Jesse Jackson

I

Introduction

Jesse Jackson, born in 1941, African American civil rights activist and political leader. In order to promote racial and economic justice in the United States, he founded two groups: Operation PUSH (People United to Save [later Serve] Humanity) and the National Rainbow Coalition. In 1984 and 1988 Jackson campaigned as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

II

Early Life

Jackson was born to Helen Burns, in Greenville, South Carolina. His father, Noah Robinson, a former professional boxer and one of the most prominent and economically successful blacks in the community, was married to another woman. In 1943 Helen Burns married Charles Henry Jackson, who formally adopted Jesse in 1957.

Jackson was an outstanding athlete and an honors student at Greenville's segregated Sterling High School. After graduation in 1959, he rejected a contract from a professional baseball team in favor of a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. However, Jackson soon learned that while racially integrated, the University of Illinois did not offer blacks equality. A star quarterback in high school, Jackson found that the Illinois football program did not allow blacks to play quarterback. Some of his professors also made their racial biases clear. For example, a speech professor demoted Jackson to an alternate position on a public speaking competition team, despite the fact that his class had voted him a place on the team for his outstanding abilities. After one year at Illinois, Jackson transferred to all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T) in Greensboro.

III

Civil Rights Movement

Jackson moved to North Carolina just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum on college campuses in the South. A year before he arrived, four A&T students had organized a sit-in, in which blacks pressured restaurants to integrate by waiting to be served at “whites only” lunch counters. The sit-in took place at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro; sit-ins soon spread throughout the South. See also Civil Rights Movement in the United States

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At A&T Jackson flourished, becoming quarterback for the football team. He also gained attention for his leadership and for his public speaking skills. Jackson was elected president of the student body, he organized student protests against racial segregation, and he served as an influential member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights organization. In 1963 police arrested Jackson after he led a protest march in Greensboro. Nearly a thousand supporters attended a mass meeting when he surrendered to authorities. This event solidified his position as one of the most important student leaders of the Southern civil rights movement.

In the summer of 1963 Jackson participated in the March on Washington, a massive civil rights demonstration, and heard Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his famous 'I Have a Dream' speech. Soon after, Jackson was elected president of the North Carolina Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights, a new organization designed to coordinate student civil rights protests in the state. He also went to Las Vegas, Nevada, for a national convention of Young Democrats. At this meeting he met Willie Brown, who would later become speaker of the California state assembly and mayor of San Francisco, and Harold Washington, who would be the first black mayor of Chicago.

Jesse Jackson received his bachelor of arts degree in 1964 and was admitted to Duke Divinity School, where he would have been one of the first African American students. Instead, he accepted a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and enrolled in a graduate program at the Chicago Theological Seminary. He moved to Illinois with his wife, Jacqueline Brown, whom he had met at A&T and married in December 1964.

Jackson, along with many other Americans in 1965, witnessed the brutal beatings of civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. In response, he led a group of fellow divinity students to Selma, where two weeks later they participated in a protest march led by Martin Luther King, Jr., then president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In early 1966, Jackson left school to devote all his time to the civil rights movement. Dr. King became Jackson's mentor, and Jackson, in turn, became one of King's closest coworkers.

King encouraged Jackson’s career. In 1966 he asked Jackson to head the Operation Breadbasket project in Chicago. Jackson mobilized Chicago's poor black community and used economic pressure from black churches and community organizations to force local companies to end discriminatory practices and hire more black workers. Jackson was also involved in an unsuccessful effort to desegregate Cicero, a white working-class suburb of Chicago. In 1967 Jackson became national director of Operation Breadbasket. He was ordained as a Baptist minister the following year.

In April 1968 Jackson was with King and some of his followers at a Memphis, Tennessee, motel when King was assassinated. After King's death, tensions developed between Jackson and his SCLC colleagues. They could not agree on who should take King’s place and on what direction the movement should take. Jackson advocated working to change the economic conditions of Northern blacks, while other SCLC leaders wanted to focus attention on Southern race relations. A dispute about the events surrounding King's death also increased conflict within the SCLC leadership. Immediately after King's assassination, Jackson claimed to have been the last person to talk to King before he died and to have cradled his head after he was shot. Other SCLC leaders vehemently denied this and accused Jackson of lying in order to help his own career. Jackson's prominence, along with his aggressive leadership and failure to consult with other leaders, led to further friction within SCLC.

IV

Operation Push

In 1971 Jackson left SCLC and began building his own Chicago-based organization known as PUSH—People United to Save (later Serve) Humanity. He founded the organization in an ambitious attempt to help minorities improve their economic situations. One of Jackson’s main goals was to help blacks and Hispanics upgrade work skills or start small businesses. Through negotiations and threats of boycott, PUSH forced several major corporations with big markets in the black community to adopt affirmative action programs, to hire more black executives and supervisors, and to buy from black suppliers, wholesalers, and distributors.

Jackson also launched a companion project, PUSH-EXCEL, which promoted mastery of basic academic skills. His success in raising academic standards was partly due to his constant emphasis on the importance of self-respect and family values within the black community. His repeated refrain, 'I Am Somebody,' resonated among African Americans, especially those in inner-city schools. The PUSH-EXCEL program used Jackson’s personal appeal and charisma to persuade inner-city students to sign a pledge that they would study at least two hours every night. The administration of President Jimmy Carter was impressed by the program’s success in raising student test scores and gave it a large funding grant.

Beginning in 1981, the administration of President Ronald Reagan implemented policies that had a devastating effect on many black Americans. Reagan's emphasis on supply-side economics, which included significant reductions in government spending, caused new unemployment. In addition, Reagan's tax programs encouraged economic investment outside of the inner cities, while they discouraged the rebuilding of urban industry. In the cities of the North and Midwest, many steel, rubber, and automobile factories shut their doors, and the layoffs hit the black population particularly hard.

In an effort to defeat Reagan’s reelection bid, PUSH launched a drive to register black voters, and Jackson began conducting voter-registration meetings that had the feeling of religious revivals. Jackson’s passionate and memorable rhetoric aroused so much enthusiasm that in November 1983 Jackson declared his candidacy for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. He quickly proved himself a first-rate political campaigner. He also showed his diplomatic skills in 1984 when he traveled to Syria and negotiated the release of a U.S. military pilot who had been held captive after his plane was shot down. Jackson's success raised his stature among whites and blacks, who saw him as an effective politician capable of implementing foreign policy as well as domestic policy.

During the 1984 campaign, Jackson also began appealing to a 'Rainbow Coalition” of the disadvantaged and rejected from all races and creeds. In debates among Democratic candidates, Jackson stood out as President Reagan's sharpest critic. Unlike his rivals, Jackson called for more government spending on programs to end poverty and less on national defense. Initially, liberal whites as well as blacks supported Jackson’s candidacy. He received almost one-fourth of the votes cast in the Democratic primaries and caucuses and one-eighth of the delegates to the Democratic national convention.

However, Jackson lost a large portion of this support after he made an offensive comment about Jews. Jackson later apologized, but the incident severely damaged his campaign. Jackson's close ties to Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who had also made negative remarks about Judaism, further undermined Jackson's credibility as a serious presidential candidate. At the Democratic national convention, Jackson gave a dramatic speech in which he pledged to support the Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale. However, after the convention Jackson provided only limited help to Mondale’s campaign. Jackson’s voter registration program faltered, and Reagan won a convincing victory over Mondale in the election.

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