How the Rev. Jesse Jackson transformed American politics

0:00On November 4, 2008, a 67-year-old preacher stood in a massive crowd in a park in Chicago and wept.. America had just elected Barack Obama as its first black president. That was a big deal. And I wish that Dr. King or Meg Evers could have been there just for 30 seconds to see the fruit of their labors. And I thought about them and I just wept. It was tears of joy. That preacher, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, wasn't just witnessing history. He had paved the way for it. After a childhood in segregated South Carolina, Jackson joined the civil rights movement. He became a protege of Martin Luther King Jr.

0:36He witnessed his assassination in Memphis in 1968. You couldn't tell it was a shot. You didn't get a shot. No, until it hit his face. It sounded like a stick of dynamite on a large firecracker. After King's death, Jackson went on to become a giant in the civil rights movement in his own right. With his Rainbow Push coalition, he worked to unite poor and working class Americans of all races in a fight for economic empowerment. You can hear it in his signature chant, heard here on his spoken word album, The Country Preacher. I may be uneducated, but I am somebody. I may be in jail, but I am somebody.

1:16Eventually, Jackson tried to harness that coalition for his own run for office. In 1984, and again in 1988, Jackson sought the Democratic presidential nomination. He lost both times, but in 1988, he won multiple state primaries and some 7 million votes, nearly a third of the ballots cast. His speech at that year's Democratic National Convention imagined America as his grandmother's patchwork quilt. She took pieces of old cloth, patches, wool, silk, gabardine, croker sack, only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn't stay that way very long. They stirred their hands on a strong cord.

1:58She sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. The fight for a better future would take more than any one group, Jackson argued. Farmers, you seek fair prices and you're right, but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is not big enough. Bound together by a common thread, he said, they were more powerful. Blacks and Hispanics, when we fight for civil rights, we are right, but our patch is not big enough. Gays and lesbians, when you fight against discrimination and a cure for AIDS, you are right, but your patch is not thick enough. That message never took Jesse Jackson to the White House, but 20 years later, it would echo on in that victory speech in Chicago.

2:48To reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many, we are one, that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt and those who tell us that we can't, We will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes, we can. Thank you. God bless you. Consider this. Reverend Jesse Jackson has died at age 84. His imprint on American politics endures.

3:22From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

3:33It's Consider This from NPR. Jesse Jackson was a trailblazing figure for black Americans. He also played a big role in shaping the Democratic Party that we know today, which CNN's Abby Phillip explores in her book, A Dream Deferred. I talked to her about Jackson's political legacy. I've been taking in a lot of the obituaries and articles about Reverend Jackson today, and there was one sentence in the New York Times obit that stuck with me, and I was wondering what you make of this framing. Essentially, that Jesse Jackson was the most influential Black figure in the years between Martin Luther King Jr.

4:06and Barack Obama. You think that's the right way to think about it? Yeah, I think that is very much an accurate statement. And in many ways, Jesse Jackson was the bridge between Reverend King and Barack Obama. And he was someone who influenced culture, business, politics, international affairs. and you really can't think of another Black figure who had the reach that Jesse Jackson did for the time that he did. And he was, for decades, one of the most well-known people, forget Black figures, but one of the most well-known people in America. You know, he tries to pick up Martin Luther King's mantle and his failings, his flaws, are on much more display than King's ever were.

4:54He runs for president two times. He comes up short. And yet he still amassed all this power. Like, what's the best way to think about where Jesse Jackson's power came from? Well, that power came from his ability to capture people's attention. He was a master of the attention economy. This is before the internet, before cable news. He knew better than almost anyone else how to get all cameras on him at all times and to get the entire nation practically tuned into his message. And that became his superpower for much of the last 60 years. What drew you to reporting and writing about Jesse Jackson's story, particularly those 1984 and 1988 presidential runs?

5:37Those campaigns are some of the most interesting but little-known campaigns. But when you look under the hood a little bit and you look a little bit more deeply at what happened in the primary, and particularly Jesse Jackson's role in changing his party in those years, what you start to see is the prescience of those campaigns. so much of what Jesse Jackson was running on, the things that he was talking about, the type of politics, the progressive populism, so many of those things were before his time. He was talking about issues like universal healthcare, poverty, hunger, farmers, even this idea of America first, of the fact that he argued that America should spend way more time and resources and way more of its treasure domestically than it did internationally.

6:36And those themes not only became themes that were picked up by Democratic candidates decades later, but also by a Republican candidate in particular, by Donald Trump. And I think that we are in a sort of high watermark for that kind of politics right now. And that's why understanding his legacy matters more than ever. You're so right about the issues. You know, it's like I feel like the shorthand is as Jesse Jackson was kind of this liberal end of the spectrum in those races. And you look and it's like all of this is exactly what mainstream politics is these days. You write in your book about the way that he also cracked open the nuts and bolts of the nominating process in a way that opened up future primaries to outsider candidates.

7:18How do you think specifically his oratory affected politics? You know, he's remembered for these big, soaring convention speeches, but those were conventions where his party ended up losing in a landslide. Like, what was the life of those particular speeches to you? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people regard the 1984 and 1988 Democratic National Convention speeches that he delivered, both of them, to be two of the best convention speeches ever delivered. When I look out at this convention, I see the face of America, red, yellow, brown, black, and white. We're all precious in God's sight, the real rainbow coalition.

8:01And when you look closely at those speeches, they are really a masterclass in a moral framing for American politics that tries to argue to people that there is a common thread, a common theme among all of the people in this nation. And when you think about those speeches and the tradition that they came out of, which is the Black church tradition, it's hard not to see the way in which Barack Obama's great speeches were influenced by that kind of approach to politics. You talked to Jackson for this book. He was a lot older when you sat down with him. He was battling some serious health issues by that point in his life.

8:44What struck you about your conversations and interviews with Jesse Jackson? What struck me actually was the lack of ego in a lot of how he talked about what he did. And when I talked to him about what he was trying to accomplish in these two campaigns, he saw it as moves on a chessboard of trying to move the Democratic Party closer to a form that would allow for a candidate like him to be successful. And even when I asked him about some of the harder parts of his experience, which was the rejection of his candidacy by a lot of Black elites and establishment types, he wasn't judgmental about it.

9:28He wasn't angry. He wasn't bitter. he understood that they had a political calculation that was different from him. As he looked back, I think he kind of sees the arc of his political career as laying the groundwork for all the things that came next, whether it was Barack Obama or even someone like Bernie Sanders and beyond. I think he sees it all as part of the building blocks that he was putting together at that time. That is CNN's Abby Phillip. Her book is titled A Dream Deferred, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. Thanks so much. Thank you. This episode was produced by Erica Ryan and Connor Donovan with audio engineering by Hannah Glovna and Ted Meebane.

10:12It was edited by John Ketchum. Our executive producer is Sammy Ennigan.

10:21It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.