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AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at the life and legacy of the towering civil rights icon, Reverend Jesse Jackson. He died earlier today at the age of 84.
In the 1960s, Jackson worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Jackson was with King when King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4th, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel.
Jackson later moved to Chicago, where he founded Operation PUSH — People United to Serve Humanity. He also founded the National Rainbow Coalition.
In 1984 and 1988, Jackson ran two groundbreaking presidential campaigns. In 1988, he received about 7 million votes as a presidential candidate. He pushed for cutting the Pentagon budget while increasing domestic spending on education, housing and healthcare. Jackson was also involved in international campaigns from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa to supporting Palestinian self-determination.
The Reverend Jackson was hospitalized in November for treatment of a rare and particularly severe neurodegenerative condition, progressive supranuclear palsy, PSP. In a statement, Reverend Jackson’s family said, quote, “Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world. … His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by,” they said.
This is a clip of Reverend Jesse Jackson speaking at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: When you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination. I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it wasn’t born in you. And you can make it. Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high. Stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender! Suffering breeds character. Character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint. You must not surrender. You may or may not get there, but just know that you are qualified, and you hold on and hold out. We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive!
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Reverend Jesse Jackson speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 when he ran for president for the second time.
Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, October 8th, 1941. As a college student in North Carolina, Jackson became involved in the civil rights movement. By the mid-’60s, he was a close aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and became national director of Operation Breadbasket, a campaign run by the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Over the past 30 years, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was a regular guest on Democracy Now! In 2011, I spoke with him shortly after the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: I think we would do well to use the statue as an occasion to deal with his unfinished business. He was shot down, assassinated at age 39. His last agenda items included a Poor People’s Campaign, the quest to end the war in Vietnam and stop the radical installation of capital in the hands of the very wealthy. And today, here we are with too few people with too much wealth, subsidized by the government, too many unnecessary wars and too many people in poverty. So, in substance, this memorial gives us a rallying point to keep going with his unfinished business. We bail out the banks, without link to lending and reinvestment, for example. The Bush tax cut extension is more money than all of the state budget deficits combined. So, clearly, Wall Street has made out big time, but the poor are expanding, and we’re losing jobs en masse, and we must, in fact, turn it around. …
He died a very unpopular man, attacked by our government, attacked by the media, shunned by many Blacks themselves, for example, civil rights activists, because he dared to deal with the issue of unjust, unnecessary wars. Today we’re spending a trillion dollars in Iraq on the wrong target. Overthrowing the government in Libya, well, a billion there, and billions more to restore it. Two billion a week in Afghanistan. And yet, we’re laying off teachers, firemen, policemen. He would be distressed by that. He would be weeping about that. The bailout for these banks, who drove us in the hole, and then they get bailed out without links to kind of reinvest. We refortified them, not restructured them.
These issues that Dr. King would have raised would be troubling, but it is his sense of outrage and conscience that make us better today. And I would hope, as Vince said, that the interpretation must lead us to his unfinished business. The dream only makes sense if it’s connected to the broken promise that had been unfulfilled 400 years. And today, the dream has to put every American back to work. That means reinvesting in the common people bottom-up. We’re cutting public transportation, denying access to jobs, resegregating. Our schools are more segregated. The biggest growth industry in most states is the jail-industrial complex. So he would see me raising troubling questions of conscience, so I will see this monument as an opportunity to raise issues of jobs and peace and justice.
AMY GOODMAN: The late Reverend Jesse Jackson, speaking on Democracy Now! in 2011. He died earlier today at the age of 84. In 2008, Reverend Jackson appeared on Democracy Now! just after Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: Well, it has first an historic significance. I mean, an African American winning Iowa, while white Iowans were intuitive enough in their thinking to choose message and relationships over race, is a big deal, because there were those who would say, don’t go to Iowa and New Hampshire because they’re not representative of the multicultural states, but so that said a lot to me about the maturing of America.
I could not help but think about the struggle to get to that point. Many journalists think it came down from the sky and it started, you know, in Boston. But this journey from the ’54 Supreme Court decision to end legal apartheid in this country, having succeeded slavery, was a big moment in American history. Then in ’55, there’s the lynching of Emmett Till, which traumatized and woke up America. And then, out of that, four months later, the sit-in of Rosa Parks and the emergence of Dr. King. And then, the 1960 students coming alive and risking and sitting in and going to jail, leading toward the ’63 march, where Dr. King laid out his dream of hope for the nation, and the climax in the next year in the ’64 public accommodations bill.
But then, that same ’64, as hope kept rising politically, Fannie Lou Hamer and that group at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, challenged the liberal Democratic structure of Mondale and Humphrey and Johnson in ’64. And then, while we supported the Democrats, they didn’t have as their platform the Voting Rights Act. Johnson said to Dr. King, when asked about the Voting Rights Act, “Dr. King, I like you very much, but you can’t get the Voting Rights Act. The reality is, politically, that if we get the Voting Rights Act, we’ll lose the South a quarter of a century.” Dr. King said, “Well, we have to get the Voting Rights Act,” and so we marched in Selma, Alabama, to get the Voting Rights Act. And the blood of the people and, of course, their struggle has spawned everything politically, the ’65 Voting Rights Act.
And then, the Hatcher victory. At that time, a Black mayor of Gary was a national story. The Black mayor of Cleveland, Carl Stokes, was a novelty, was a national story at that time. And it continued to grow. And by ’72, we challenged the McGovern rules. If you recall, we unseated the delegation, as we sought to have a more multicultural seating of delegates from states in ’72. And by ’83, Harold Washington was running for mayor, and Mondale and Kennedy came in to defeat him with Jane Byrne and Daley. And we resisted that, and it was tension between our growth and the process.
And out of that, it drove me, in fact, to run in ’84 and ’88. And we kept expanding up on that coalition, and we won with new registered voters, new voters; Democrats regained the Senate in ’86; in the South, we won North Carolina and Louisiana and Alabama and Florida. By ’88, we expanded that base, and Doug Wilder became governor in ’89 — we won Virginia in ’88 — while Dave Dinkins became mayor of New York in ’89 — we won New York in ’88. And so, this thing has just continued.
So, when the media says, well, Barack was not a part of the civil rights struggle, he’s a beneficiary of it, not a benefactor of it, but each generation becomes beneficiary and then benefactor. This year he’s a beneficiary of that struggle; next time, those who came in because of him, they’ll be the beneficiaries, he’ll be the benefactor. But the struggle continues. And so, from the ’54 end of apartheid to the Voting Rights Act, to the urban breakthroughs, to Harold Washington, the ’84 and ’88 campaigns, to me, this is historic, a non-broken line.
And I might add, even the party resisted supporting Free Mandela. We were on the side of the South African government. We thought that was our security. So I think it’s a great moment for American democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the late Reverend Jesse Jackson speaking in 2008 on Democracy Now!. It was on a Sunday after his radio show in his studio, and I had begun by asking whether he supported Senator Obama for president, even though he had not publicly endorsed his campaign. To see all our interviews with the late Reverend Jesse Jackson, you can go to democracynow.org.
