This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Tributes are pouring in from across the globe for the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday. The civil rights icon and two-time presidential candidate was 84 years old.
In a statement, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said, quote, “From Selma in the American South to Soweto in 1979, where he visited following the death of Steve Biko, Jesse Jackson defied the architects of apartheid and executors of brutality to declare that all people are equal and that justice would ultimately triumph over injustice,” unquote.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres praised Jackson for his, quote, “work against racism, against apartheid and for human rights.”
Former President Obama cited Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, saying, quote, “In his two historic runs for president, he laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office in the land.”
This is an excerpt of the Reverend Jesse Jackson addressing the Democratic National Convention in 1988.
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! On tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive. I love you very much. I love you very much.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1988 running for president.
In a moment, we’ll be joined by Bishop William Barber. But first, Juan, we want to turn to you. Juan González has been covering Jesse Jackson for decades. Can you reflect on your time covering Reverend Jackson here and in other lands?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, Amy. Well, I first met Jesse more than 40 years ago, back in 1983, as he was preparing his first run for president. I was a young reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News back then, and the first national presidential convention I covered was the 1984 DNC gathering in San Francisco, where Jesse gave his now-legendary first convention speech, urging the Democratic Party to adopt a program of true social justice.
A few years later, in 1990, during the historic five-month labor strike at the New York Daily News, where I chaired the strike committee of the Newspaper Guild, Jesse was pivotal in rallying support for our cause. He joined Governor Mario Cuomo, Cardinal O’Connor, Mayor Dinkins in speaking at a massive rally in support of our strike in front of the Daily News.
And later, during Christmas week in 1993, I traveled with Jesse, labor leader Dennis Rivera and a handful of others to Cuba, where we met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. And Jesse convinced Fidel to allow Fidel’s granddaughter to leave Cuba and reunite with the U.S., with her mother, who defected. I was stunned at how many people in the streets of Havana instantly recognized Jesse and wanted to talk with him, and he spent time with them, as well. And my favorite —
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, can you — we’re just showing a picture, you can’t see, of Jesse Jackson sitting in a rocking chair. Can you explain what this is? This was in Cuba?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right. Yeah, that was — that’s my favorite personal photo of him, is, early one morning, I came down — we were in a guesthouse in Havana. I come down the stairs about 7:00 in the morning, and there is Jesse in his robe in a rocking chair reading the Bible, no one else — no one else in the room at the time. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to Reverend Jesse Jackson, as you talk about — you covered Jesse Jackson in that meeting that you all had with Fidel Castro. This is Jackson speaking in Havana in 2013.
REV. JESSE JACKSON: There are no rational security threats from us to Cuba, after we have Guantánamo base in Cuba. Russia is no longer, as we knew it in the ’60s, in Cuba. There is no — Putin is not where Khrushchev was 60 years ago. And what would it mean to us, except a market for telecommunications and cars and tourism? And what it would mean for Cubans? Food and development. We all stand to gain from pulling down blockades and building bridges. …
I am convinced if the bridge — if the wall between South Africa, white and Black, could come down, the wall in East-West Germany could come down, if we could begin to talk with Iran again after 35 years, now’s the time to bring down this. There’s a certain diplomacy spirit in the air. We should seize this moment to bring down this Cuba-Cuban-American barrier.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Jesse Jackson in Havana in 2013, one of many trips he made there. Juan was with him on one of those trips. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And also, back then, in 1999, I again traveled with Jesse in a small group to the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, where we met with the protesters who were occupying the U.S. Navy’s bombing range on Vieques, demanding that the Navy leave Vieques. And I specifically recall one point, because Jesse got so much press coverage on the island then, that the commander of the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base demanded a meeting with Jesse to explain the Navy’s point of view. And he went on and on, the commander, about the importance of Vieques as a training facility for the U.S. military. And at one point, Jesse looks at him and says, “You don’t get it. These people don’t want you here. You know, you’re like a man who keeps telling a woman, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and she tells you, ‘No, no, no,’ and you won’t listen. It’s up. You have to leave. The Navy has to leave Vieques.” And, of course, about a year or two later, finally, it was President Bush that finally pulled the Navy out of Vieques.
So, basically, Jesse was always there when people were fighting for some form of social justice. He could always be counted on to show up, express public support. And of all the U.S. leaders of the past half-century, I believe none had a more international view and a commitment to worldwide social justice as Jesse Jackson did. So, those of us who knew him will all — are all better for having known him, and it’s a tremendous loss that he’s gone.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Juan, you’re speaking to us from Chicago, his longtime hometown. We’re going to go right now to North Carolina to continue to talk about the life and legacy of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. We’re joined by Bishop William Barber, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.
While you’re joining us today, Bishop, from New Haven, you’re usually in North Carolina. While Jesse Jackson was born in South Carolina, he went to school in North Carolina, as you did. Can you reflect on the significance, the life and legacy of Jesse Jackson, Bishop Barber?
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Thank you so much, Amy and Juan.
We just left a 50-mile walk in North Carolina, “It’s Time to Love Forward Together: This Is Our Selma.” And in many ways, the way we organized it was what I learned with Jesse Jackson, broad and deep, Black and white and Brown, and young and old, and gay and straight, and Asian and Indigenous and multi-policy-focused.
Jesse Jackson, when I met him 40 years ago as a student, he asked me to work with his student campaign when he was running for president in 1984. And what we heard in him was not a politician. What we heard in him was somebody who was serious about people uniting to save humanity — PUSHing — that he was serious about an agenda of uplift. We didn’t hear him just criticizing the person he was running against or demeaning them, a message we need to have today. He instead gave people a vision. He talked about moving from civil right battlegrounds to economic common ground. He talked about moving to a moral high ground. He framed issues in a moral perspective, using both Judeo-Christian traditions as well as the Constitution. And Jesse had a way, just like Juan said, of saying, “If you can pull down the walls in German, if you can pull down the walls in South Africa, you can pull down the walls here in Cuba, you can pull down the walls that keeps people in poverty and in ghettos right here.” And that’s to uniqueness.
Jesse didn’t just have a race critique. He had a race critique, but he recognized that race critique alone was too limited. He remembered what Dr. King taught in 1965, the end of the Selma to Montgomery March, that the greatest fear of the greedy oligarchs in this country is for the masses of Black people and poor white people and others, Latinos, to join together and form a voting bloc that could fundamentally shift the economic architecture of this nation. He pushed us hard, Amy, on knowing policy, and policy by adversaries and our own, knowing both sides, and that we didn’t have to be about demeaning our adversary. What we needed to do was give people a vision of hope, and not just daydreaming and wishful thinking, but the kind of hope that grows out of building a movement.
You know, people say he lost. He really didn’t lose those two elections. He brought 10 million new people into the electorate. He changed rules in the Democratic Party. He lifted up an agenda for people who weren’t even hearing their names talked about. He was one of the few candidates that talked about the poor openly, talked about whether it was in Iowa or in Alabama or Mississippi or New York or upstate Connecticut. Wherever he was, he was lifting up the people. And that is the part of the genius and the kind of hope that he kept alive over and over again.
And he never stopped, even when he got ill. We were in Texas, walking 21 miles supporting people in Texas, and Jesse Jackson showed up five years ago, when we were in the middle of COVID. When we were fighting to make sure that poor and low-wage people would be treated as fair as — fairly in COVID appropriations, Jesse Jackson just showed up one day. When we were standing there fighting for voting rights and demanding that the COVID bill and restoring voting rights be done at the same time, and politicians didn’t want to do that, Jesse showed up, and we went to jail together. When we started — I got arrested together.
When we started the reiteration of the Poor People’s Campaign, Jesse had been the mayor of Solidarity City. He came and said, “I’m not even here to lead it. I’m here to say it’s about time that we picked this up, 50 years later, and that it is the right thing to do,” because he recognized right now that we’re not in a crisis of democracy or a crisis of a party; we’re in the crisis of civilization. Something very flawed is happening when people think the only thing you do with power is hurt people and expel people and deport people and take people’s healthcare and take people’s living wages. Jesse’s message is needed today. I would say everybody needs to go listen to ’84 and ’88, and listen to it and model much of it today in order for us to come up and out of the things that we are experiencing today.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Reverend Barber, I’m wondering — you’ve often said that, like Selma in ’65 and Birmingham in ’63, this is our moral moment now. I’m wondering if you could briefly tell us why.
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, you know, one of the things when you listen, for instance, at the end of the Selma to Montgomery, when Dr. King gave his sermon on the steps of the Alabama state House, it’s interesting that he broadened what he was talking about. He wasn’t just talking about voting rights for Black people. He laid out what could happen if we had — if we expanded voting rights. He laid out how it would shift the democracy itself.
As we stand here right now, Jesse passed yesterday, and when his family called me, his son called me, as we were praying, as they were taking him out, his wife said, “A mighty lion has fallen.” That’s what his son told me. And I think about the moral power of that lion is both protect and expand the pride. Well, right now we have less voting rights today than we had August 6, 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was first passed. And Jesse would always teach us that voting rights wasn’t just for Black people. He taught what it did for white women, what it did for working people. We still do not have a living wage, while we are making trillionaires, greedy trillionaires, and giving more and more money to billionaires and the oligarchs. We don’t have a living wage. Over 140 million people are poor and low-wage. Eighty-seven million people are without healthcare or underinsured, at a time where we’re passing big, ugly, deadly, destructive bills that take healthcare.
We also live in a time when, even on the Democratic side, politicians won’t say the word “poor.” They’ll talk about affordability, but they won’t say the word “poor.” Jesse would. And what he would say is that you can’t just say rising tides help the middle class, and everybody else will come up. He knew some boats were stuck. And he knew that you have to lift from the bottom, not really rising tide, but lift from the bottom. And he had a way, and that we need now. We need to let people know something that he often said: If you’re Black and you can’t pay your light bill because you don’t make a living wage, or you’re white and you can’t pay your light bill because you don’t make a living wage, we’re all Black in the dark, and the only way to get in the light is for all of those in the dark to exercise their power.
We’re in, finally, Juan, a critical moral moment, because 90 million people — with all of this authoritarianism and neofascism being spewed and put in policy through this current administration, 90 million people stayed home. The current Congress is made up the way it is because of only 7,000 votes. And in many states, many states, the margin of victory is within 5% of just the number of poor and low-wage people that didn’t vote. And they said they didn’t vote because nobody talked to them. Jesse would talk to them, and we need to be doing it today.
AMY GOODMAN: Bishop William Barber, we want to thank you so much for being with us, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.
Coming up, an update on the U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva as the U.S. expands its military presence in the Middle East. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: A new song by Grammy-winning singer Shervin Hajipour, “I Am Iran.” He dedicated it to the protesters killed in Iran.
