Racial Justice

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… “There has developed among many, for sure, a kind of attitudinal air-barrier of cynicism” around Jackson, Marshall Frady, a journalist and the author of Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, once said. “Part of it is, no doubt, a reflection of the abiding, if not steadily deepening, racial schism in the country since the ’60s.” Jackson was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest lieutenants; he came of age when many considered racial injustice history, an issue the country had already dealt with. He reminded Americans that King’s dream had not yet come, and that created for him enemies. In hindsight, it seems strange that people would assume that the effects of centuries of slavery and segregation would be entirely wiped away in fewer than two decades. Jackson had grown up in poverty in the shadow of Jim Crow segregation; it must have seemed even more absurd to him….

Yet this caricature of Jackson as an anti-white, anti-Semitic demagogue never reflected the man. The entire point of Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition,” his vision of Americans from all backgrounds coming together for social justice, was overcoming such differences. Jackson’s political vision was always inclusive, always multiracial, and always opposed to bigotry and prejudice of all kinds, even if the man himself sometimes fell short.

For one thing, Jackson’s egalitarianism and support for a strong welfare state—including universal health care—did not contradict his emphasis on personal responsibility and the importance of the Church in Americans’ lives. As Frady notes, the South Carolina reverend was constantly hammering on these conservative-friendly themes, long before they became part of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns…

Many obituaries have emphasized Jackson’s hunger for publicity. He was, indeed, no wallflower. But neither did he simply pose for the cameras. Jackson’s decades of activism demonstrated that he was sincere about his vision. When workers were striking, Jackson was there. When it was unpopular to support LGBTQ rights, Jackson did so anyway. When both conservatives and liberals were outraged over illegal immigration, Jackson insisted on mercy and understanding for the undocumented. Despite the “hymie” incident, Jackson never stopped condemning the evils of anti-Semitism, even as he supported Palestinian rights and statehood. Before Pat Buchanan or Donald Trump ran for president, Jackson was condemning “American multinationals” who “hire repressed labor abroad and fire free labor at home.”

The critics who caricatured him did not understand this sincerity—or perhaps they understood it far too well. His commitment to the people he once described as “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised,” was real, and he dedicated his life to it…

Democratic leaders credited Jackson’s work registering Black voters with making otherwise-difficult gains in the wilderness of the Reagan era. He was a genuinely transformative figure, inspiring not just a generation of Black voters but Black officeholders, helping usher in an era of Black self-determination that eclipsed the previous peak during Reconstruction a century earlier. His exhortation to “keep hope alive” in an era of backlash was precisely what he did. Frady quotes former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown calling Jackson “the Jackie Robinson of American politics,” who would “spawn a whole lot of Little Leaguers in many cities and counties that you and I will never hear about.” That was, we now know, an understatement…

i think jesse jackson was one of the most important american political figures of the post-war era and i think that his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the democratic nomination still have a great deal to teach about forging a path to a more egalitarian world. RIP.

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 17, 2026 at 8:36 AM

i wrote this last year about jackson and mamdani www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/o…

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 17, 2026 at 8:36 AM

and i wrote this a decade ago about jackson as the model response to trump-style politics www.slate.com/articles/new…

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 17, 2026 at 8:36 AM

Jesse Jackson Knew Where We Were Headed share.google/Qn9GsxLG4SFQ…

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— C.S. Lang (@cslpoetry.bsky.social) February 17, 2026 at 10:54 PM

Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire:

… Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money does a terrific job summarizing the long sweep of Jackson’s public career, including its very problematic episodes. (Among other things, Jackson was late to reproductive freedom, probably a vestige of his early religious education. But he got there, finally.) He even flirted with the Republicans for a spell. Once he moved into presidential politics, however, he proved to be the force that scared the Democratic party straight. His victory in Michigan in 1988 went off like a bomb. One of the party’s great blunders in the 2000 recount blood fight in Florida was the decision early on by Al Gore’s people to ask Jackson to cease agitating in Palm Beach County.

Nobody saw more clearly the direction in which the Republican party was heading than Jesse Jackson did, and nobody saw more clearly the eventual public policy failures of Democrats seeking to carve off conservative voters who already were in the process of losing their minds. Donald Trump is the creature at the end of that road, and Jesse Jackson, who passed away Tuesday morning, saw that before many allegedly shrewd political minds did. Sail on, Reverend. You were … somebody.

Rev. Jesse Jackson showed up for the family of Vincent Chin and Asian Americans when few others would.

His Rainbow Coalition showed us the way to solidarity.

May he rest in peace. pic.twitter.com/mRAy2HWE7p

— Chuck Park (@chuckforqueens) February 17, 2026

Financial columnist Michelle Singletary, at the Washington Post — gift link.

How the Rev. Jesse Jackson taught me to keep hope alive www.washingtonpost.com/business/202…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) February 18, 2026 at 8:28 AM

How Jesse Jackson Took King’s Civil Rights Movement to Company Doorsteps
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/u…

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— Mike Walker (@newnarrative.bsky.social) February 18, 2026 at 7:06 AM

Gift link

Jesse Jackson's letter of support for the Americans with Disabilities Act via the Dole Archive:
"When the deaf can communicate more freely, through TDD
devices, we all benefit from what they have to say."
dolearchivecollections.ku.edu/collections/…

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— Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social) February 17, 2026 at 10:01 AM

thinking about the conversation I had with Jesse Jackson in 2019:
"The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away. It’s buried right now, but as each generation becomes much more serious, it will be grappled with." www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc…

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— Adam Harris (@adamhsays.com) February 17, 2026 at 7:54 AM

C-SPAN thankfully has posted Jesse's whole 1988 speech at the DNC. Seriously. Go back and watch it and tell me you don't hear so much of what you hear now from folks like AOC, Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RCA…

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— Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social) February 17, 2026 at 8:41 AM