As Democrats prepare to celebrate the first Black woman at the top of the presidential ticket this week in Chicago, progressive leaders on Sunday reflected on the monumental legacy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the trail he blazed that could help lead Kamala Harris to the White House.
“The reason Kamala Harris is going to be nominated starts right in this building,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said during a tribute to Jackson hosted at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s convention at the organization’s Kenwood headquarters. “It starts right with this man. It has been a long journey, but the one that brought us this far, was Jesse Louis Jackson.”
Though Jackson’s mighty voice has been largely silenced by a progressive case of Parkinson’s disease, Sharpton declared “every time we march, Jesse Jackson is walking.
“When you see Kamala Harris up on that stage this week, Jesse Jackson is on that stage,” Sharpton said during the tribute sponsored by The Nation magazine ahead of the Democratic National Convention. “He's sitting there watching the results of his work. There wouldn't be no ‘us’ if it wasn't for him.”
Jackson was feted a day ahead of the convention’s official launch on Monday, when he’ll be honored onstage at the United Center alongside his son and fellow delegate Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill.
The start of Sunday’s evening program was delayed more than 20 minutes as Yusuf Jackson, another of the civil rights leader’s sons, pleaded with supporters who crowded around the elder Jackson to take their seats.
Instead, the stream of well-wishers lined up for photos and chanted: “Run, Jesse, run!”
Jackson, 82, smiled and grasped the hands of those able to work their way through the crowd to his wheelchair.
“This feels like 1984,” an exasperated Yusuf Jackson said, referring to his father’s first run for president.
The civil rights icon and two-time Democratic presidential primary candidate formally stepped down earlier this year as head of Rainbow PUSH, the organization he founded to promote racial, economic and educational equity.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, called Jackson “one of the very most significant political leaders in this country in the last 100 years.”
“Sometimes we take for granted all that he has accomplished and the walls that he has broken down today,” Sanders said. “When people say Black and white and Latino and Asian American and Native American and gay and straight have gotta stand together — people were not talking like that 30 or 40 years ago.”
“Let us be crystal clear: there would not have been, in my view, a Barack Obama in 2008 without Jesse Jackson. There would not have been a Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020 without Jesse Jackson, and there would not have been a President Kamala Harris without Jesse Jackson,” Sanders said.
Jackson, a protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., marched from Selma to Montgomery alongside King and other Civil Rights Movement leaders, and later served as the Chicago director of King’s Operation Breadbasket.
Jackson founded Operation PUSH in 1971 and helped lead a 1983 voter registration drive that ultimately resulted in the election of Harold Washington as Chicago’s first Black mayor.
Jackson then ran for president in 1984, when he made his famous “Rainbow Coalition” speech to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.
“Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black, and white — and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” Jackson said then. “America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.”
Another son of the reverend, ex-U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., referenced that speech Sunday, saying “if we weave our patch together at the right time in the right place, if we can embrace each other's pain and come together, we can elect Kamala Harris the next president of the United States of America.”
Jackson ran for president again in 1988, again falling short of the nomination — winning seven primaries, garnering nearly 7 million votes and mobilizing a younger, more diverse generation of voters.
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates said she was set on her own progressive path when she was a youngster watching Jackson’s ‘84 convention speech.
“Let me tell you whose convention it belongs to: it belongs to Rev. Jesse Jackson. It belongs to a man who changed the rules to make it possible for two other people with names like Barack and Kamala to come behind him,” Davis Gates said. “He knew we needed equity, not just in speeches, not just in marches, but equity in the rules. And so we changed them.”
During a Chicago visit last summer, Harris said Jackson’s presidential campaigns “widened the path for generations that would follow, including President Barack Obama and me.”
