Tribune for Race and Class
Unlike his mentor, Martin Luther King, and unlike some other leaders of the civil rights movement—A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer—Jesse Jackson was never (at least, never proclaimed himself) a democratic socialist. Nevertheless, throughout his long career, Jackson, who died today at age 84, advanced perspectives and interests that were effectively democratic socialist. Indeed, during the Reagan years, when he twice (1984 and 1988) entered the Democrats’ presidential primaries, winning states and amassing millions of votes, he was the nation’s only truly prominent public figure who championed—eloquently and forcefully—America’s multiracial working class.
Like Walt Whitman, Jackson contained multitudes, at once opposing corporate power and seeking funding for his projects from some of those very same corporations. But before there was Bernie, there was Jesse—in the spirit of Tom Joad, showing up seemingly every time workers battled for a better deal on the job and a more just social order. Nobody fused the perspectives of race and class, nor battled more consistently for the claims of both, than Jackson.
He was literally at his mentor’s side when King was murdered in Memphis, to which King had come to help the city’s almost entirely Black sanitation workers win a strike for union recognition and dignity on the job, a strike whose slogan was “I Am a Man.” Jackson carried with him that inextricable linkage of racial and economic justice, for which King gave his life, into his subsequent half-century of activism. He shined a light on jobs increasingly performed by minority and immigrant workers—janitors, hospital orderlies, home care workers—who were not yet on the nation’s radar during his presidential campaigns. “They take the early bus,” he would say, documenting the typical day of workers whose shifts began at 6 a.m. He would summon the press covering his campaign to those bus stops at those ungodly hours. Just making those workers visible—visibly “a man” and visibly “a woman”—was a major part of his mission.
He marched with striking coal miners in southwest Virginia, with striking janitors outside the office towers in L.A.’s Century City. He spoke at rallies for Yale’s cafeteria workers and to Solidarity Day’s massive crowds on the National Mall. He traveled to Japan to publicly shame its automakers for their discrimination against Blacks and Hispanics, and discrimination against and harassment of women, in their U.S. auto plants.
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My friend Jo-Ann Mort was the communications director for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers (ACTWU) in the late 1980s and ’90s, when the union was organizing workers in Southern textile plants. “Jesse never said no to any request we made to him,” she recalls. She particularly remembers one four-day swing that Jackson and union leaders made to five towns in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama where the union had organizing campaigns going on. Jackson drew large and enraptured crowds to the rallies, where organizers for both his Rainbow Coalition and the union had attendees sign enrollment cards. ACTWU, of course, was very much a multiracial union, which Jackson addressed by telling the crowds that “the only color the companies care about is green.”
One town he visited was so small and isolated that the small plane carrying Jackson and ACTWU organizers had to land in an open field (there were no nearby airports). “This is a town,” Jackson told Jo-Ann, “that the [civil rights] movement passed by.” Jackson made sure that that town, and the others on the itinerary, would be bypassed no longer: At every stop, he’d speak at high school football fields, day care centers, churches; proselytizing was his love, his mission, his life.
He usually ended his talks with a charge to his listeners to “keep hope alive.” In the decades between the decline of the ’60s left and the rise of the current left (whose beginning might date to the Occupy movement of 2011), that wasn’t mere rhetoric; it was a political necessity. Through the heyday of neoliberalism, Jackson did as much if not more than anyone else to keep the values of the 1960s and 1930s lefts alive enough to help inform their current successor. That’s no small legacy.
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