Remembering Jesse Jackson

A great American citizen died on Tuesday. I have thought about him quite a bit upon hearing of his passing. Let me mention a few of those thoughts.

I remember that my first encounter with Jesse Jackson was in the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.

I was involved with the Campaign when Martin Luther King was assassinated. With King’s death, the Campaign took a hit; however, a scaled-down version was carried on under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy and a group of men usually called MLK’s lieutenants. This included Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and Hosea Williams.

As planned, a mule train, symbolizing very poor people in America, made its way from Marks, Mississippi, to Washington, D.C., and several thousand people came and occupied tents in so-called “Resurrection City” on the National Mall.

I was working in New York City at the time; however, I would go down to Washington every two or three weeks to attend meetings, assist with maintenance chores, and otherwise support “Resurrection City.”

At one point, it became evident that many of the young activists at the camp wanted to demonstrate and protest. They were anxious to do something. So, at one of the frequent meetings, Jesse found a way to provoke a demonstration. Showing a bloody purse, he shouted that one of our people, a young lady, had been beaten by the police. At the time, I thought the beating incident might have been fabricated, but it did the trick. And off to the streets we went.

About 50 of us occupied Independence Avenue and blocked traffic around 4:00 pm, at the start of rush hour. Others heard about our actions and joined the demonstration, yelling about police brutality and poverty (our primary issue at the time). The police pulled us out of the street and, in the end, arrested 75 demonstrators. For some strange reason, I was pulled out of the street three times but never arrested.

I remember attending a couple of the Saturday events in Chicago of Jackson’s SCLC Operation Breadbasket, once taking my father, who was up from Alabama. This was just before Jackson left the SCLC and started Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity).

I remember that Jackson started Operation Push in 1984 when he first ran for the presidency. At the 1984 Democratic Convention, Jackson articulated a vision for the party, one that would encompass a “rainbow” coalition across race and class. After the convention, he organized the Rainbow Coalition.

I remember how Jesse tried to align poor whites and poor blacks politically. Poor whites had been split from blacks ever since Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1677.

His campaigns took him to speak to and meet with white farmers in the rural South. Jesse described his introduction to speak to a group of these white farmers in South Carolina from the flat bed on a truck: “The man spat a bit of tobacco juice on the ground and said, ‘Some of y’all said it was foolish to invite Reverend Jackson, and you said if I invited him, he wouldn’t come. Well, I invited him. And he came. Here he is, Reverend Jackson.”

I remember that Jackson’s political standing took a hit in 1984 after a revelation that he had used a racist slur in what he thought was a private conversation. He had referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” with “Hymie” being a racist name for Jews. He later apologized, but much of the damage was done.

I remember that his next major foe was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which was founded in 1985 by Democratic operative Al From and such Democratic leaders as Governors Chuck Robb (Virginia), Bruce Babbitt (Arizona), and Lawton Chiles (Florida), and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia.

Bill Clinton became chair of the DLC in 1989. Among its founding arguments was that the Democratic Party should shift away from its liberal orientation that had formed in the 1960’s and 1970’s. To do that, the DLC wrested control of the Democratic Party from liberal leaders such as Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson.

The break from the liberal faction was serious. I remember that in April of 1991, the DLC held a major conference in Cleveland, Ohio, and did not invite Cuomo or Jackson. Jackson came anyway but was not permitted to speak.

During his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton used the occasion of an appearance at the annual meeting of Operation PUSH to underscore his tilt to the right by criticizing Sister Souljah, the fiery hip-hop artist and activist, who had spoken the day before. Jackson apparently forgave Clinton for that indignity and became an advisor during Clinton’s presidency.

Elected president in 1992, Bill Clinton proceeded to govern from a more conservative position than Democrats had for many years. Clinton had run for the presidency on an anti-welfare platform and had praised Charles Murray’s radically racist ideas. In the book The Bell Curve, Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued that social welfare programs do not work and that the reason is that minorities have low IQs and cannot be helped to improve.

In 1996, Charles Murray’s long campaign to end welfare for single mothers paid off when President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, essentially killing traditional welfare programs with a specific emphasis on cutting welfare for poor families with children. As a result, today, single mothers in America have the least social welfare support in the developed world. Also, extreme poverty doubled in the next 15 years.

Bill Clinton caused the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Although he did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs, he escalated each beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible.

With the fallout from the Hymie incident and Clinton leading the Democratic Party in a more conservative direction, the rainbow coalition Jackson had championed as a cornerstone of the party lost its footing.

I also remember Jesse Jackson and Operation PUSH being a leading beacon during the lean years for civil rights activism between the end of the Black Power Movement in the mid-19970s and the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s.

I remember Jesse raising the spirits of African American and other youth with his admonishment that “You are somebody!” and thinking that he seemed to have spent some time in my mother’s household when I was a youth. She repeatedly told us, “You are somebody.”

Jesse showed us the way. And then there was President Barack Obama, and then Vice President Kamala Harris. Maybe someday we will embrace Jackson’s rainbow coalition more fully.