Requiescat in Pace: Jesse Louis Jackson AD1941-2026
Reverend Jesse Jackson, political organizer and the leading engineer of post-Jim Crow African American economic empowerment, has passed away aged 84. What racial peace Americans had after 1968 is due in large part to the efforts of Jackson to translate the end of the segregation-regime into tangible inclusion. As he reportedly said in response to the riots of 1968, “It’s not Black pride to burn down a Black man’s store.”
Jesse Jackson was America’s best anti-provocateur. And misunderstood by his opponents.
To the casual observer, Jackson was a master political performer—a master of the rhythmic cadence, a politician who spoke with the power of a preacher. But to understand the relative social calm that defined the decades between the Reagan administration and the first Obama term, one must look past the rhetoric to the architecture. Jackson engineered an economic settlement that made America a more hopeful place before the 2008 financial crisis.
Jackson’s heyday was when the Civil Rights protester became the market stakeholder, and when pluralism reigned as a natural outgrowth of American ethnic diversity. Jackson did this by knowing it was time for something new after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Poor People’s Campaign without their founder and leader. The SCLC would continue to exist, but Jackson perceived that the era of the old protest movement was over. After disagreements with MLK’s successor at the SCLC, Jackson was suspended from the organization and resigned to form his own group in Chicago: Operation PUSH, meaning People United to Save Humanity. Jackson intended to build a multi-ethnic coalition, but this would require building up Black America in the marketplace. Black radicals did not like Jackson’s appropriation of their term “Rainbow Coalition” for his reformist rather than revolutionary agenda. Jackson won that round by trademarking the term and creating a second organization that he would later merge with PUSH.
Rev. Jackson understood that if you did not want riots, you needed people to have jobs and a place in the economy, and Jackson went directly to corporate America with the principle of reciprocity.
The old protests were replaced by negotiated partnerships where African Americans had purchasing power as demonstrated by his 1981 boycott of Coca-Cola which led to a pledge by Coke include more Black distributors and banks in its operations, and hire more African Americans for management positions including as a member of the corporate board. By securing multi-million-dollar agreements with firms, he did not simply ask for jobs; he mandated the integration of the American supply chain. This forced the normalization of Black presence in the C-suite and the boardroom. By the 1990s, this integration had created the beginnings of a robust, property-owning professional class with a vested interest in the stability of the American market, and a more competitive workforce as non-Blacks also took advantage of the new openness in hiring.
With new income, America’s suburbs became more integrated; more middle-class kids coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s experienced a naturally integrated childhood.
Jackson was often the first Black leader to speak out on major shifts in American life, and at a time when the pro-life/anti-abortion movement was primarily a Catholic activist concern, Jesse Jackson was the most prominent Protestant leader to immediately oppose Roe v. Wade as an attack on the dignity of human life.
The question of “life” is The Question of the 20th century. Race and poverty are dimensions of the life question, but discussions about abortion have brought the issue into focus in a much sharper way. How we will respect and understand the nature of life itself is the over-riding moral issue, not of the Black race, but of the human race.
The question of abortion confronts me in several different ways. First, although I do not profess to be a biologist, I have studied biology and know something about life from the point of view of the natural sciences. Second, I am a minister of the Gospel and therefore, feel that abortion has a religious and moral dimension that I must consider.
Third, I was born out of wedlock (and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor) and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me. From my perspective, human life is the highest good, the summum bonum . Human life itself is the highest human good and God is the supreme good because He is the giver of life. That is my philosophy. Everything I do proceeds from that religious and philosophical premise. — Jesse Jackson, from “How we respect life is the over-riding moral issue” written in 1977
Jackson’s framing of abortion as a war on the poor was a potent weapon for the nascent pro-life movement; however, there would be no grand alliance. Right-wing White Americans, often led by Southerners, chose alienation from African Americans. Commentary in outlets like The Wall Street Journal attacked Jackson as a “shakedown artist.” By framing his moral covenants and accords with corporate America as extortion, right-wing intellectuals effectively banished their most potent potential Black ally.
Prior to running for president in 1984, Jackson was anti-violence, pro-life, and pro-education, and still he was vilified because he insisted on economic inclusion and dignity for African Americans, which is what the white right-wing opposed. In a standard economic negotiation, two partners usually enter the room acknowledging each other’s right to exist in the market. For Jackson, this meant the White-corporate seller acknowledging the Black buyer’s right to negotiate. To classify this as a shakedown was a mistake as it deliberately closed-off discussion of alternative pathways to economic inclusion and violated the free-market principle that the buyer always has agency. Jackson never threatened violence or unrest; in fact, he was the man you called in to keep such things at bay, which is why Black radicals despised him.
Because this failure to recruit, Jackson’s political legacy was in how he transformed the Democratic Party apparatus and as the party that was his only avenue became pro-choice, he soften his anti-abortion stance and adopted the “personally pro-life, pro-choice regarding the government” stance that many associate with the Democratic Party’s Catholic politicians. A great counterfactual of history is the “what-if” of how things could have changed if Jesse Jackson’s drive to integrate Black Americans in to capitalist America had been embraced by the White right-wing. As it was Jackson had a massive impact on America through the Democratic Party.
His 1984 and 1988 campaigns for president of the United States were outsider moves that shook the establishment. As long as “winner-take-all” systems were the norm in the presidential primaries, minority voting blocs would remain mathematically irrelevant; however, by coming in second place in 1988, Jackson had the influence to push the Democrats to adopt proportional representation. This structural overhaul provided a path for a popular candidate like Barack Obama to win delegates in big-state races won by Hillary Clinton. Under the old winner-take-all rules, Obama might have lost the delegate count and the nomination while winning the popular vote. Jackson’s work made it possible.
As America diversified through immigration in the 1980s and 1990s, few immigrants from outside of Europe understood that their smoother inclusion in America was paved by Jackson’s efforts that made the default American identity no longer “White” but simply a good and diligent citizen that everyone could aspire to be, and thrive.
In the 21st century Jackson became a less important figure because as Black Americans became more comfortably middle-class his work was no longer needed, it appeared he had worked himself out of a job. Scandals involving his own extramarital affair and out-of-wedlock child tarnished his image. Still he came when needed, but America suffered from his diminished standing.
In 2014, Jackson traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown. Once again he was a fireman. “You can reshape an iron while it’s hot, but don’t destroy yourself in the process. Don’t self-destruct.” He told people to plan, to activate, to work, but not to riot. He was booed by a younger generation of activists who viewed his broker-logic as an outdated relic, and right-wing White attacks on Jackson helped the cause of the radicals, because if GOP and the “conservatives” so totally misunderstood him what was the point?
In what some have derisively called the “Summer of Floyd” during the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests, and looting after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, again Jackson stood athwart a riot and yelled stop!
This act of pillaging, robbing & looting in Chicago was humiliating, embarrassing & morally wrong. It must not be associated with our quest for social justice and equality. —Twitter statement from Jesse Jackson, August 2020
The new untried BLM activists told him to keep his opinions to himself, and that is a pity. The anti-elder, and anti-organized BLM movement achieved no tangible wins regarding police reform of public safety. In the almost six-years since, Americans, without knowing it perhaps, have missed the world Jesse Jackson helped create. It can return, better and stronger, if we learn the lessons of his successes and our mistakes.
Keep Hope Alive.
Requiescat in Pace
You met Rev. Jackson at Memphis Peabody Hotel in 1986 and he came over to the table and you held your hand out shake his. You were only 3. Rev.Jackso. was impressed, he ask could if he take you shake others people hands and you did! I was walking close. He did then said this young man will be president some day. That when I took you. Even so your articles share things about him I didn't. Thank you!