh, it was a conversation with a Washington Post reporter where
he allegedly used that pejorative term, um, and it blew up.
Barbara, can you explain from your perspective what had happened here?
I don't know what happened.
Um, I didn't hear it.
I just saw it reported at the time, you know, being, uh, um, one
of the first black, uh, reporters in on the mainstream press.
Negative stereotypes was what was the often menu, uh, that
blacks weren't good enough.
They, they weren't smart enough and, and to see is strong.
Intelligent, brilliant black man stand up like he did and debate
the issues with such a plume.
Uh, really, um, cast a spell over the, the, uh, colleagues that I was looking at.
They seemed to be shocked that this man, uh, was, was even there.
He had virtually no television ads.
He had an inexperienced campaign staff who had never, uh, most of them
never worked with anybody running for president, but by his estimates, he said
he won 3.5 million votes, spent less than 3 million in comparison to about
31 million spent by Walter Mondale, and 17 million spent by Gary Hart.
Uh, his race was supposed to be one of the most cost efficient in history.
But here's the thing.
You know, you talk about when he ran, uh, the people down
the ballot were, were running.
It seemed like he just opened up a, a, a flood.
Of people were saying it's, it is now, it is my time to get in the race.
It was about, uh, 10 of thousand people running in the states for school,
board sheriff, state legislators.
I mean, he was transforming the, the, uh, congressional and, and
state, uh, infrastructure of America because when he ran, we won.
I think that when he lost, we still.
One, you cannot rule out what Reverend Jackson did, and it's so
much attributed to the win of our first black president, but Obama
and the, and if I could add to that, thank you.
Ms. Reynolds is, uh, headlines on certain newspapers in 1988.
Or reading, and we gotta talk about the racism in the media and the journalism.
Um, is it legal for him to run?
Wow.
Yeah.
They just couldn't take it.
You know, Jonathan, that this man, uh, did not come to them to ask could he do it.
So what else could they do, but say now, should he do it?
And you see the parallels in how Barack Obama was treated when he
ran in 2008 with birtherism of this, this idea of can you, are you even
allowed to, can you legally do it?
You kind of, it's, it's, it's eerie how you see history kind of repeat itself.
Yes.
I wanna wrap here with everybody with our final question.
We talked about the impact on the political system, but what is Reverend
Jackson's legacy here when we take in, you know, his activism, the presidents
presidency, the politics, what impact did all this have on American history itself?
Yeah, I don't think, uh, American politics will have, would be the same
again, what was started in 84 and 88.
Uh, politics doesn't operate, you know, boom, boom, boom.
It takes time for things to, uh, gel.
And so what you're seeing now with all these young people of color
and gay lesbian people and women, and the people that were in the
coalition in 84 and 88 are now.
Running for office.
So I think Reverend Jackson changed politics forever.
I,
I have to just bring mention in here because we say he was a civil rights
leader, but he was also an international leader, and he's not perfect.
And, and he'll tell you, you'll be the first to tell you that he's not perfect.
Like none of us are perfect.
But when you look at it and then you look at the leadership crisis for today,
that is scandalous, that is toxic.
You don't wanna almost wanna put a crown on his head.
Next up, section B, rainbow Coalition.
So set the scene for us.
What was happening in Chicago in the late 1960s?
Well, it's 1969.
Of course, the city, like so many parts of the country, was still reeling and on
edge following the violence and uprisings.
Sparked by Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, and Chicago was
then and still is today, famously one of the most deeply segregated
big cities in the United States.
Now is the time to get rid of the slums and ghettos of Chicago.
Now is the time.
Yeah.
I remember reading about how, you know, obviously before he was killed, Martin
Luther King went north to Chicago to organize poor people and he was met by and
attacked by all these angry white crowds.
I have never.
Seen even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as
hate filled as our seen in Chicago.
The march will go on anyway.
And during the violence and unrest after King's assassination, Chicago's mayor
Richard j Dailey told the police to kill people rioting in the street and
very definite that an order be issued immediately to shoot, to kill any
arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in their hand in Chicago.
To fire a building,
even in times with less unrest, that kind of police violence was a big part
of life in certain Chicago neighborhoods.
The cops racially profiled people.
They arrested them without telling them why.
You know all the classics.
Yeah.
One group that was organizing against all this was the Black Panthers
who were founded to protect black residents from police brutality and
provide them with basic services.
So the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is started in
Oakland, California in 1966.
This is Jakobi Williams.
He's a professor and historian who wrote a whole book about this called
From The Bullet to the Ballot.
So in 68 in Chicago, you get the founding of the Illinois Chapter
of the Black Panther Party.
Many of its leaders come from the west side of Chicago, Fred Hampton.
Probably the most famous of the group is from Maywood, Illinois.
A lot of people will recognize the name Fred Hampton.
He was the chair of the Illinois Chapter of the Panthers, and he
was recently the subject of the movie Judas and the Black Messiah.
We'll get to Hampton more later.
So.
The Panthers are organizing black folks on the west side, but on the
north side there's this street gang.
They call themselves the Young Lords, and they're made up of mostly
Puerto Rican migrants and one of the leaders, a guy named Cha-Cha Jiménez.
Became politically active after he was locked up for drug possession.
And because the young lords were poor and lived in a neighborhood that was being
primed for redevelopment, it was near the city center and right on the lake, they
watched as the Puerto Rican residents were pushed out as richer white folks moved in.
So when Jimenez got out of prison, he decided that the young Lords
wouldn't be a street gang anymore.
It was going to be an organization that provided essential services to
their neighborhood, like childcare and healthcare and free food programs.
So kind of along the lines of what the Panthers were doing.
Right,
exactly.
Jimenez specifically looked to the Panthers as a model for the young Lords.
And there was one more group in the uptown neighborhood.
There was an enclave of working class white folks who had moved from Appalachia
to Chicago for better economic prospects.
Huh.
So it was sort of like a great migration, but for white folks,
essentially.
Uptown was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.
It had a certain reputation.
A 1958 issue of Harper's Bizarre described the people there as quote, proud, poor,
primitive, and fast with a knife, unquote.
Yikes,
right?
Here's Jakobi again.
They faced some of the same oppression that African Americans, Puerto Ricans
were, were facing because they were poor.
The police harassed them.
They weren't getting basic services.
People treated them like they were backwards.
So you have various entities in the Chicago community who
called them derogatory terms like hillbillys or poor white trash.
So they were discriminated against.
And so they organized themselves against what they saw as, um,
community not supporting them.
And so at first, these poor white folks teamed up with white, middle
class lefty college students.
Later they formed an organization run by and for poor white people in uptown.
They called themselves the young Patriots.
Okay?
So you got these groups who are working in different parts of the city.
You got the Black Panthers on the west side.
You got the Young Lords who are Puerto Rican on the north side,
and you got the young Patriots who are poor white folks in uptown.
And so they have, you know, different constituencies so to speak.
And we know from the listeners' questions that they kind of
linked up like Voltron eventually.
Gene, what is Voltron?
Oh my god.
I don't know if I should be offended as like an older millennial or just like,
you're not sufficiently nerdy, whatever.
Anyway, the thing that matters here is that Voltron is a giant robot made
up of these different colored parts, uh, that come together to form a
super robot to beat up the bad guys.
That's the simplest, least nerdy and least embarrassing way I can explain it.
Okay.
Yes.
So it's kind of like Voltron.
Okay.
Yeah.
So how did they end up working together?
So one night the young Patriots were invited to speak at a church
with a congregation of mostly middle class white folks on the north side.
The Patriots were supposed to be given a talk about police brutality,
but the meeting turned raucous.
It's a scene captured in the documentary, American Revolution two.
So here's what happens.
The poor white folks and the Patriots at this meeting were trying to explain to
the middle class white folks that they just wanted decent housing and proper
jobs, but some of the middle class people came down on the Patriots essentially
saying, why is that our problem?
Of
course they did that.
Of course.
And it turned out that one of the people who had coordinated
the meeting that evening had also invited the Black Panthers.
Now, one of the Panthers in particular watched these white folks, y'all at each
other, and in the documentary you see him come to defense of the young Patriots.
Pushing back on the churchgoers.
His name was Bob Lee E. His name was Robert E. Lee ii.
This African
American man from Houston, Texas.
Wait, Robert E. Lee, like the Confederate General?
Yes, like the Confederate General.
So he wasn't named after him?
I wouldn't think so.
I
want that to be clear, but Bob Lee's name would actually create
an opening because the Young Patriots was made up of Southerners.
Okay.
And even though they were lefties, all of their signage and symbols
were draped in the Confederate flag.
Wait, what?
Huh?
Yeah, it was a whole thing.
They wore the flag on their clothes.
They hung the Confederate flag up in their headquarters, you know,
quote unquote Southern Pride.
I, I don't know, man.
Listen, I know, but more than that in a second.
So, back to the meeting.
Bob Lee, the Black Panther, not the traitorous Confederate general, right.
Had just moved to Chicago from Texas.
It was supposed to be his first speaking engagement in the city
and he is watching all this and he knows the young Patriots want the
same things that the Panthers want.
So he gets to work at that meeting and mediates throwing his arm around people,
real talk in them, trying to get them.
To see that everyone in the room was dealing with the same
BS and wanted the same things.
Let's see what we all have in common.
You all have rats and roaches up here?
We do too.
You have police brutality, so did we.
You have dilapidated housing?
Yes, we do as well.
What about your schools?
They underfunded.
Underserved.
So are you being drafted to Vietnam?
We are too.
So why do we hate with each other?
Again?
You have healthcare, dental.
We don't either.
So one only thing that's divided us is our so-called race.
So let's rely on what we have in common, which is our poverty.
So Ana, we've learned so much about the effectiveness of organizing around key
progressive issues and really pushing back against the kind of representational
politics that so often cloud the actual needs of people rather than there's a
black or brown, uh, or an agent in office.
And so I'm really curious, you know, do you think right now what you're
seeing on the ground in Chicago makes the Rainbow Coalition that we've
been talking about still viable?
Do you think this is something, and Ben, I don't know what, I don't even
know if you, what you think about this.
Do, do you think this is something that we ought to be talking a lot more about?
Khalil, I mean, uh, I'm thinking about this a lot.
We have a mayoral election going on, but I'm also thinking about
the demographics in Chicago.
So we were talking about Harold Washington when he was mayor.
The, the Latino population was not that big.
It was like around 14% or something.
Okay.
And we had this huge influx, especially people from Mexico over
the next, you know, 20, 30 years.
And now at least in theory, we have this beautifully diverse city of like
30% Latino, 45% white, 30% black, and, and another sort of 7% Asian.
Now we're madly segregated, so it doesn't feel crazy diverse, but, but the, the,
the total makeup is this amazing thing.
Yes.
And that's probably true of cities, you know, democratic
cities all across the country.
Chicago is representative in that way.
Yes.
Of a rising Latino population and sort of thinking about the jumble of these
politics and, and like partly what we were talking about with Harold Washington.
Is sort of this white backlash to this progressive movement and
to this, this, you know, intra interracial, uh, connections.
Um, but I'm really interested in sort of like the, the, also the
black Latino divides that happen.
That's right.
And like to think about how that's also taking shape in Chicago, because
certainly like, you know, I think the black community in some ways feels
like they're losing out of power, you know, but maybe Rosanna feels
differently of seeing this on the ground.
Um, and even like seeing it in the city council, which has this, you
know, 50 aldermen alder people, alders Alder women and Alder men.
Mm-hmm.
All them.
But, but, you know, so, so yeah.
I think it's, it is this, it is this example of what's
happening nationally here.
I
think there's a lot of work to do to be able to build, um, the same
structures in black communities, and it is very challenging right now.
Um, we are in the middle of this mayor election and United Working
Families, which is our effort to create a workers' party, um, in Chicago.
And the top of the ticket is Brandon Johnson for for mayor,
which I believe that he is trying to build that Rainbow Coalition.
And Brandon's Black just, uh, even I know that from, from from national reporting.
Okay.
Yes.
So, so here, so the, so what I am saying is here in this Latino neighborhoods,
right, the different organizations that have been built around all of these other
candidates at different levels of office, um, this is something that we haven't been
able to build yet in black communities.
And because of segregation, it has been a very different reality.
Are you saying that when you say we, you mean the party has not been effective
on some of the black wards and districts on the south and west sides of Chicago?
That's what you mean by the we?
No,
what I mean is that what it means, that those efforts haven't gotten underway.
So can you give an example of an organizing effort to get a program
in place or a policy that hasn't yet worked among black Chicagoans?
One example of this is treatment trauma is a bill that I introduced in 2020 to create
a mental health response, um, holistic mental health response in Chicago.
We put it on the ballot in the last election in November.
We were hearing my word 33.
And in two wards that are predominantly black, which are the
sixth ward and the 20th ward, yeah.
People knocked on doors.
People had conversations.
This is how we do it, right?
Like we go to people, we.
We talked about what are the problems that we're having?
Well, this is a possible solution.
How do we do this?
But we haven't been doing that necessarily in a lot of black communities here
in, in, in the North Northwest side.
We started doing it.
Um, but we haven't been able to go through that process there.
And I say we, because this is everybody's responsibility, right?
I say we, I am in my community doing what, what I can, but we haven't
been able to have that level of, of organization in this particular context.
But we are on our way to do that.
Right.
And
Ro Rosanna, I'm, I'm, I'm interested in this idea.
So you're endorsing a black progressive can.
In the mayor election, there's a very prominent Latino candidate
as well who actually emerges from Harold Washington's coalition.
We know.
Yeah.
Chewy Garcia.
Yeah.
Who, who I met a few years ago.
Uh, it seems like a really lovely guy.
Um, I got, I got, I'm thinking about two things here.
One is, is it controversial that you are siding with a black
progressive and not a Latino?
And maybe you can explain sort of how your progressive politics kind
of supersedes, uh, a racial politics.
And then two, like say you're knocking on doors and you go to an older
family and in your ward and, you know, a Latino family and, and they're,
they're Chewy Garcia supporters.
How do you convince them?
You're like, no, no, no.
This, this, this black guy who, who actually has your interests?
Brandon Johnson.
Um, better.
Yeah.
Yeah, well the, those conversations, um, usually start with an issue, right?
Like, what is the issue that you care about?
And it is not easy.
And I, I would like to start saying I have a lot of respect
for, uh, Congressman Garcia.
Um, I know him personally.
I did meet with him alongside all of the northwest side electeds,
uh, progressive Latino electeds.
He was not ready to commit to running when we met with him.
Um, and Brandon was.
And Brandon sat down with us and we talked about all of the different, uh,
things that we needed, and he committed to fighting alongside us for those things.
So I am going to support the person that is going to go to bed for the
progressive agenda that we have, right?
So we couldn't commit to it at that point.
He didn't even know if he was running.
I'm sorry, we have to run somebody against Mayor Lightfoot.
So this is what we're doing.
Um, and I am very proud to be supporting Brandon Johnson because I
know what his history is in movement.
I know that he's a union person.
I know that, um, he, I know where he has been and what he has been
doing, and I, I, I do think that it is important for Latino communities.
Um, to understand who is fighting in their best interest.
And I think Brandon is going to be doing that.
When I go into a, a household and we talked about the issues at hand, I am
very comfortable saying Brandon has committed to treatment, not trauma.
Brandon already committed to that and I know that I'm going to be able
to count on him to deliver that.
I wanna just, um, sort of round this out with an issue that I
think is a third rail around this question of coalition politics.
Um, and it certainly is in New York City.
Um, it is in a lot of places.
So you keep talking about treatment, not trauma, and I want to understand
like how does that intersect with a larger debate about Chicago crime?
Just like many other cities and in a lot of other places, it's most
certainly derailed progressive ideas.
It has derailed the attractiveness of progressive politicians who have been.
Saddled with the stigma of hating police officers through the
quote unquote defund movement.
And, and it seems like this isn't, this doesn't animate any of the
people that you're talking to.
Do I have that right?
And if so, how is that possible?
Well, that's what I was just talking about with the election of Delia Ramirez,
then Anthony Casava and all of the slate that just won, like they were attacked.
Literally everybody was saying, everybody against them was saying,
these people are defund The opposition got money from the FOP, like, yeah,
like the police $17,000 from the FOP.
And what happened was that it's backfired because those values
do not belong in our communities.
And we called it out and we said, you are taking money from people
who are, you know, like the, the president of the FOP in Chicago is.
A, a terrible human being.
He's racist.
He has made so many Islamophobic remarks.
He was okay with the riots in the in the capitol.
On January.
On January 6th.
Sixth,
he said, he said the only, the only law he saw broken was, uh, trespassing.
That was his quote.
At the January 6th.
Yeah.
So, so, so I'm sorry.
We are not going to stand by those values.
Right?
Yeah.
And, and I think that we need to speak clearly about those things, but
also speak very clearly as well about what is it that we imagine, right?
Because people need to be able to imagine how is it that you're
talking about safety and what are the concrete things that you're gonna do?
And treatment and trauma, for example, is trying to reduce the amount of calls
that are going through 9 1 1 by developing other approaches that are well, like,
way better, um, and, and evidence based.
To handle things that are public health based, to handle things that are
human service, social service based.
Um, so expanding the care pilot that we fought for so that you
don't have to send police to deal with mental health emergencies.
Creating walking crisis centers that are open 24 hours so that we, you
have a place to transport, right?
You don't have to go to the police station or to the ER making sure that you have, I
like to call them beat clinicians instead of talking about beat cops all the time.
You actually need beat like social workers that are going to go and are
going to monitor the people and places that are most likely to go into crisis.
'cause you already know what's happened there and where those people are.
Build trust, monitor them, figure out how you can prevent crisis, right?
It is actually not like rocket science and this is working in other cities as well.
So when I hear that somebody is behind the treatment trauma
approach, which let me tell you.
In the last several my year old debates, treatment trauma
has been in everybody's mouth.
Everybody's talking about treatment, trauma.
When I first introduced it, nobody wanted to hear anything about it.
But now we do need to be thinking about safety in a different way
and use the right and proper tools to address each social issue
when we went to the committees to work on, you know, mayor Daley's Rubber
Stamp Committees, uptown Conservation Council, uh, with this proposal,
they looked at it and they said, well, you know, let's look at it.
If you can get funding, we'll take a serious look at it.
We did.
We got, you know, like half a million dollars at that time.
And this was from various banks and realtors and developers and, you know,
church associations and all that.
Uh, you know, but of course, you know, in the end, you know, they, they pull
a secret meeting and voted it down.
So the lessons that can be learned today is, hey, you know, be
smarter than they're, you know, they're, they're always planning.
And why don't, why aren't we planning?
Why aren't we planning?
Why don't we have think tanks?
Why don't we talk about the types of things that they're talking
about and look at it through their eyes in the way that they see it?
Because, you know, poor folks and white, uh, rich folks do
not see the same as each other.
There's a whole different way of thinking.
If you talk to somebody with money.
You talk about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, they'll say,
well, a hamburger will cost more.
Well, who gives a fuck?
You know, I mean, a hamburger does cost more, but that means that
somebody else can eat, you know?
So that's the way they see it.
And uh, and, and I think that's the way that we need to approach
'em and talk to them about it.
And too many times.
You know, they think that the, that the poor person is, is the
subservient person to the rich person or to the, or to their boss.
When in actuality, uh, the poor person may not have a choice,
but given the choice, they will fight against the person in power.
So what we see, and you ask it about Trump.
Unfortunately, you know, the types of racism that we were
dealing with is still there.
And it's still there.
It's still in, we're talking about the south.
I live in the south.
I know within my street there's only like three people on the block that are
not Trump supporters, and the reason they're Trump supporters is because
the government wasn't smart enough.
And so they overlooked everybody.
They overlooked the poor people.
They overlooked the working class people.
And that racism has, has always been there.
But then you have somebody like Donald Trump comes in and says, I'm your answer.
I'm a racist, son of a bitch.
And therefore, if you let these other people into this country, or if you.
If you believe in, you know, this democratic process, it's socialism.
Socialism.
It's so bad they're gonna come in and take the money that you don't have.
But they think they have because back in the, there's an interesting
thing that happened back in the sixties, back in uptown, uh, and,
and other, you know, across the country people didn't have credit.
Okay.
Um.
And I'm not gonna get too far off base here, but there's part of it.
Uh, people didn't have credit.
And so the government, wall Street saw all this protest about poor people.
They saw this going on with Martin Luther King.
They saw Poor People's Campaign.
They saw all kinds of people, poor people, uprising, and
what are you gonna do about it?
They, they're not about to give them any more money.
So what they're gonna do is try to make money off of them.
And, and so they gave poor folks credit.
I remember getting a credit card, didn't really know what it was, but instead
I had 300 bucks on it, you know, and I needed 300 bucks, so what am I gonna do?
I took it.
I used it.
Now I gotta pay it back With all this interest on it.
And so one of the problems I believe that organizing poor folks today
is the definition of what is poor.
And we can ask people if they're poor and they will say, no, I am not poor.
I have my credit card, I have my flat screen.
I have my telephone, I got my computer.
You know, I got all these things.
But they're still paying for 'em.
I have a neighbor next door that just had two cars repossessed,
you know, within the last week.
But, but they thought they had money.
They thought they had credit and they don't.
And so, uh, here comes Donald Trump along saying, you gotta stand by me.
I'm gonna give you all this shit.
You know, we're gonna, we're gonna take over.
And that's what they believe because.
The Democrats and the Republicans didn't do that.
And we're moving more and more toward, in my opinion, fascism
than we've ever been before.
And that's even incorporating the Democrat and the Republican Party and
you know, especially Donald Trump.
You know, I was just in a, a gun shop here a few weeks ago.
And, um, a guy went in and bought an AK right off the shelf, went out there, and
I just thought I'd look at his truck.
Well, it's got that Confederate flag on it, you know, and
you know what that means?
That means they're, you know, they're preparing for something and I'm afraid
our country's in deep shit, you know?
And the only thing that we can do is try to try to keep organizing.
That, that's really an important story there.
I mean, I think that you just told, and I, and I just conclude here, but
I, I was thinking about it before, just before we start the conversation, we'll
make this short, is that you showed me a picture you just put on your Facebook
page of, uh, Bobby Lee and, and Bobby McGinnis from the Black Panthers and
the young Patriots effectively, and the young Patriot McGinnis had a, a
Confederate flag on the back of his cutoff denim jacket standing next to the.
I believe the Black Panther in his black leather jacket.
That, to me, pictures spoke volumes about what you wrote about in the book, but it
also speaks volumes about where we can go as a movement and, and in this country.
I mean, I think that, that, that really struck me.
Well, there's, yeah, there is a new movement starting, and I, and
I, I think in one of our phone conversations that I had mentioned, it.
There is a new, uh, movement toward a new Rainbow coalition
and this, this encompasses several different organizations that's
actually modeling themselves.
After the original Rainbow Coalition, there's several groups.
There's the new African Black Panther Party, which has a point
program, which is pretty much like the original Black Panthers.
There's a new, new era, young Lords made up of a bunch of young Hispanic
people, uh, the Brown Berets that have been around for a while.
Uh, an organization called The White Panthers, which is modeling
themselves after the Young Patriots, American Indi, aim, parts of
aim, some of the AIM chapters.
And an Asian group, and, and, and, you know, they're, they're
moving toward organizing.
Now.
They've asked me and some of the other old timers to be a council of elders,
you know, so we can advise them.
They want to take the lead from the original Rainbow Coalition,
not necessarily make it different, but make it more modern.
Uh, in terms of, you know, what's happening in the country today, and
I think we're gonna see more of that.
I think this is a reality and it's gonna happen.
We, we gotta keep educating and what the school that, that I'm running called the
North Alabama School or organizers, you know, is to educate organizers or to give
them more resources and educate people to become organizers or effective organizers.
And so these types of, I, I think you'll see these types of programs,
uh, in schools emerging more and more.
it seems to me there's potential power of the Rainbow Coalition was part of the
reason that Fred Hampton was assassinated.
I mean, there's this multiracial coalition crossing all ethnic and
racial lines of working class people around Chicago was a real threat
to the power in the establishment.
And Bobby Lee might have been doing most of the work in from the Panther side
and building the coalition, but they thought taking a Hampton out would end it.
So, I mean, do you think that's correct?
Take it up from there.
Oh, oh, absolutely.
I think, you know, at that particular time, you know, at that time in
Chicago, period, I, I think it's been going on, it was going on since
almost the formation of Chicago.
That, that somebody had to get beat down, you know, and, and
it just happened to be our turn.
But, uh, uh, you know, when, when, I don't think, I don't think
anybody ever expected for, you know, I, I think they, they may have.
Expected, maybe the, the brown community and the black community to get together.
But never, never, I don't think they would ever expect that a bunch of
hillbillies would join in, you know, with a bunch of black and and brown
hood ones, you know, as they would say.
Uh, and at that meeting now, that was, that's a very important meeting to
watch the dynamics of, of what took place that from what poison was saying.
Was the fact that there was a lot of tension there, man, there was there
just all kinds of tension there.
There were some people who, you know, who thought that the, the Panthers were
just a bunch of gun toting gangsters.
And, and of course, you know, you're dealing with a lot of white supremacy.
You know, you're dealing with a lot of racism.
You're dealing with, you know, in that community with the, with the Ku Klux clan.
American Nazi party, you know, I mean, you know, and we got, but we managed to get
a lot of people together at that meeting, uh, who were, some were just curious.
Uh, and I think that when, when they walked outta that meeting, um, they were
committed, A lot of 'em were committed.
Of course, some of 'em still would be, you know, white supremacist,
uh, but Bobby Lee had a way of, he didn't just sit there, he walked
right in the middle of the crowd, man.
I mean, he walked right in the middle of the, of the floor and just
started talking to people and putting his hands on people's shoulders.
And that broke a lot of ice right there because, you know, it showed that
this, this dude really cared, you know, instead of just setting up the table
and talking, uh, that he really cared.
And I think, uh, that carried a lot of weight within the, the,
the white community there, but also, uh, with the, with the
Native Americans that lived there.
We, we could begin to, you know, to to talk a little more,
break down some, some barriers.
And it began, we began to, uh, people started looking at us as not
necessarily a gang anymore, but a group of people who kids, you know,
who was trying to make a change.
And I think that, that because of that and because of that formation, the
beginning of the formation there, the.
Of, uh, of the, uh, rainbow Coalition.
I think it scared the hell out of Daley.
I think it scared a lot of people powers to be that.
Never would they think that a group of crazy hillbillies would get together with,
with blacks and, you know, Puerto Ricans.
I mean, it just wasn't heard of.
We were supposed to be fighting each other, you know, and which,
which was happening, you know, at least a year before that.
So, uh, yeah, I would say that's, that's probably, that's one of the reasons
that, that Hampton was assassinated because he was dealing with class, uh,
he, he started dealing with class and the poor, and so he started dealing
with more and recruiting more and more poor people of all, of all colors.
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, Bobby Lee did a lot of the work, but we, it, it wouldn't
have been possible without Fred Hamptons.
And his, uh, charismatic ability to deal with other elements of
the Rainbow Coalition as well.
Uh, Fred was able to, uh, analyze complex ideas and translate them into, uh, the
vernacular of the people on the block.
People, people, the common working class people, and those who made up what we
call the lump and proletariat, um, uh, as had talked about it shook up daily.
It shook up the, uh, cook County Democratic machine, which daily
was the head of, and the system that daily, uh, controlled.
As, uh, the Pharaoh, as the top banana in that criminal political
organization, uh, of the Cook County, uh, democratic machine.
Um, of course the coalition, the formation was not as easy, uh, as it looked.
Bobby Lee in the film and the impact that he was making there, because
we had our own issues back at the headquarters because at that point,
uh, the nascent Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party had members
who came from various elements of, uh, political activism, and you had some.
Were strongly nationalistic in terms of black nationalism who, uh, didn't and
couldn't handle that type of alliance.
And ultimately, uh, some resigned from the party.
I mean, you're saying because of the coalition, because of
that interracial coalition?
Yes, because.
That, you know, not bringing white people into, uh, the struggle of
the Black Panther Party and, and, and, and black people in general.
Uh, but it wasn't necessarily bringing white people in, but it was the idea.
Of various communities organizing to overcome the repression of
the empire at the local level.
So when people go see this film, when people see Juda and Black Messiah, and I
know the other day we talked on the phone, Henry, about the fact that what Hampton
said in that film, actually Bobby Lee said it when he went to Uptown Chicago,
uh, to talk with that community, but.
Even given that the film was inspiring for so many people, I mean, they told
the story that day that folks don't even know about the Panther 10 point program,
about the health clinics, free breast breakfast programs, all that coming up.
I mean, building one of the most important coalitions, interracial
coalitions in our history.
Um, so I wonder how, given everything we're facing today,
how you think that moment and that understanding affects our world today.
Well, I think, I think it very much relates to, to our world
today, because it seems that a lot of the same things are happening.
Uh, you know, you got, certainly, you got police suppression, you
know, look at what's going on, uh, in, in, in the country today.
You know, the starting, you know, uh, jury selection for, uh, George Floyd.
You've got all kinds of, uh, things going on.
Uh, we were.
I, I was at an NAACP rally and, and we got tear gassed
here in Huntsville, got beaten.
You know, uh, some of those things are going on now.
They're still slum landlords, they're still slums.
Uh, and there's still a lot of repression, you know, and, and, and I think that
every community should stand up.
And, and, and fight for their community.
And that's what we were trying to do, I think in the Rainbow Coalition,
was to fight in our own community.
But, you know, uh, in tandem with the other, uh, organizations that
were, were around at that time.
And I think the Rainbow Coalition set the example, um, people.
Tell me today that, you know, with the Young Patriots, it's a blueprint for
what they could do and what they've done.
The same with, you know, the Panthers and, and the same thing
with the, with the Rainbow Coalition.
Now, section C, the man
We're really, uh, putting an awful lot of emphasis into dealing with the
effects of this economy upon all poor people, our people in particular.
I think our movement now has to have a dual focus, economic generation
and spiritual regeneration economic generation to the extent that we have
more than 6 million people unemployed.
25 million people making less than $3,000 a year, another 25
million, less than 6,000, another 25 million, less than 9,000.
And given the inflated economy, that means that you have three levels
of real poverty in the country.
So that is a critical question.
On the other hand, we have a, a kind of deteriorating spiritual
condition in the black community where our young people are trapped.
Uh, pushing dope in their veins rather than hope in their brains and pickling
their brains with liquor and using all kinds of ways to escape reality.
It is at that level that we must be spiritually regenerated because if we
have a new school and don't have the will to learn some no avail, we got a
job and don't have the will to work, or we have the opportunity and can't
seize it because we've tripped out.
Mm-hmm.
So there's, at that level, we must have a dual focus.
I guess biblically speaking, you would say that.
Man cannot live by bread alone.
You need the bread and the spiritual development.
Uh, the question becomes how do you break such a recession as this?
Number one, you point to the weaknesses of it.
Uh, the inflation that we're now on is not a consumer inspired inflation where people
are spent too much, but rather because the super rich and the military budget
have, uh, been made into sacred cows.
Uh, Ford says he's going to save $5 billion in surtax.
Well, the fact is the military budget's growth is $7 billion a year.
Why is that $7 billion sacred?
You ask people making $15,000 a year to tighten up their belt.
Well, they already wearing suspenders because their real income
has been eaten up by inflation.
Then he says that if we save 20 billion from federal spending,
we can break stagflation.
Well, the Proxmire report indicates that the military spend spent
beyond its appropriations last year.
$27 billion.
Now that plus the super rich not being taxed properly and being
allowed to develop monopolies and run competitions outta business.
That is why the economy is jammed.
So on the one hand, we must know that.
On the other hand, we must prepare to hit these streets marching again
in mass January 15th this year, which is Dr. King's birth date.
Uh, we are going to celebrate it by marching in at least
50 cities simultaneously.
Marching, I might add behind the Hawkins full employment bill, demanding that
once and for all that is declared in this country, that everybody has a right to
a job, a decent house and medical care.
In my judgment, that's where the struggle is now.
It's not as much civil rights as it is civil rights.
Mm-hmm.
It's a matter of redefining the economy.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I heard, uh, him, Diane in Chicago at, at your, at his
annual, uh, black expo, and, uh, you made a very interesting, uh.
Parallel as you do often your three E's.
Well, my point is that we must be ethnic, which is our blackness, accept
our African roots, our African heritage, get all of the psychological self-esteem
that we need outta being black.
How about natural haves and our symbols of blackness?
But you got to go beyond being ethnic.
You must also be ethical.
Cain and Abel were ethnic.
They were two brothers came out the same mother's womb, but they were not
ethical and so they killed each other.
So in addition to being ethnic, you must be ethical.
But beyond that, you must be excellent because in the last analysis, the
only thing that will, uh, protect you from genocide is to be necessary.
I mean, whether you are in America or in Africa and wherever your, your life
chances are increased by being excellent.
Now, you may not survive even if you are not excellent, but
you are almost guaranteed to get wiped out if you're not excellent.
I mean, that which has protected our Hank Aaron.
And that which protected the Willie Mays, that which has sustained the Muhammad Ali.
That which has made a Ralph Bunche go down into the Annals of Science or
George Washington Carver is in spite of a racist society, uh, not liking
their ethnicity, their excellence was of such until even their enemies had
to respect where they were coming from.
What do you think of Rockefeller's vice president?
Well, I think it's a bad choice for the country.
Uh, basically I think it's bad because at one level there's a very delicate
balance of power in this country between labor, business and government.
And when the man with that much concentrated economic wealth is one
heartbeat away from the presidency, uh, it destroys that balance of power, uh, beyond
the way he handled an Attica situation.
Ah, uh, which, you know, becomes murder in my judgment, it's, it,
it's bad that that thing happened.
But even if warned, but not coming out of our black emotional concern
and ethical concern for Attica, it is not good for this government because
there are some places where this government politically should not
be where he personally already is.
So there's a collision course between the interests of the country and the
interest of the Rockefeller family.
I think that it's a bad situation.
How I would hasten to add, however, that if Rockefeller.
And Ford have their team.
And if Nixon is resurrected, it is not.
Racism will stop us as much as cynicism will.
We can overcome Rockefeller and, and Bilbo and Maddox and all of
that bunch if we just don't give up.
And that is what kind of frames me about this kind of cynical
reasoning about blacks can't make it.
So I contend that, uh, the system is not good, but we can make it
in it if anybody can, because we can do what other folk can do.
Now if we have integrity, not only will we make it, we will change it
also, but I cannot accept a set of reasons why we can't finish school.
A set of reasons why our track men can't win the race, or why our
boxers can't win the boxing match.
We can accept no reason we, we have fought racism because we never
allowed cynicism to overtake us.
I think when one looks at, uh, the struggles you've had with this show,
I mean racism has tried to jam you.
But if you had moved and become cynical, then even if racism had moved, you
still couldn't have conducted your show.
Mm-hmm.
I had a little slogan once, uh, I asked some of my students, if racism
quit, could you take advantage of it?
Oh, that's, that's the fundamental proposition.
Uhhuh, I mean, that's the case of Muhammad Ali.
Racism took its title.
But they didn't take his manhood, right?
And so when racism stepped out the way, he didn't step back and the rang 300
pounds and slope, you know, because he kept his head together, you know?
So at that level, you know, um, uh, since preachers always develop his sayings,
speaking of preachers, let me ask you a preacher question.
Don't you forget that stupid?
And I, I won't, and you called me a frustrated preacher.
Uh, let me ask you the flip, Wilson brings a whole.
Phenomenon in the focus, and that is the responsibility of the black artists to
black people, et cetera, and so forth.
Now we know black artists have to eat, et cetera and so forth.
And it's, it's the old run around about how much of this can I do and how much of
this he's been doing, the Reverend Le Roy.
And
the question is, who are you going to eat?
Well, you know, any
opinion?
Let me ask you the, you
know, I mean, are you gonna eat?
That's right.
Are you gonna eat animals or we're gonna eat each other?
Right.
And I think that when we make the kind of move that he has made relative
to the black church, that uh, he has moved into the area of the sacred.
And Jewish comedians crack a lot of funny jokes, but it's never about the rabbi.
Uh, the Catholic comedians crack a lot of jokes, but it's never about the Pope.
In other words, there is something sacred.
I think there's a lot of room to tell jokes and finger
pop and make people laugh.
I mean, I, I, I'm not one of the great critics of Amos and, and because it,
you know, it was funny to me and, and it didn't gimme no brain damage either.
But I think there's some areas that are basically sacred and I think that, uh.
A group of ministers, we are going to meet with that brother and try to
arrive at some understanding because on the one hand, we don't want to, uh,
you know, we don't wanna undercut him
because this meeting is not taking place in a dark alley, I hope.
Oh, no, no, no.
Friendly.
But we know how you
map
preachers meeting.
No, we're not gonna meet.
I tell you why.
Because on the one hand I respect flip because he has done a lot for our cause.
He has done a lot of benefits and he's tried her.
He put a lot of black folk on that show who otherwise never
would've been on Televis.
But he says, he says his, that his portrayal of Reverend Le
Roy does not in any way damage the image of black preachers.
Well, you see, we disagree and that's why we have to have a meeting, you know,
but not a meeting based in hostility.
But when we have differences, we must reconcile our differences
through dialogue and lack civilized people in the final analysis.
It will not hurt us because that which he's portraying is not the truth.
It won't hurt preachers.
But it may hurt our children who don't know any better.
Somebody needs to know the first piece of property bought in America by blacks
was bought by the black church that the first black bank, first black
insurance company, first Black College, Wilberforce University Black Church.
We talk about the Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad, the black
church with the railway station.
We talk about Denmark Vesey being hung in South Carolina.
The A ME Church also was put out of South Carolina because
that was his headquarters.
We talk about the civil rights legislation that was led by Adam Powell and Dr.
King.
These were black preachers.
And so if our black children get trapped thinking that the black
preacher is Reverend Leroy and thinking the Black pimp is some kind
of hero, it reverses their psyche.
So what he is doing, it may appear to be funny, but it's
more dangerous than it is funny.
So we need to discuss this.
I'm not even sure he understands this history, all the
ramifications of his actions.
So I would not suggest that we need to get nasty and hostile.
And try to jam him relative to NBC, but to appeal to him, to reason.
Just like I, I may do something that's outta line.
I'm on TV and rapping and talking into stuff.
I would hope that you would have the capacity to come to me as a
rational concern, brother or sister,
Jesse Jackson is the, one of the biggest reasons Obama could have won
in oh eight because his, his run, his campaign in 88, after it was done and
Dukakis needed to bring his supporters into the fold, the trade Jesse
made was okay, but you guys have to change the way that you do primaries.
Instead of them being winner take all, there's gotta be some
proportional distribution of the delegates, which is what made it
possible for Obama to win in oh eight.
Like this isn't just a Jesse Jackson walk, so Obama could
run kind of situation, right.
Jesse is tangibly responsible for what happened later on top of the Jesse Rand.
So Jesse walked so that Obama could run situation.
You have.
Um, I think that's all very well said, and I think the, this
relates to sports in so many ways where it's like the, the history.
Is always kind of like so much colored by whether you won or lost.
Yes.
And I think there's an under appreciation for the progress made.
And one of my friends from school would say this all the time.
He's incredibly smart guy.
Uh, a lot of really advanced, impressive degrees.
And he wouldn't go to class and he wouldn't study and he
would get the equivalent of a b.
And then someone else will work their ass off and get an A and he'd be like,
well, the distance I traveled this morning to when we had the test and the grade
that I got was much more impressive.
It's not a perfect corollary to what Jesse has done, but like the distance
that Jesse traveled in the environment in which he fought the things that he
accomplished, like you could argue, despite the fact that it's not gonna,
there's not gonna, the W for win is not gonna be next to his name.
You could make the argument that that was just as or more valuable
than any other, like real success because like in a time when there's a
significant backlash to have somebody.
Who's willing to fight that backlash.
And of course, you're not winning the fight against the backlash, but you
are giving somebody, it's the, it's the equivalent of getting a, forcing
them to punt at mid midfield, right?
Like you're giving yourself a better field position or you're giving
the next generation a better field position than they would've otherwise.
But nobody is gonna write a piece the next day of, of the game.
About the third down stop in the middle of the third quarter, you're gonna
write the piece about the touchdown scored on the subsequent drive and.
I think there's something to be said for breaking up that pass.
Yeah.
On third and sixth,
I think there's also, the biggest thing with Jesse that I think can
easily be lost by people who were but so aware of him is he has been perhaps
the most impactful advocate for the broader working class of America that
there has been, like this is not.
Jesse's work was not simply the work of black people.
It was a broad co, like the idea of the Rainbow Coalition was a,
it's, it's much more in line with the Fred Hampton type of situation
or as much as anybody else, right?
Same Chicago sort of roots.
It's the very similar to the Harold Washington Coalition in 1983 that
you put together, but it is working class people of all races and stripes.
Right?
Fighting for them like Operation Breadbasket.
Okay.
Operation Push.
It eventually became that Wall Street Project, which is where
it got a little weird for Jesse.
'cause the, that that's when you started having cronyism.
Uh, concerns and everything else is when it went over there, Jesse's argument was,
this is the next frontier of the fight.
We gotta be over there too.
But once you go play, once you start playing them reindeer games, right.
You know, it's real easy for people to get caught up in that.
But the idea that Jesse was the fighting man for the working class.
The 1988 campaign for Jesse Jackson is in large part the template of the Bernie
Sanders campaigns that you saw later.
If you go back and look at what he was talking about in 88, a lot of it
sticks through and he was going out and winning like he won primaries in 88.
Making that happen now.
You know, America ain't what it, America don't live its raps.
What a little sh man.
Um, Michael Dukakis was like this big ain't no way in the world in America,
man, this big run against a man this big and the man this big wins.
That's just not how we do things ordinarily.
Right.
Yeah.
That like basically longer the short.
Being white is like being a foot taller than you really are.
Yeah.
The ju the impact, and I, I, so the funny thing is when you get older and, and read
and learn more about it, like, I feel like growing up the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse
Jackson's run was almost kind of a joke.
And I didn't really like, it was a joke for me.
Like I was born in 83, so like what I did hear about it was like how ridiculous
and absurd it was and the idea that a black person could ever be president
and how Jesse, and that was also, we started to learn more and more about.
His his off the field issues.
Yeah.
Like those, like, it, it, it all coalesced to make that all feel like a joke.
And now like going back and reading about all that stuff, like recognizing
the impact that he had is not something that's gonna be the like title of,
uh, a chapter in a history book.
But the things that came afterwards couldn't have been possible without it.
And it's, it's funny that we.
History.
We like to think about history as fact, but it is like SI mean,
it is fact, but it's selected stories and we select people.
And the choices that were made around Jesse Jackson and the prices
that he paid for his, um, issues is inconsistent with the way that
we treat just about anybody else.
'cause nobody, I mean.
Nobody really feels perfect, like Obama don't got nothing on it, on his jacket.
Everybody else got something pretty significant on their jacket.
Yeah.
Obama.
Obama was thinking Obama started playing the law game.
Yeah.
Before anybody else, like, yeah.
Yeah.
Let me tell you who was not about to get caught up sleeping with
his wife's sister at the office.
Oh, hell no.
No.
Obama's not getting anywhere near that.
I, I am going to point this out, by the way, 'cause if you haven't seen it.
This is the funniest thing to happen after, um, after Jesse Jackson
died the most incredible statement.
I provided office space for him and his Rainbow Coalition for years in
the Trump building at 40 Wall Street.
Responded to his request for help in getting criminal justice reform passed
and signed when no other president would even try single handedly pushed
along and passed long-term funding for historically black colleges and
universities, which Jesse loved, but also, which other presidents would not do.
Fondant to Jesse's support for Opportunity Zones, the single most successful economic
development package yet approved for black business men and women, and much more.
I am fascinated by the idea that Trump's people were ready for this, right?
They were like the last thing anybody had on their Bingo
card is, yeah, positive state.
They tried to act like Black History Month ain't going on, and Trump was
like, nah, that Jesse dude is all right with me, but hold on, hold on.
Excuse me, he hit it.
Jesse was a force of nature.
Like few others before him, he had much to do with the election
without acknowledgement or credit.
A Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand.
He loved his family greatly, and to them, I send my deepest sympathies
and condolences, Jesse will be missed.
And the thing about that last party is.
Not what Lie was told,
um, auto Root for the team, but that was one hell of a play.
It was one hell of a play.
Like it was just, it was the, the surprise of it.
And then like the accuracy and execution, because like there's.
Trump has not written, uh, or put out a, like a respectful eulogy of anybody.
No.
Like he burns everybody.
Even people that were like, oh, like I feel like the, he went after McCain like
this on, yes, he's on your side, man.
And in this case, the shock that it was like a favorable one combined
with the slights at the end.
It's a well executed play man.
It's well designed, well executed.
He hates Obama so much.
It is so dedicated to Haiti, Obama that he was, he, he wasn't
missing any opportunity, right?
Yeah.
He was like, oh, this is a perfect time.
And I will note, I hope Obama's people, I, when he put that out, I
was like, oh boy, Obama better step to the plate because you, you can't, you
can't let Trump outdo you now, dog.
It's not an option.
And by the way, he just set a fairly high bar.
Any preemptively cut off any credit that you was going to give him?
Yes.
Like you ain't give him no credit before, essentially.
Like he ain't even like you.
Ooh.
And you didn't like him
dirty, move dirty,
man.
And that that was, I mean, I will say though, I will never forget
in oh eight watching Jesse, who.
Like I say, them, them two men had their issues.
Right.
It's, it's very, it's a very similar situation to like Jordan and Isiah Thomas
fighting for the soul of Chicago, right?
Yeah.
Like, like it, Isaiah being like, yo, I made it so that Mike Alt these streets.
Perfect.
And Mike, don't gimme no credit, right.
Very similar, right?
Yeah, it's a perfect analogy.
I think that your, your point is like Obama was like much more of the, I
don't wanna say Dr. King because Dr. King was different, but like Obama
was, grew up in a world and separate from the experience that Jesse had.
Yes.
Like Jesse Jackson had a much more, like, I guess stereotypical, uh, might
be the word, like stereo, stereotypical like, um, challenging black upbringing.
That wasn't, yeah,
and this motherfucker ain't said thank you one time.
That's like, that's, that's, that's Jesse's situation, right?
It is like, and he's not the only person who feels this way.
He's like, he say Thank you to me one time.
Obama's people.
Hey man, y'all better get that statement cracking.
Hey, hey, hey.
You might wanna, nah, not one of your Harvard.
Like if it was me.
Yeah.
Not one of your Harvard pots.
Nah.
Like,
nah,
you need to, you need to, you need to get on the phone with somebody
you ain't talked to in a while and, and, and get, and get, got crank out.
Got on your team.
You and I both, we read that from Trump and we're like, yo,
I can't believe this happened.
Oh, it was tough.
You can't, it is a, it is a tough comeback from that one man.
Going back to in Chicago, king talks about how surprised he was
at the ferocity of the whites.
Chicago is up.
A city of ethnic enclaves, 70 some cities within the city, and people
fiercely guard the neighborhood turf and, uh, various ethnic groups,
European ethnic groups have certain territories as Latinos and blacks and,
and Russians, and Germans and all that.
So we started marching west of Halsted.
This was invading their territory and then seeing blacks in
the most stereotypical terms.
When we come, pain comes, community disintegration comes and, and there
was a reaction to us just as the people stereotypes, and so we began to march
for the right of open housing and we would have a black and a white go to.
Uh, rent a house.
They to tell the black and no room available, white come right
back and get room available.
So we, we had to break down, uh, house by house.
And then they had the real estate guys, they, what they call block busting.
Uh, once the block moved in on the block till otherwise they, they, they're
coming and, and jacked the price.
So it really was not just the.
Crowd throwing the rocks, which is obvious.
The real estate brokers were behind that deal.
And the bankers, bankers were not.
Bankers were on to lend money to buy a house or forbid in certain areas.
So the bankers had a role in this.
Their hands were hid, the real estate, brokers leading the blockbuster,
and they had a role of play in this.
So the kids turned rocks.
They were make, they maybe in the third or fourth layer.
Of resistance.
What about King when he moved in with his family to the projects?
Yeah.
On the, on the west side.
He moved, he moved into a, just to prove when he moved into that, uh,
apartment, it was to put a focus on the fact that you had, people had to pay
rent, didn't have heat, had to pay rent, maybe didn't have running water, had
to pay rent, lead paint on the walls.
I mean.
And so by moving the middle of the community, put, put a global focus.
In other words, he had this, the, the strategic sense to put light in
dark places, a heating cold place.
He knew that by his corner it illuminated the situation.
You could say, oh man, he would say the most difficult part of the movement
when you, when you, when you leave the excitement of a march in Selma,
where has even violent reaction.
That's not the difficult part.
The difficult part is that when all that's over, you got to get
people to register and vote.
The slowly, because the slow, non-romantic dimension when the lights are not there.
The hardcore organized, convincing people to change their minds,
to change their situation.
'cause at the end of the day, change comes and people change their minds.
Most people who are under occupation.
Those backs are against the wall.
They have three options and that's why it's so difficult to organize is
without understanding this, most people are just, they have found their place,
they've found their space where they live, where they can live, where they
grocery shop, where they go to school, where they go to church, where they
get married, they live in the circle and they've adjusted to, they, they,
they, they blank the outside world away.
So if you are in, in, in the building now you, you paying pension funds,
uh, and, and the pension funds are building the other side of town.
They're building the big, tall buildings, but you just forget that, uh, you, you
are living in, in conditions where you live there, but you don't control the
economic resources, but you've adjusted.
Uh, and some people beyond, they resent, they know better.
They don't feel empowered enough to change anything, so they
have a often become very bitter.
They, they, they, they, they, they not adjusted, they resent.
And then there's the third dimension call resistance.
That's where the action comes in, where you know only,
where you become maladjusted.
Dr. King would say.
And you resent, but you also begin to resist.
Resisting means some kind of boycott, some kind of action.
The, the weapons we use, uh, one, uh, defective use of one's vote, one's dollar
Coalition, uh, uh.
Action and to be morally right.
Those are the weapons that you use because at the end of the
day, our, our biggest weapons to be is to be mostly morally right.
Mrs. Mrs. Parks were mostly right.
Those are March in Birmingham.
Were mostly right.
Those are March.
Were right to vote.
Were mostly morally right.
We couldn't impose wrong on anybody.
We had, in fact, to assert the rightness of our cause and the righteousness
of our cause, and we, and we willing to suffer and sacrifice that in.
And non-violence is both a, um, a strategy and a way of life.
If we had been fighting with arms, we couldn't have battle in arms.
But then Dr. King said, if, if you shoot and you get shot,
then there are no winners.
But if you can, if you can have change without shooting, getting shot, then
both can survive for another day.
You've already talked about the assassination.
You went home to Chicago right afterwards.
Could you talk about the rioting?
I woke up the next morning,
Chuck per was starting to go with me, so Perche to come by the house.
I was still landed with my clothes on and went down to City Hall.
I was so angry.
'cause the same force was so hostile toward him.
Some of the ministers and political leaders that they, the forces
that say he should get outta town.
He had no place in Chicago.
They were having, having the drapes, the purple and grip, purple and
black drapes, and I was mad as hell.
So you guys sit here as hypocrites?
I could not.
I was trying to control my anguish with discipline.
It was hard to do, and I left that afternoon.
I'm back to Atlanta, but I came home first.
But there were explosions all over the country.
We were trying to D turn.
You know, you turn garbage into energy.
Energy if you can discipline it.
So our point was don't just burn up where you live.
There's some of the areas were burned out, are still burned
out these many years later.
Turn your anger into votes.
You should turn your anger into boycotts.
Turn your anger into opening school doors or to close.
Because if you
spend more than you have, you get in debt and you vote less than you have.
That's a formula for suicide.
If you, if you spend less than you have and vote all you can, that's
a formula for power is Chicago.
This is not Selma or Birmingham or uh, or Atlanta.
This is Chicago.
And so we had to figure our way out, how to navigate.
Through this urban situation and build coalition.
That's why I say that the weapons are, you have to have the right to vote.
You have to right use of your dollars, be coalitions, act and be most and more
in the right to all that stuff has to come together to make something happen.
But he, doctor, he warned us of this.
He said, you'll have these forward movements forward and then field would
sit in and the reaction would sit in, um.
You plant two seeds in the ground of equal strength and you water them
both, but you put a wall between them.
One will grow tall with multiples of fruit.
One will be short and stunted does not mean the smallest is
less than the other is more than something called photosynthesis.
One had the light could flourish, and whites often have the light
and they flourish not because they're better because they have
photosynthesis or to pull another way.
You have a wall between you.
And, and on the other side of the wall is ignorance, uh, fear, hatred, and violence.
So you pull the walls and we can see each other.
We become teammates, uh, in, on the football field.
We become teammates in the army.
We want to become teammates in voting for healthcare and jobs and justice.
That's what I do.
That's why we choose britches over walls.
You know, Reverend Jackson, you know, like all of us is a really complicated person.
Um, there are flaws, there are things that people have criticized
and things in his personal life.
There are flaws then, and he had them.
Certainly, I think when I look at the overall assessment, I have to say yes.
There were things that he did that, you know, made other people, made people
uncomfortable, things that were not.
Particularly flattering to him, but when you assess the whole person, he is
someone who opened doors for other people.
He's someone who gave people confidence.
He changed the way the Democratic party counted delegates that
opened the door for Barack Obama.
So yes, on On Balance, he's a person who was a visionary who made a huge
difference, but he definitely had flaws.
You can't ignore that when you're looking at at the whole man.
Interestingly enough, president Trump actually released the statement praising
Jesse Jackson as a force of nature.
He noted that he provided office space to the Rainbow Coalition, worked with
Reverend Jackson criminal Justice Reform, which is true long-term HBCU funding,
which is true Opportunity Zones that was in his first term, and also asserted
that Jackson helped pave the way.
For Obama's election, could you just say more about how he paved
the way for Obama's election?
Well, I think, you know, we have to mention Ron Brown here and Ron
Brown was a chair of the Democratic National Committee and was very
much an ally of Reverend Jackson's.
And at that point, uh, primaries were winner take all, and it was
really through that, you know, sort of back room policy change.
Mm-hmm.
Primaries became proportional.
Your delegates became proportional to the number of votes you
had gotten in the primary.
That was a huge change because it meant that if you had one candidate who you
know, might one by 51% of the vote, that person would've gotten all the
delegates to be able to divide that up.
Open the door, both for Reverend Jackson to get.
Uh, a certain number of primary wins, but it certainly opened the door for,
um, Barack Obama when he was first running, and that when you look at.
W the difference that would've been whether Barack Obama would've
been the nominee, or Hillary Clinton would've been the nominee.
I think that policy change made that difference.
We've talked about him as a civil rights activist, and of course you,
we've kind of moved past the fact that he was actually with Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr. When he was killed.
I mean, he was there in Memphis, um, at that.
Motel.
He was one of the last people to see him alive.
But so fast forward.
How do you position Jesse Jackson as sort of a figure in the American story?
What would you say if you were writing his biography?
You know that he, he is a person who was born in the segregated Jim Crow South,
where black people had few rights.
You were a laborer.
You, you were not even having the right to vote in most instances.
He also was a person who, because he was born out of wedlock, was supposed
to feel shame, and he took that.
Those personal experiences, he expanded them to look at ways
to involve and to engage African Americans and other people who were
disenfranchised to create this coalition.
And I, you could see that our born in 1941, that means before World War II, that
he then went through the Jim Crow South.
Through the opening up civil rights, um, legislation, he was able to tap
into that, to take advantage of that, to be a part of what, uh, Reverend
Martin Luther King was embodying.
And then to say, we are going to have a position on the American stage.
We're going to be intricately involved.
In politics, we're going to be intricately involved.
Mm-hmm.
In corporate America, and we want to have our place and our share.
It was a coalition, it was diversifying, it was diversity
and inclusion and equality.
Those are things that he embodied, and even though we are seeing a pushback
on that, I think that people are going to think of him as a visionary.
And while some people are saying.
Is this the end of an era?
I think it is a reminder that as we will see with the what the funeral
services, the memorial services, that we will see some of these new
young people who are inspired by what he represented, taking that mantle
and finally, section D, his legacy.
Are you seeing Jesse Jackson's influence today then in, in just
how, uh, Democrats approach.
Black voter engagement and just messaging overall today?
Well, I think that there is a lot that I think current leaders can
learn from what he did, because I do think that he both spoke to the
current situation that black people faced, which back in the eighties was.
Worse than it is now.
Mm-hmm.
And he spoke to the destitution, the sense of, um, economic abandonment.
Political abandonment.
But he also said to black Americans, uh, you are somebody, he said to them
they could be more than they are.
He asked them to walk away from drugs and violence.
He, there was, there was both, uh, a desire to say.
There is a responsibility that you have.
Mm-hmm.
And then a responsibility that we have to you.
So I think there's that.
But also what he did for black voters is he said to them, you have power.
Yeah.
In your vote, he registered millions of voters all across the country in a
massive voter registration campaign.
And I, I heard you talking to the reverend earlier.
Yes, yes.
Uh, the program and, uh, she had exactly the right analogy.
He gave this, uh, speech and he, he did it in a lot of his speeches.
He talked about a David and Goliath struggle.
The rocks just laying around.
Were all of the unregistered voters.
Uh.
Black voters.
Yeah.
But all voters, unregistered voters who had not really fully
realized their voting power.
And he said, if only, uh, Dave, David could pick up those stones,
uh, he could defeat Goliath.
And I think that empowerment was something that was really powerful
for black Americans at that time.
Let's go back to talking about Barack Obama because I, you know
what, I remember the iconic image.
And a lot of people remember this, of the tears that were running down
Jesse Jackson's face that night.
Yeah.
When Barack Obama was elected, our country's first black president.
But when, you know, when you think about what was behind those tears, uh, you know,
I'm thinking about from Obama's senate win to that presidential win a lot of.
Ups and downs.
Yeah.
I would say maybe in their relationship and how things were perceived.
Talk more about what was really behind those tears, you think
for, for Reverend Jackson.
Yeah.
I mean, well, Reverend Jackson has been around since the 1960s.
He was there on the day on the site of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination.
Mm-hmm.
And so when you think about that journey that.
Journey between Dr. King's assassination and Barack Obama's election was
40 years, so as someone put it to me, that was 40 years in the
wilderness for our black voters.
And I think Reverend Jackson's tears were not just about his relationship
with Barack Obama, it was also about.
All that he tried to achieve personally and couldn't.
It was also about what Dr. King tried to achieve and was killed
before he could achieve it.
Mm-hmm.
There's so much fear.
In so many of the figures that I spoke to for this book Yeah.
About what it's like to be a prominent black political figure in this country.
And for those 40 years, what it was like was fear of being killed.
And I think for Doc, for, for Jesse Jackson to see Barack Obama win that
election and be alive for that moment.
Yes.
I think that the tears were not just about their.
At times strained relationship.
It was also about actually seeing that moment happen.
I think there was a bit of disbelief in there.
With
the disbelief it's
happening, it's
finally happening.
It had been truncated that hope had been truncated for so many Americans.
So many times.
Yeah.
It was truncated for him, and yes, you're right.
Their relationship has been very up and down, very publicly.
So comments that, uh, Reverend Jackson made.
About Barack Obama,
which weren't supposed to be
public, but became Yeah.
Which weren't supposed to be public.
Became public.
Um, and, uh, basically privately reprimanding him for
how he spoke to black people.
And later on, Reverend Jackson said, I so regret saying that
he had so much deep regret.
Mm-hmm.
And I think there were, there was regret in those tears too.
Yeah.
So, yes, the relationship was.
Strained.
And I think for everybody around them it's so unfortunate because
there is a direct line between.
Reverend Jackson and Barack Obama, that one could not have
existed without the other.
We just left a 50 mile walk, uh, in North Carolina.
It's time to love forward together.
This is our Selma, and in many ways, the way we organized it was what I learned
with Jesse Jackson, broad and deep, black and white, and brown and young and
old, and gay and straight, and Asian and indigenous and multi policy, uh, focused.
Jesse Jackson.
Uh, when I met him 40 years ago as a student, uh, he asked me to work.
With his, um, student campaign when he was running for president in 1984, and
what we heard in him was not a politician.
What we heard in him was somebody was serious about, uh, people united to
save humanity, pushing that he was serious about, um, an agenda of uplift.
We didn't hear him just criticizing the person he was running against or demeaning
them a message we need to have today.
He instead gave people a vision.
He talked about moving from civil rights.
Battlegrounds, the economic common ground.
He talked about moving to moral high ground.
He framed issues in a moral perspective using both Judeo-Christian traditions
as well as, uh, uh, the Constitution.
And Jesse had a wave, just like Juan said, of saying, if, if,
if you can pull down the walls.
In, in Germany, if you can pull down the walls in South Africa, you can pull
down the walls here in Cuba, you can pull down the walls of that keeps people
in poverty and in ghettos right here.
And, and that's too uniqueness.
Jesse didn't just have a race critique, he had a race critique,
but he recognized that a race critique alone was too limited.
He remembered what Dr. King talked.
In 1965, the end of the Selma Montgomery March, that the greatest fear of the
greedy, uh, oligarchs in this country is for the masses of black people and
poor white people and others Latinos, to join together and form a voting
block that could fundamentally shift the economic architecture of this nation.
He pushed us.
Amy on, on knowing policy, the policy by adversaries and our own knowing
both sides and, and that we didn't have to be about demeaning our adversary.
What we needed to do is give people a vision of hope, and not just daydreaming
and wishful thinking, but the kind of hope that grows out of building a movement.
You know, people say he lost.
He really didn't lose those two elections.
He brought 10 million new people into the electorate.
He changed rules in the Democratic party.
He lifted up an agenda for people who weren't even hearing
their names talked about.
He was one of the few candidates that talked about the poor, openly
talked about whether it was in Iowa.
Or in Alabama or Mississippi or New York or upstate Connecticut, wherever
he was, he was lifting up the people.
And that is the part of the genius and the and, and the kind of hope that he
kept alive over and over again and he never stopped even when he got ill,
uh, we were in Texas walking 21 miles.
Uh, supporting, um, people in Texas and Jesse Jackson showed up five years ago
when we, in the middle of COVID, when they, we were fighting to make sure that
poor and low wage people would be treated as fast, fairly in COVID appropriations.
Jesse Jackson just showed up one day when we were standing at fighting for voting
rights and demanding that the COVID bill and, and restoring voting rights.
Uh, be done the same time, and politicians didn't want to do that.
Jesse showed up and we, uh, went to jail together.
Uh, when we started, uh, I got arrested together.
When we started the reiteration of the Poor People's Campaign.
Jesse had been the mayor of of Solidarity City.
He came and said, I'm not even here to lead it.
I'm here to say it is about time that we pick this up 50 years later and
that it is the right thing to do.
Because he recognized right now that we were not in a crisis of
democracy or a crisis of a party.
We are in the crisis of civilization.
Something very flaw is happening when people think the only thing you do with
power is hurt people and expel people, and deport people, and take people's
healthcare and take people's living wages.
Jesse's message is needed today.
I would say everybody needs to go listen to 84 and 88 and listen to it
and model much of it today in order for us to come up and out of the
things that we are experiencing today.
And, and Reverend Barber, uh, I'm wondering, you've often said that
like Selma in 65 and Birmingham in 63, this is our moral moment now.
If you could briefly, uh, tell us why.
Well, you know, one of the things when you listen, for instance, at the end of the
Selma to Montgomery, when Dr. King gave his sermon on the steps of the Alabama
State House, it's interesting that he broadened what he was talking about.
He was about just talking about voting rights for black people.
He laid out what could happen if we had, if we expanded voting rights.
He laid out, um, uh, how it would shift the democracy itself
as we stand here right now.
Uh, Jesse passed yesterday and when and when his family called me, his
son called me as we were praying.
As they were taking him out, his wife said, A mighty lion has fallen.
That's what his son told me.
And I think about the moral power of that lion is both protect
and expand the pride well.
Right now we have less voting rights to today than we had August 6th, 1965 when
the Voting Rights Act was first passed.
And Jesse would always teach us that voting rights wasn't
just for black people.
He taught what it did for white women.
What it did for working people, we still do not have a living wage
while we are making trillionaires.
Greedy trillionaires and giving more and more money to, to
billionaires and the oligarchs.
We don't have a living wage.
Uh, over 140 million people are poor and low wage.
Uh, 87 million people are without healthcare or underinsured at a time
where we are passing big, ugly, deadly destructive bills that take healthcare.
We also live in a time.
When, uh, even on the democratic side, politicians won't say the word poor.
They'll talk about affordability, but they won't say the word poor
Jesse would, and what he would say is that you can't just say rising
tides, you know, help the middle class and everybody else would come up.
He knew some votes were stuck, and he knew that you have to lift from the bottom.
Not really rising tide, but lift from the bottom.
And he had a way.
That we need now, we need to let people know something that he often said, if
you are black and you can't pay your light bill because you don't make
a living wage or you are white, you can't pay your light bill 'cause you,
because you don't make a living wage.
We're all black in the dark and the only way to get in the light
is for all of those in the dark.
To exercise their power.
We are in the finding that want a critical moral moment because 90 million people,
with all of this authoritarianism and neo fascism being spewed and put in policy
through this current administration, 90 million people stayed home.
The current Congress is made up the way it is because of only 7,000
votes and in many states, many states, uh, the margin of victory.
Is within 5% of just the number of poor low wage people that didn't
vote and they said they didn't vote because nobody talked to them.
Jesse would talk to them and we need to be doing it today.
We must never surrender.
America will get better and better.
Keep hope alive.
Um, that was the phrase before hope.
That, uh, remarkable picture with, uh, Barack Obama.
But you go way back.
Um, go back to 1971, Larry.
Well, that was my first contact with Jesse Jackson in 1971.
I had been, uh, invited to the, uh, SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
national Convention in New Orleans.
Uh, to receive an award.
I had just been appointed to the Board of Education in Newark by Ken Gibson,
the first black mayor of Newark.
And you were the youngest ever member of the Board of Education?
Yes.
Uh, you would later become known as Adhimu.
Yes.
And you were a protege of, uh, Amiri Baraka?
That is correct.
And, uh, I was invited down by Coretta Scott King, and I met.
Many of the civil rights leaders that were still living at that
time, including Jesse Jackson.
In fact, that was my first introduction to, uh, his or rhetorical powers.
He spoke one night for almost like three hours, I think, uh,
at the dinner and then again.
We, um, were, we crossed paths at the National Black Political Convention in
Gary, Indiana in 1972, and Jesse gave one of his most famous speeches, uh,
at the opening of the National Black.
Political convention, Gary, in 1972, but then as you mentioned, uh,
Amy in 1984, he ran for president.
At that time, we had, uh, formed in Newark, the People's
Organization for Progress in 1982.
But in 84 we formed another group called Friends of Jesse Jackson to campaign, uh,
uh, for Jesse and to raise money for him.
And then in 88, uh, everything came together in the 1988 campaign.
I was co-chair of, uh, his campaign in New Jersey and a Jesse Jackson delegate.
Now, I wanna say one of the major impacts that Jesse had.
I remember this fight.
Uh, pretty clearly was the question of, um, winner take all versus
proportional representation.
Uh, at the convention, uh, you were selected to be the presidential nominee
based on the number of delegates you won.
And if you won a district, you got all the delegates.
Jesse Jackson helped change that.
So it was proportional.
You got the number of delegates in proportion to the number
of votes you received.
And, uh, I think that that mechanistically was one of the things that helped pave the
way as, uh, Bernie Sanders and Professor Sse mentioned paved the way for Barack
Obama to become President Jesse Jackson in that way, uh, made the democratic process,
uh, as Jesse said, more democratic.
So talk about the significance, I mean the inspiration for the next generations.
I mean, you had Jackson taking on the large corporations, uh, very comfortable
walking into Wall Street demanding, proportional representation, not only
in voting yes, but um, based on, for example, in media outlets around.
The country proportional representations to the population they broadcast to.
That's right.
To have African American reporters there.
Right, right.
Launch.
Many young black reporters in the country, uh, being hired.
Right.
Well, uh, he introduced that principle not only into the political sphere, but into
the economic sphere that black people, as you said in the media, should, uh, have.
Representation, uh, proportional to our presence in the population, uh,
should have contracts in business in proportion to our population.
That that was one of his, uh, mantras at that time.
But what amazes me, um, Amy looking at the clips you played here this
morning, is how prescient, how relevant.
Jackson's message was in the eighties and nineties to today.
I mean, he's talking basically about the same thing.
You know, that we are living under, uh, political tyranny, uh, economic
tyranny of Wall Street, uh, the greatest upward distribution of wealth
in the history of the country, uh, increasing poverty and unemployment.
And, uh, we need a fundamental change.
And I think those of us who recognize, uh, Reverend Jackson's contributions, the
way we continue to honor him is to step up, intensify the struggle for racial
and economic justice in this country.
Uh, finally, um, you ran for various political offices in New Jersey.
Um, you were there at the convention he got, he was the, in 1988, he got the,
uh, second greatest number of votes.
Yes.
Uh, for the presidential nomination.
Yes.
He famously was there.
Crowd in Chicago when, uh, Barack Obama had just been elected
and you saw his tears stained.
That's righted face.
That's right.
As he looked up into the crowd.
Right.
Um, your final thoughts on Reverend Jesse Jackson?
Well, he was our living link.
To the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Freedom Struggle, the Black
Liberation Movement, Jesse Jackson, more than anything else was audacious.
He had waited around for people to say, Jesse, you should run for president.
Or Jesse, you should do the, it, it, it probably wouldn't have happened, Jesse.
Knew his place in history.
He knew because of his role in the Civil rights movement, and that's
something we should not overlook.
Uh, we talk more about the contemporary Jesse Jackson.
We need to talk about his role in that movement of blood and fury in the 1960s,
the Civil rights movement in which so many lives were taken, but to, as I said.
The best way that we can honor Jesse Jackson and all the martyrs.
We also saw this week, a couple of weeks, the passage of Claudette
Colvin is to get back, um, uh, step up
Claudette Colvin was Rosa Parks before Rosa Park.
That's right.
Sat down on the bus, refused to get right.
Jesse's daughter, Santita spoke at the Tributed at Abyssinian
Baptist Church last week.
I was also there for that.
But the best way that we can honor these people is to step up this fight because.
We, Jesse's life was an arc, and we saw that arc move in the direction
of progress, and now the arc swings in the opposite direction
of really counter-revolution, and now we have to step up and
build this movement to fight that.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s saw important strides
made for black Americans, part of a global movement of black pride,
post-colonial struggles, and a burgeoning sense of diasporic solidarity.
The Civil Rights movement was marked by both social and
legislative victories in the us.
Some of these victories included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned
various forms of discrimination and employment institutions and privately
owned public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prevented
state and local governments from denying citizens equal access to voting votes.
The 1960s also marked the era of President Lyndon b Johnson's Great society.
Which saw significant legislative and social policy pushes to
reduce poverty nationwide.
It was the largest social reform agenda in modern history.
It included the establishment of a job Corps of a hundred thousand
disadvantaged Men, a community action program that allowed people to tackle
poverty in their own communities.
Plans to help unemployed people find sustainable work money for farmers
to purchase land, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and help for unemployed
parents entering the workforce.
Johnson's great society also established some landmark programs
that still exist today, such as Medicare and Medicaid and Headstart.
But Johnson's great society failed to address some key issues in
the fight to eliminate poverty.
Some said his policies didn't go far enough.
For example, many wanted Johnson to include a universal basic income or
guaranteed jobs for the unemployed.
Additionally, the great society didn't address the issues that
emerged from global capitalism.
Such as large corporations shifting their operations to low wage markets, which
caused a decline in the number of stable and well-paying manufacturing jobs.
That for so long had been the catalyst of upward mobility from millions of
people in America, and some of the great society programs were racially biased.
They increased opportunities and access for white families, but didn't address
the needs of poor black Americans.
'cause the spread of integration had led to so-called white flight
where white families would move out of integrated neighborhoods.
This also caused a more informal form of segregation that had lasting impacts.
Public schools with predominantly black students received relatively little
federal funding, meaning they had fewer resources, which exacerbated already
existing racial inequality in response to the shortcomings of government sponsored
social programs, black people nationwide.
Continued the freedom struggle.
They achieved most success by founding small grassroots organizations from
within the community that could meet their needs in a more community specific way.
One successful example of this type of grassroots organizing that eventually
snowballed into a nationwide organization was Operation Push, an acronym that
originally stood for People United to save humanity, and that was later changed
to People United to Serve Humanity.
The organization was founded by the Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1971.
With the specific mission to improve the economic conditions
of black Americans in Chicago.
Let's learn a little bit more about Reverend Jackson in the thought bubble.
Reverend Jesse Jackson was born, Jesse Burns later adopting the name Jackson
from his stepfather on October 8th, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina.
Growing up in the segregated south, he excelled in school and sports.
Jackson's forays into political organizing and social activism began in college.
He became heavily involved in local civil rights demonstrations.
In 1964, he graduated from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical
State College in Greensboro, North Carolina, with a bachelor's in sociology.
After graduation, he traveled to Selma, Alabama to march with Dr. King
and became active in King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The SCLC was and remains to this day, a landmark civil rights
organization alongside the SCLC.
Jackson helped coordinate civil rights protests across the south.
In 1966, king appointed Jackson as the first Director of
Operation Breadbasket in Chicago.
Operation Breadbasket was an offshoot of the SCLC, which aimed to get more jobs for
black Americans, while organizing various levels of boycotts against companies
that refused to hire black employees.
Two years later, Jackson was with King when he was
assassinated on April 4th, 1968.
Jackson.
Was just 26 years old.
Within a couple years, Jackson exited from the SCLC under a cloud of
accusations from other leaders, namely Ralph Abernathy, that he was using the
organization for his own personal gain.
He formerly resigned in 1971.
Thanks.
Thought bubble.
That same year in 1971, Jackson founded Operation Push.
Although the organization struggled financially in its early years.
Push was able to raise money from notable black Americans.
Push sought to improve the economic and social conditions of black people
domestically and internationally.
To that end, they hosted a number of direct action campaigns, had
weekly radio broadcasts, and gave out awards to prominent black
people in the US and abroad.
Jackson saw his work as part of what would become known as a rainbow coalition,
a phrase originally coined by Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, which
referred to a group of diverse Americans.
Working together to fight for justice for all.
One of the cornerstones of Bush's agenda was a weekly Saturday morning rally at the
Hyde Park headquarters of Push in Chicago, intentionally scheduled for Saturdays so
that Jackson, a self-proclaimed country preacher, would not have to compete
with the other ministers on Sundays.
The rallies were an important source of Jackson's influence in the community
Operation Push established several key social programs that looked to
improve the circumstances of black people in the Chicago community.
And founded Push Excel, a program that focused on keeping black youth
in school and helped them with job placement after graduation.
The program also included lobbying organizations and major corporations
with a heavy presence in the black community, pushing them to adopt
affirmative action programs, which included getting companies to commit
to hiring more black people and people of color as executives and supervisors.
It also worked to get those same companies to include black suppliers, wholesalers,
and distributors to their purchasing list.
Push held vigils and Boycots to win these important employment concessions, and even
managed to get several major corporations to sign voluntary agreements, to hire
more black people, increase businesses with minorities, donate money to black
colleges and other organizations, and to increase ads and black publications.
But despite these important gains, push suffered under the weight of public
scrutiny, Jackson's high profile image in the community and his role as the face
of push meant that criticism of Jackson.
It was difficult to disentangle from the criticism of the organization as a whole.
In 1983, Jackson launched his presidential campaign and formally
resigned from his leadership position within the organization.
In 1984, after he ended his presidential campaign, Jackson formally launched
a new organization, the National Rainbow Coalition, which sought
equal rights for all Americans.
The new group positioned themselves as a counter to President Ronald
Reagan's economic agenda known as Reaganomics Reaganomics.
Called for widespread tax cuts, a decrease in spending for social programs
and deregulation of domestic markets.
Many black leaders believe that Reagan's policies contributed to unemployment and
economic instability in black communities.
Jackson's speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention
was like the organization he would found called the Rainbow Coalition,
and look to unite disenfranchised people from all walks of life.
Poor whites.
Black people, Latino people, young people, Asian Americans, native
Americans, disabled people, small farmers, and so many others.
Jackson said in his speech quote, America is not like a blanket, one
piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size.
America is more like a quilt.
Many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and
held together by common thread.
The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the
Native American, the small farmer, the business person, the environmentalist,
the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and
the disabled make up the American quilt even in our fractured state.
In of us, count and fit somewhere in 1996.
Jackson's new organization, the National Rainbow Coalition, and Jackson's
old organization, operation Push.
Merged to form a new hybrid organization, the Rainbow Push Coalition.
The merger continued the mission of the two previous organizations, which sought
to protect and gain civil rights through economic and educational initiatives and
to promote peace and justice worldwide.
New organization also pushed aggressively for black involvement
in the new emerging sectors of American society like Wall Street
Telecommunications and Silicon Valley.
The Rainbow Push Coalition is still operational and continues
to promote these ideals today.
Jackson's vision served as a bridge from the victories of the Civil
Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s to today, extending the mission
of social activists and allies.
His work addressed the political and economic disparities in the Black
American community as well as in communities of color across the world.
Despite this many permutations and pitfalls over the years,
what operation pushed?
A successor organization show us is the strength, power, and potential
of grassroots organizing, not only within the black community, but
through communities nationwide.
As Jackson himself noted, it's important to hold your head
high, stick your chest out.
You can make it.
It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes keep hope alive.
Operation push.
Shows the way that the energy of the Civil Rights movement moved, changed, and
evolved beyond the 1960s and helped shape the landscape of contemporary activism.
That's going to be it for today.
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Some of my best friends are.
The Real News Podcast 13 PBS the right time with Bomani Jones Life Stories.
Amanpour and Company.
In the loop and crash course.
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Thanks to everyone for listening.
Thanks to Dion and Aaron for their production work for the show, and
co-starring Unsolved thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes,
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