The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s half-century at the DNC: Landmark speeches and presidential bids helped reshape a party

CHICAGO — It was around 11 p.m. on the second night of the 1984 Democratic National Convention when the Rev. Jesse Jackson stepped on the stage inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center and punctuated his place in American history.

With his family seated behind him, he delivered a roughly 50-minute speech to a crowd of delegates — some waving green signs with his name printed in white letters — and millions more watching on television.

“America is not like a blanket: One piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size,” he told them in his unmistakable oratorical style. “America is more like a quilt: Many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. 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, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.”

Jackson’s remarks that July evening became known as his “Rainbow Coalition” speech, considered by academics to be one of the greatest examples of 20th century American political rhetoric. It’s remembered both for its message of social, racial and economic equity — themes that would come to shape the Democratic Party platform — and as being the culmination of a groundbreaking presidential campaign in which the civil rights leader became the first Black person to win a major party’s state primary or caucus, a feat unmatched until Barack Obama in 2008.

Forty years later, Jackson’s adopted home of the last six decades, Chicago, is set to host the DNC next week with another historic first in Kamala Harris’ presidential nomination. Separate tributes are planned to honor the legacy of Jackson’s presidential campaigns and his broader contributions to the Democratic Party.

“Reverend Jesse Jackson paved the way for many of us,” said convention Chair Minyon Moore in an email. A Chicago native, Moore’s extensive political resume includes work on Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign.

“He is a giant in the Civil Rights Movement and embodies the spirit of the more perfect union we strive toward everyday. The Reverend’s legacy isn’t just cemented in the work he’s done, it lives and breathes in each of the lives that he has touched, including mine. His invaluable work has played a key role in propelling us to this historic moment, and his legacy will be reflected in the faces and stories we see on the convention stage.”

Convention organizers are planning to recognize Jackson during the event, though it’s unclear when that will happen and in what form it will take. Jackson, 82, is an Illinois delegate and is expected to be at the United Center, though Parkinson’s disease — he was diagnosed in 2015 — has robbed him, and the public, of his powerful voice.

The day before the convention begins, on Sunday, Jackson will be honored at the Kenwood headquarters of Rainbow/PUSH, the organization he founded and led before his retirement last year.

The event, which comes amid Rainbow/PUSH’s international convention, is sponsored by the coalition and The Nation magazine. It will include speeches from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Maxine Waters and the Rev. Al Sharpton, among others.

“Campaigning as an unapologetic progressive, the Rev. Jesse Jackson reframed, renewed and refashioned U.S. politics with a pair of hard-fought campaigns for the Democratic presidential nominations of 1984 and 1988,” reads an advertisement for the event. “Those campaigns broke new ground, showing that it was possible to leap lines of race, gender, and class to form coalitions for change. Jackson’s presidential runs also brought in several million new voters — especially young and Black American voters — onto the rolls.”

On the way to ’84

The details of Jackson’s rise to prominence as one of the nation’s best known civil rights leaders have been well covered: His childhood in Greenville, South Carolina. His meeting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and being asked by King to run Chicago’s chapter of Operation Breadbasket, an economic justice initiative that Jackson would quickly lead as its national director.

Most are familiar with the iconic photograph of a 26-year-old Jackson standing with King and two other civil rights leaders — Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams — on the balcony of Memphis’ Lorraine Motel the day before King’s assassination.

Some media reports at the time dubbed Jackson as King’s heir apparent. But three years later, Jackson left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that King once led and formed his own organization, People United to Save Humanity, or Operation PUSH (it was later changed from “Save” to “Serve”).

Jackson’s willingness to enter the political world was on display during the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami, where he and Chicago Ald. William Singer successfully ousted an Illinois delegation of 59 people controlled by Mayor Richard J. Daley, arguing that the Daley slate did not reflect the demographics of the voters.

The move delivered a crushing blow to the seemingly all-powerful Chicago machine boss, four years after the national embarrassment of the ’68 convention in Chicago.

The 1972 convention also saw U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to serve in Congress, achieve another first when she became the first Black woman to seek a major party presidential nomination (she finished fourth with 152 delegates).

‘Run Jesse Run!’

Jackson’s son, former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., said the idea for his father’s presidential campaign came, in part, from a visit Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy made to Operation PUSH prior to Reagan’s 1980 election. The soon-to-be president spent 20 minutes speaking with a man he thought was Jackson but was really St. Clair Booker, a family friend and longtime aide.

“I’m convinced,” Jackson Jr. remembered his father telling him after Reagan’s visit, “anybody can be president.”

At the time, Jackson and his organization worked tirelessly on voter registration in Black communities, efforts that many credit with helping propel Harold Washington to become Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983.

Expanding that effort on a national scale further fueled Jackson’s presidential aspirations, particularly during a tour of 11 southern states where he encountered scores of unregistered Black voters — in another famous Jackson speech from 1984, he contrasted Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory totals in several states with the number of unregistered Black, Hispanic and college student voters in those states, which he referred to as “rocks just laying around.”

“One of the things that Rev. Jackson did that’s still underappreciated was to get Black people to understand that we could be the margin of victory,” said Ron Daniels, who worked as Jackson’s deputy campaign manager in 1988. “And he would time and time again create that sense of possibilities, of hope and promise, that if we would just organize ourselves, mobilize and get engaged, we can in fact make change.”

In a 2019 interview, Jackson said he first approached other Black leaders about running for president before deciding to do so himself when they would not. The campaign, he said in the interview, began “as a protest really, resisting how liberals were taking us for granted and dismissing us and marginalizing us in the process.”

Jackson hit the campaign trail to crowds yelling “run Jesse run,” a refrain he would adopt as his campaign slogan.

“People today don’t understand how young and vibrant and athletic and charismatic Jesse Jackson was on the podium,” said Stephen Lucas, professor emeritus of rhetoric, politics and culture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-author of “Words of a Century: The Top 100 American Speeches, 1900-1999.”

Jackson “wasn’t as good a speaker as Martin Luther King Jr. was,” Lucas continued, “but he was a preacher and he worked with King and knew how to draw in and handle a crowd.”

His campaign faltered, in part, after Jackson faced accusations of antisemitism for using a derogatory term for Jewish people to describe New York. In the end, Jackson won Louisiana and Washington, D.C., and finished the primary season with 3 million votes, third among the candidates.

The party’s nominee that year, former Vice President Walter Mondale, and his running mate Geraldine Ferraro (the first woman selected as a vice presidential candidate from a major party), were eventually trounced by the incumbent Reagan and his vice president, George H.W. Bush.

But by the time Jackson took the stage at the convention, he had established himself as a force in the Democratic party.

Lucas’ book, compiled through a survey of American political rhetoric experts, ranks Jackson’s ’84 convention speech as No. 12.

“I think it’s the first speech I know of that could be seen as a forerunner in the emphasis of identity politics today,” Lucas said. “He talks about Black people, Hispanic people, Native Americans and others. But he doesn’t carve out a coalition just based on ethnic identity because it’s really based on economic issues as well. There was a serious criticism of the then-operations of American capitalism and how it left so many out.”

’88 and beyond

Jackson made a second run for the White House in 1988, outpacing his previous effort with nearly 7 million primary season votes. Still, he finished second among the party’s nominees behind Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who lost big in the general election to George H.W. Bush. (Jackson’s DNC address that year, which closes with his famous refrain to “keep hope alive,” is ranked No. 49 in Lucas’ book.)

That year would be Jackson’s last presidential campaign, though he did win election in 1990 as one of two shadow senators for the District of Columbia, an office that has no vote in the U.S. Senate and is primarily tasked with advocating for D.C. statehood.

Despite coming up short in his bids for the nation’s highest office, political observers say those campaigns changed the face of the Democratic Party.

Don Rose, a Chicago political consultant who worked as King’s press secretary in Chicago, said Jackson’s work on voting rights and voter registration and his emphasis on racial, ethnic and social equity helped accelerate the party’s transformation from its past roots in the Jim Crow South.

In the process, said Rose, 93, Jackson “played a very substantial role in the movement to elect more African Americans and Latinos to public office.”

Others credit Jackson with pushing the party to change its nomination process from a winner-take-all approach to a system in which candidates were awarded delegates in proportion to the votes they received — a change, it’s been said, that opened the door for Obama’s 2008 victory over Hillary Clinton.

“Jackson is a much more significant figure in American political history than he is sometimes given credit for,” Lucas said.

There have been those, of course, who have criticized Jackson over the years, who have called him opportunistic, all-too-willing to seek the spotlight and insert himself in any moment once cameras turn on. His reputation took another hit in 2001 when it was revealed he cheated on his wife, the affair resulting in a child born two years earlier while Jackson was acting as “spiritual adviser” to President Bill Clinton post-Monica Lewinsky scandal.

But the news of his retirement from Rainbow/PUSH Coalition last year brought a renewed appreciation of his life’s work.

“As a poor, Black kid growing up in the South, my first encounter with politics came when I was a 12-year-old watching Reverend Jesse Jackson’s speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta,” said Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison in a statement last year. “For the first time, I was watching someone who looked like me speaking about what it meant to not only hope, but fight for a better America. An America where people of color have a seat at the table and an America that works for everyone — not just those at the top.

During last year’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition conference, Kamala Harris called Jackson “one of America’s greatest patriots, someone who deeply believes in the promise of our country.”

“In this moment, let us all understand the history and the significance of Rev’s work and his approach,” she told the crowd at Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn. “Just as Rev has shown, our ability to stand together is our strength. Our ability to unify as many peoples is our strength. And the heroes of this moment will be those who bring us together in coalition.”

Though he never again ran for president, Jackson continued his involvement with Democratic conventions, speaking at DNCs in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2016.

Today, Parkinson’s has severely limited Jackson’s speech. Sitting in a recliner in his office at Rainbow/PUSH headquarters last week, surrounded by photos showing his illustrious career, he paused when asked what he would say in a speech to this year’s convention.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his comments centered on young people registering to vote and turning protest energy into political action.

“We have to go from freedom to equality,” he said.