Our first encounter with Jesse Jackson was at a corporate annual meeting in Chicago in the early 1980s. He rose to make what was already his signature pitch for companies to contribute to his political group to make amends for the racial injustices that led to inequality. That theme and his considerable rhetorical gifts would make him a national political figure by the end of the 1980s and one of the most influential Democratic power brokers of his era.
Rev Jesse Jackson died at 84 (AP)
Jackson, who died Tuesday at age 84, was a talented orator and political organizer who learned how to strike powerful moral notes as a young participant in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. He used the legal victories of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders to become one of the most significant black leaders of his generation.
He never held a major political office, but his two runs for President, in 1984 and 1988, made his national mark and mobilized black voters and the young as part of his Rainbow Coalition. He lost the Democratic Party nomination in 1988 to Michael Dukakis, but his stirring speech at the party convention that year had more than a few Democrats wondering if they had nominated the right man.
Less admirable was Jackson’s habit of shaking down businesses for contributions to his social and political outfit, Operation PUSH. He’d attack a business using racial demagoguery, which he would cease when the business paid up. This was less about racial justice than mercenary politics. Jackson also suffered politically from his reference to New York as “Hymietown” because it was home to so many Jews.
Jackson was a man of the left on most policies, but his politics were also more complicated. His desire for government to do more for minorities and the downtrodden was mixed with calls for aspiration and more opportunity that are too often missing from today’s progressives. “Capitalism without capital is just an ism,” he sometimes said, as he understood the importance of economic mobility.
He shared many of the optimistic sentiments, if not the policy convictions, of the late Republican supply-sider Jack Kemp. We’ve often wondered how Jackson might have fared had his political message been more centrist and unifying, like that of candidate Barack Obama in 2004 and 2008 (as opposed to how Mr. Obama governed as President).
Perhaps Jackson’s greatest legacy is that he proved the success of the civil-rights movement in opening political doors that were shut for too long to black Americans. His own life—rising from the segregated South of Jim Crow to the boardrooms of business and backrooms of politics—showed how far America had finally come in fulfilling the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are created equal.
Many blacks were inspired by his campaigns less because of his ideology than because of his symbolic demonstration that a black candidate could aspire to be President, and come close to winning a party nomination. In that sense he really did pave the way for Mr. Obama, who was able to make it to the White House.
