Mother Jones
Jesse Jackson Told Me Why He Really Ran for President
Word of the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson’s death last week transported me back to the summer of 1987, when I was the editor of Mother Jones, and met him in person for the first time at the start of his second campaign for the presidency. One of his generation’s greatest orators, he blended Bible verses and calls for social justice like Dr. King. Invocations of self-affirmation, though, were distinctly Jesse. On Sesame Street he once taught a multiracial group of children to shout: “I AM SOMEBODY.” The son of an impoverished single mother from South Carolina, Jackson was a key figure in the struggle for racial equality by the time he was 23. Two decades later, he turned that slogan on himself by launching an improbable bid to run the country.
If you’d seen him thundering before massive crowds on television or in person during the ’60s and ’70s, as I had, you never forgot his booming baritone and rhythmic wordplay. So when I met him at his headquarters on the South Side of Chicago, Jackson was a familiar figure. At 6’4”, he towered over me, with the bruiser build of his father, a onetime boxer, and broad shoulders of the football player he’d been in college. That was the first impression—larger than life—no surprise. But the sound of his offstage voice was muted and even whispery, hard for my tape recorder to pick up. He was blunt about the business at hand. “What are we doing?” he rasped.
Related
Read Foster's 1987 cover story, "He Thinks He Can Win"
In the weeks ahead, Jackson would prove the most challenging subject for a profile I ever encountered. He had a skeptical squint and used it strategically, with long pauses and silence that telegraphed he wasn’t yet sure this interlocutor was worth his trouble. “That’s not fair! That’s not fair!” he grumbled when pressed on the wisdom of attacking the very media companies whose airwaves he needed to carry his campaign message to voters. “I have an analysis of the role the media play in the power structure of this country. Our press is privately owned by wealthy people who have substantial investments in the world economy. And they have power without accountability. Any publisher can make a political judgment and unleash the hounds. That power is real.” When I asked another question he didn’t like on our way to the airport, he began his reply, took a catnap midway, and roused himself at the terminal to finish—less gruff, without ever losing the thread. As we spent more time together—in town cars; on a flight from San Francisco to New York; and at many events—he seemed to unwrap himself, layer by layer, a little like the pastor portrayed in Purpose, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play more than loosely based on his sometimes tumultuous family life.
Jackson wasn’t the first Black person to mount a nationwide campaign for president. Shirley Chisholm, bold and brilliant, ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972. In 1984, he’d upped the ante, though, earning about 3.3 million votes, nearly one-in-five Democratic primary voters. He outlasted five famous officeholders, including a former nominee for president; an astronaut who became a senator from Ohio; the former governor of Florida; a well-known senator from South Carolina; and Sen. Alan Cranston, a political powerhouse from California. Former Vice President Walter Mondale won the nomination, but got flattened by President Ronald Reagan’s reelection apparatus in the general election.
Jesse Jackson delivers a speech during his 1984 presidential campaign in Chicago. Walter Mondale eventually won the nomination, but got flattened by Ronald Reagan in the general election.David Hume Kennerly/Getty
It still irritated Jackson four years later that his first run should be referred to as a failure, just as he would bristle years later that his second run was also dismissed as a “failed campaign.” The biggest challenge he faced was turning an audacious move into something perceived as plausible. He had never been elected to anything before. (This was Before Times, when a candidate for president thought experience in public office mattered.) With just one Black senator out of 100, the field remained tilted against the very notion of Black eligibility for generations. (Four decades later there are five.) The first primary of the season, then, took place in the realm of the imagination.
Against that backdrop, coverage of his second campaign orbited around speculation about his underlying motivations. Headlines for stories ran along these lines:
JESSE JACKSON
“What Does He Really Want?”
That was the headline we also used at Mother Jones when we put the accompanying story on the cover. “To win,” he kept repeating at campaign events. “Not as in place well, not as in good showing, not as in making a difference! Not nothing like that! As in win. We can win!” He knew his job as a candidate was to deny any doubts, but of course he carried them. Even one of his friends considered the presidential run a vanity project, telling Jackson he had zero chance. (He predicted, accurately, that all the other candidates would coalesce around an elected officeholder when they dropped out.)
“We can win!”
His status as a celebrity proved doubled-edged. Jackson drew high-wattage attention, which kept an underfunded campaign in the news, but celebrity treatment also yielded superficial coverage. On the flight, I watched this dynamic play out, listening as Jackson and his top aide labored over a major address he would give the next day. That speech heralded a set of detailed proposals he called “New Internationalism.” It was anti-protectionist and pro-worker, calling for a new global effort to prevent union-busting worldwide and to punish corporations for divesting in the U.S. He favored a nuclear freeze; reversal of Reagan’s tax cuts for the top 10 percent; revival of New Deal–era Public Works Administration and farm programs; reparations for slavery; a single-payer health care system; a 15 percent cut in military spending; ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; and establishment of a Palestinian state—proposals that also proved ahead of their time.
Our October 1987 cover story by Mother Jones editor Douglas Foster profiled Jesse Jackson as he mounted his 1988 presidential campaign./Mother Jones
After his powerful address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention, he looked spent but reassured that he’d made clear his candidacy was no vanity project. Early the following morning, though, Jackson looked low ebb. A story about Sen. Joe Biden, one of his early primary adversaries, was on the front page of the New York Times and a shorter piece about his appearance at the NAACP convention was buried deep inside the paper. “I gave a major address about the uneven playing field that American workers are forced to play on, caused because multinational corporations have incentives to move capital abroad and no incentives to reinvest, redevelop and retrain workers,” he pointed out. “Yet the coverage was: ‘He came, they cheered, they sang, they prayed, he got rousing applause.’” That experience only deepened his skepticism about the willingness of journalists to treat him fairly.
“To make progress we have to forgive each other, redeem each other, and focus on common ground.”
“Why do you speak so much about the farm crisis?” I asked on the way back to the airport for his flight to Chicago. “Because I know that can turn its back on the family farmer, it’s open season on everybody,” he replied. That led to a kind of meditative free association about what had happened on the campaign trail so far. In Wisconsin, he mused, he’d seen posters for his campaign on porches where the Confederate flag also flew. I must have looked jolted, thinking of the physical attacks he and Dr. King withstood by people waving that flag. The sight of his own face beside the Confederate flag had not unsettled him. “A sense of gratification, a sense of vindication. A sense of joy,” Jackson explained. “To make progress we have to forgive each other, redeem each other, and focus on common ground.”
For a year he kept up the same kind of schedule and ended up earning nearly 7 million votes in 1988, more than twice what he achieved four years earlier, but short of the 8 million to 10 million votes he calculated he would need to become the nominee. His chief adversaries had been white men with distinguished careers in elected office—an eventual majority leader in the House of Representatives, three senators, and Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. (Dukakis was nominated but then lost in a rout to Vice President George H.W. Bush.) Jackson showed up at the nominating convention, looking buoyant and sounding like a victor. He closed his speech there by thundering: “We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive!”
“I know what my job is. It’s to bang on the door. Kick at the door. Bang on the door harder and push harder still. Someday, someone else will walk through it.”
Twenty years later, on election night in November 2008, we stood in Chicago’s Grant Park, waiting for the Obama family to appear so a newly elected president—the first Black chief executive—could claim his victory. Nearby, Reverend Jackson clutched a small American flag and wept unashamedly. Watching him, I was carried back to the weeks we spent together on the campaign trail in 1987. During our final conversation on the road, in an unusually guarded off-the-record moment, Jackson admitted: “I know what my job is. It’s to bang on the door. Kick at the door. Bang on the door harder and push harder still. Someday, someone else will walk through it.”
Many of his contemporaries preceded him in death, too many of them assassinated in their prime. It’s a little miracle that Jackson, the target of so many threats, managed to play such a pivotal role in politics through six decades and survived into his 80s. When I moved to Chicago 20 years ago, it was easy to find an aging Jesse Jackson. If you joined, or reported on, any protest about injustice, odds were that you would bump into him. A rare neurological disease called supranuclear palsy left him wobbly on his feet and nearly mute for years. Critics, as always, considered him a showboat addicted to the limelight. Who cares? He showed up over and over in the right places anyway, even when there was little coverage.
“He was the free-est Black man I ever met,” Deborah Douglas, a Chicago journalist and friend of the family, told me. “And he outlived so many who were gunning to take him down.” For that last decade of his life, Jackson no longer mesmerized crowds with his boyish baritone. Whispers faded to a distant mumble. He marched as far as he could each time, then stood at the edge of the crowd, looking as if he was holding auditions for a successor. Whenever some emerging talent launched into a particularly effective peroration, he marked it with a tight smile and quick nod. Jesse Louis Jackson, still somebody, could see there was a new generation stepping up to speak in his place.