I watched Jesse Jackson from a few rows behind him on the yellow school bus in Houston’s crime-and-poverty-ridden 3rd District as someone in the rear shouted, “We’ve got the president on the bus!”
It was late fall 1988, and Jackson was no longer a presidential candidate. He was a campaigner for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. Jackson would never be president, and he probably knew it after two unsuccessful runs to become the nation’s first black president.
“I will continue working, fighting for justice at home,” the 47-year-old minister and civil rights leader would say soon after that supporter shouted his school bus endorsement. “I will continue to study and grow.”
I was a reporter for Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C., at the time, and my assignment was to follow Jackson around the nation as he campaigned for Dukakis. For weeks, we traveled together—from the Texas-Mexico border to Wisconsin’s border with Canada. At each stop, he told the crowds—from domestic workers in Texas to the destitute poor in New Orleans’ Desire Housing Projects to farmers in Wisconsin—to “keep hope alive”, that they are “somebody”, that they need to keep reaching for “higher ground.”
Jackson, who died Feb. 17 at the age of 84, kept his promise. He did indeed spend the rest of his life studying and growing and certainly fighting for justice. He was a tireless supporter of black people, yes, but also of all people regardless of race. I remember well his familiar reminder to the huge media presence among his multi-racial audiences that they should consider the hard-working folks who rose early in the morning to come and clean their hotel rooms and make sure they had clean sheets.
“I always seek to establish a moral foundation to any speech,” he said to us later on the small plane that flew us to many stops. “There is no greater moral authority than the Bible. Jesus was a master teacher.”
In 1988, Jackson’s mission included keeping the national Democratic Party tied to its roots in the working class, and it put him at odds with members of the Democratic Leadership Council, a largely Southern organization led by the likes of Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. John Breaux, D-La. The DLC wanted the party to shift to the center-right to blunt the hemorrhaging of white males to the Republican Party.
Jackson “fits in like a big thorn,” Atlanta-based political analyst Clairbourne Darden told me in 1988.
Jackson lost that fight as today’s Democratic Party is largely fixed in a Clintonian center-right mode with little real interest in the party that once put Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the White House.
In his first bid for the presidency in 1984, Jackson received 3.3 million votes in the Democratic Party primaries. He more than doubled that in his 1988 bid with 6.9 million votes. He was never to win the big prize, but he did set the stage for Barack Obama to become the first black president a couple decades later.
Born in 1941 in a three-room house with no running water and an outhouse in the back in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson played football in college and gravitated quickly toward the burgeoning civil rights movement. He became a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was with Martin Luther King Jr. when King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968.
Jackson would go to make his Rainbow Coalition and Operation Push major forces for social justice (the organizations would later combine). His work reached beyond the United States and made him a voice heard and listened to across the world.
“I do intend to be a part of the conscience of the nation,” he told black graduate business students in Houston back in 1988.
He was right about that, and his success is one reason why he will be remembered long after his death.
