by Joy-Ann Reid
Nevertheless, as he toured the country holding voter registration rallies, “Run Jesse Run!”—an exhortation originating from the pews of a small southern church—became a familiar refrain. In late October, Jackson taped an appearance on 60 Minutes with reporter Mike Wallace and confirmed his intention to run. When Jackson spoke at Morehouse College the day after the interview aired, he was introduced as a presidential candidate and received a thunderous reception. Four days later, in Washington, he officially announced he was running for president in 1984.
For a generation of young, liberal activists, Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign was the most exciting thing happening in America. For the Democratic Party, Jackson’s presidential bid presented a string of uncomfortable challenges. Robust enthusiasm among black voters was key to the party’s national prospects and to leading candidate Mondale’s hope of unseating Ronald Reagan, whose approval ratings had recently rebounded. But Jackson, who brought with him an agenda that had sent white voters first to Nixon, and then to Reagan, was preventing Mondale from having any chance of getting the black voters he needed to win in 1984. The party faced a dilemma because it could neither accommodate Jackson nor reject him.
Walter Mondale’s deal brokering that set aside the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the 1964 Democratic Convention, as well as his backing of Richard Daley over Harold Washington, continued to rankle Chicago’s black political elite, putting Jackson’s full and enthusiastic support of the ticket in question. Mondale, a longtime ally of the civil rights movement, was not without strong backers in the black political establishment, most of whom dismissed the Jackson campaign as an absurdity when the country was still wrangling over a holiday honoring Dr. King, which had been introduced and defeated by every Congress since a bill was introduced in 1968. Even after millions of petition signatures and mass rallies, including one that August that attracted two hundred thousand people to the National Mall for the twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington, and a song by Stevie Wonder, the bill was filibustered by Senator Jesse Helms in October 1983, the same month Jackson announced his presidential bid.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus also had no interest in Jackson’s symbolic runs for president when Reaganomics was cutting into the heart of their districts. Symbolism was a luxury too extravagant for their constituents to afford. As Detroit mayor Coleman Young put it at the time, the priority for the black political establishment was not electing one of their own to the White House, it was beating Ronald Reagan.
Still, black audiences flocked to Jackson’s campaign as it barreled across the South, raising money through “love offerings” at church appearances to pay for that night’s hotel rooms and the gas to get the campaign bus to the next stop. Jackson focused on two main issues: freedom for Nelson Mandela and black South Africans, as well as the rebuilding of infrastructure and eradication of poverty at home.
The Jackson campaign never thought they would beat Ronald Reagan, or even Walter Mondale, but they believed they were offering much more than a symbolic balm for the souls of black folk. The campaign surmised that if Jackson could build enough momentum, register enough voters, and claim enough delegates, he could be a force at the Democratic convention, winning important concessions in the platform. They even thought they could take away enough of Mondale’s African American base to allow a more conservative candidate like Ohio senator John Glenn to emerge, forcing liberal Democrats to join with their camp to deny Glenn the nomination. (Glenn would wind up being a nonfactor in the primaries, while Colorado senator Gary Hart garnered major attention with his rebuke of Mondale’s New Deal–era politics and his disdain for the politics of Jesse Jackson, whom he criticized for a multitude of sins, including what Hart and others viewed as Jackson’s bias against the state of Israel.)
In January 1984, Jackson had breakfast with a black Washington Post reporter, Milton Coleman, who recalled Jackson saying, “Let’s talk black talk,” before launching into a tirade about the fixation of liberal Jewish voters and donors in New York—a key part of the Democratic base—with Israel. “That’s all Hymie wants to talk about, is Israel; every time you go to Hymietown, that’s all they want to talk about,” Jackson said, in what he must have thought was a “brother-to-brother” chat.
Coleman recounted the conversation to a colleague who was writing a piece about Jackson’s fraught relationship with the Jewish community, dating back to his public embrace of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, and his persistent advocacy for an independent Palestinian state.
When Jackson’s remark appeared in print, he first denied it—which was followed by a hearty defense from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who denounced Coleman and even seemed to threaten his life. But by February, Jackson admitted using the slur, issuing an emotional apology at a Manchester, New Hampshire, synagogue. But the damage was done.
Jackson’s prospects fizzled, and he finished well behind Mondale and Hart in the Democratic primaries, winning just two states: Louisiana and his home state of South Carolina, plus the District of Columbia. Jackson had garnered more than 3 million votes and 18 percent of the popular tally, however, taking 466 delegates into the convention—just over a third of Hart’s haul. Mondale easily won the nomination with nearly 2,200 delegates.
Jackson would have the chance to redeem himself at the convention in San Francisco, where he was slated to speak after New York governor Mario Cuomo, who articulated, at long last, a fulsome defense of his party’s progressive legacy, which had been marginalized since the end of the Johnson era. “Do not forget that this entire nation has profited by these progressive principles,” Cuomo told those assembled. “They helped lift up generations to the middle class and higher; that they gave us a chance to work, to go to college, to raise a family, to own a house, to be secure in our old age and, before that, to reach heights that our own parents would not have dared dream of.”
On the evening before, Jackson and senior members of his campaign met in House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s hotel suite, where Mondale’s campaign manager, Bob Beckel, asked Jackson to join him on the balcony. Beckel pressed Jackson for a general idea of what he planned to say, emphasizing how important his words would be to Mondale, the party, and the country. Would Jackson do his utmost to encourage the full measure of African American support for the Democratic ticket, to which Mondale had added a woman, Geraldine Ferraro of New York? Or would he hold back?
“Beckel,” Jackson said, “tomorrow night you’re either gonna be a champ, a chimp, or a chump. But you’re not going to know until tomorrow night.”
After Cuomo finished, Jackson struck an inclusive tone. “Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” he said. “America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.”
Jackson touted the country’s ending its “apartheid laws” and its achievements in voting rights. For the first time in a national convention address, he wove gays and lesbians into the “American quilt,” alongside “the white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, [and] the old.”
By the time he wrapped up his speech, at nearly midnight, more than 33 million Americans had tuned in, and rousing applause and tears filled the convention hall. For African Americans and liberals who had longed to hear a message of redemption and national unity preached again from a Democratic platform, they were tears of joy. For many in the Democratic Party establishment, there were tears of relief.
In November, President Reagan was reelected, handing the Democrats a decisive defeat. But Jackson had proven that his candidacy was no novelty, and he prepared to run again in 1988.
Jackson ha
d assembled a robust new team: Alexis Herman, who’d managed the convention floor for Jackson in 1984; Lavonia Perryman and Minyon Moore, of Operation PUSH in Detroit and Chicago; Jerry Austin, a veteran Democratic operative from the Bronx, as national campaign manager; Harold Ickes, whose father had been Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior; and a talented union organizer from New York named Patrick Gaspard. Jackson moved his campaign headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Chicago and brought on Dr. Leon Finney, a longtime organizer and the head of the Woodlawn Organization, as his national finance chair.
Finney’s grandfather, T. J. Huddleston, had built a family fortune on thousands of acres of land and twenty-seven funeral homes across Mississippi, while founding the Central Burial Association. His first cousin, Mike Espy, had in 1986 been elected the first black congressman from the state. Through Finney, Jackson gained access to the Hyde Park network of black business, civic, and labor leaders who had helped elect Harold Washington mayor in 1983. Finney had turned down Jackson’s entreaties in 1984, but determined by 1988 that Jackson’s campaign could do some good for black Americans.
The uninspiring Democratic field—Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, Senators Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee, Paul Simon of Illinois, Joe Biden of Delaware, and Gary Hart in a second bid from Colorado that was destined to end in sexual scandal; plus Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt and former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt—was derided by some in the media, after the brief entrance of Colorado congresswoman Patricia Schroe-der, as “Snow White and the seven dwarves.” With no clear front-runner, and no marquee name on the ballot, Jackson’s large campaign crowds and vibrant speeches were given notice.
The campaign was raising millions of dollars through the mail. Weeks into his job, Finney opened a closet at campaign headquarters in Chicago and discovered bags full of unopened envelopes. When the staff began to unseal them, they found money—lots of it—stuffed inside. The staff had ignored the mail in pursuit of more conventional fund-raising.
On Super Tuesday, a set of contests heavily concentrated in the South, Jackson won five primaries—as many as Gore and one fewer than Michael Dukakis. This was followed by a surprise March 26 victory for Jackson in Michigan, even without the endorsement of the African American mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young. This briefly earned Jackson the status of front-runner and the party’s full attention.
Jackson broadened his message to appeal to a wider swath of liberal voices, earning an endorsement from The Nation magazine, which called his candidacy “a new civil rights movement with an added dimension of economic justice deriving in spirit from the last campaigns of Martin Luther King Jr. with the black working poor.”
The forty-six-year-old’s stump speech refrain, “It’s our time!” didn’t “just mean African American issues,” one former campaign aide recalled. “He was the Left’s standard-bearer in the race. If you were on that campaign, you’d fly to places like Medford, Oregon, and you’d think, ‘There’s not a single black person in this town. How am I gonna pull together a rally for Jesse?’ And two days later there’d be twenty thousand white folks. White folks in overalls, Vietnam vets showing up and saying he was the only one speaking to their sense of not being part of the middle class American dream.”
The excitement led New York Times columnist R. W. Apple in April to declare 1988 “the Year of Jackson—the year when, for the first time in American history, a black made a serious bid for the White House and was taken seriously by the electorate.”
And this time, Jackson had the support of the black elite as well, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus; much of the civil rights movement’s old guard, who some Jackson staffers suspected feared being left behind by their constituents; and the national black press.
“We used the same structure that we had for the civil rights movement to drive Jesse’s campaign,” Finney said. “Black business, black churches across the U.S. . . . Ebony magazine, Jet magazine . . . Black radio carried our message. The black newspapers carried our message. And black folk were ready to believe in something. They were ready to dream. We had elected out of the city of Chicago the first black mayor. These black folk thought they could do anything. Even elect a black president.”
In the end, Jackson won 6.6 million votes, double his total in 1984 and nearly 30 percent of the popular vote. He’d won nearly as many votes as Walter Mondale had in the 1984 primaries, and attracted twice as many white voters as he had four years earlier: more than 2 million according to a June 1988 analysis in the New York Times. Jackson, with more than 1,200 delegates, finished a strong second to Dukakis, whose base of immigrant Catholics and Jewish voters helped him secure the nomination with 9.7 million votes. But Dukakis performed dismally with black voters, who cast just 200,000 ballots for him, while Jackson’s take consisted of two-thirds African Americans. Where in 1984 he had captured 77 percent of African American primary votes, Jackson now commanded 92 percent, a figure achieved by no one except LBJ.
By the time the Democratic National Convention convened in Atlanta on July 18, Jackson had won eleven contests: the Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico, Virginia, and District of Columbia primaries, and the caucuses in Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina, and Vermont, and finished second in another thirty-three. He’d edged out Dukakis 35 percent to 31 percent in the Alaska caucuses and won the Texas local conventions (despite losing the Texas primary) and garnered 1,023 delegates to Gore’s 374, and just 769 fewer than the nominee. When the final tally was called, after most candidates withdrew and threw their delegates to Dukakis, Jackson ended his campaign with 1,219 pledged delegates to Dukakis’s 2,877, a final margin of victory for Dukakis of 70 versus 30 percent for Jackson, a larger percentage than any black candidate had ever received—or perhaps even hoped to receive—in a presidential nominating contest.
Hendrik Hertzberg, a veteran of the Carter administration, proclaimed that the results placed Jackson in the tripartite pantheon of black leaders with Martin Luther King Jr. and Booker T. Washington. And at a breakfast in Atlanta the day after the convention, onetime rival Andrew Young rose to speak, raised his glass to Jackson, and told him, “Jesse, you are now the moral leader of our country.”
It wouldn’t last.
CHAPTER 3
The Third Way
We have got to have a message that touches everybody, that makes sense to everybody, that goes beyond the stale orthodoxies of left and right, one that resonates with the real concerns of ordinary Americans, with their hopes and their fears.
—Bill Clinton, address to the Democratic Leadership Council, May 1991
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SHIFTED ITS focus from accommodating Jesse Jackson and taking advantage of how much he had grown the African American base to figuring out ways they could marginalize him.
In 1984 and 1988, Jackson brought in more than 3 million new voters. Heavily concentrated in the South, the gains helped Democrats retake the U.S. Senate in 1986. His presidential campaigns cemented his role as the dominant civil rights leader of his era and made him a political celebrity (he even hosted NBC’s Saturday Night Live in the closing weeks of the 1984 campaign). He was black America’s preeminent national figure. But in the eyes of many leading Democrats, Jackson had wielded his triumphs like a sword, which hung over the party and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, its 1988 nominee.
Before the July convention, Jackson openly and pointedly sought the vice presidency, and when Dukakis eventually chose Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen instead, Jackson’s reaction seemed less than gracious, even to his friends. For some Jackson seemed to squander his triumph in the primary in a fit of pique, nursing his jilted status rather than pouring his energy into helping the hapless Massachusetts governor give life to his flagging campaign.
The 1988 election ended with a whimper, as Michael Dukakis threw away an early 17-point lead over Vice President George H. W. Bush. He was battered by his own stumbles as well as a relentless,
race-tinged crusade by the Bush campaign that featured the grainy, menacing image of a black felon, Willie Horton, who had raped and assaulted a white couple while out of prison on furlough in Massachusetts, a program the governor inherited. But the Bush campaign, including campaign manager Lee Atwater and chief media strategist Roger Ailes, made good on its vow to make Horton a household name.
The tactic emerged from a series of focus groups with Reagan Democrats, through which the Bush campaign discovered that white voters responded to the kind of “tough on crime” messaging and racial scare-mongering that had been so effective in the Nixon era. The revived campaign model pricked at white America’s deepest fears about street crime, as the crack cocaine epidemic continued to course through the arteries of major cities. Reagan’s “welfare queen” was swapped out for the “Ubiquitous Black Thug.” TV ads paid for by “independent expenditures” slid through the loopholes in post-Watergate laws, allowing millions of dollars to flood into elections without leaving a trace on the official campaign. Voter turnout reached a record low, and black voters, deflated and feeling that Jackson had been pushed aside, largely stayed home, too.
Democratic leaders saw a clear message: Even the most energetic campaign by a black liberal like Jackson couldn’t reverse the track record of the past twenty-four years, which had been interrupted only once, in 1976, when Jimmy Carter ran to the right of Lyndon Johnson’s legacy. Now, after the failure of Michael Dukakis, a liberal candidate from the Northeast, the core group of mainly southern and western senators and governors who focused on recapturing the White House saw little reason to court and solicit Jackson as an endorser in 1992, the way Mondale and Dukakis had felt they had to do. Instead party leaders had every incentive to view Jackson as a fulcrum, against whom the Democratic candidate could pivot toward working-class white voters.