REVEREND JESSE JACKSON, born in poverty in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, was a member of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), taking part in the famed 1965 Selma to Montgomery march and later the Poor People’s Campaign. He was present with other SCLC leaders when King was assassinated in 1968. Jackson then moved to Chicago — where the Civil Rights Movement had been met with extreme violence — to establish People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) as both a force for self-health and racial/economic justice advocacy. A book could be written about Jackson’s lifelong participation in movements demanding peace, justice, and freedom. His passing on February 17, 2026, justly led to numerous tributes — even from those who were hostile to his politics.

Not enough attention, however, has been paid to the extraordinary impact of Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, as well as the Rainbow Coalition as an organizational expression of those electoral efforts and the aspirations they embodied. Jackson was a national figure, of many years’ standing, in the fight for racial and economic justice. He was also a local figure — as he helped make DC statehood a national issue with a prominence it hadn’t received for many years — and was elected the District’s first “Shadow Senator” (alongside Florence Pendleton) in 1992 with over 100,000 votes. He frequently reminded audiences that DC statehood was amongst the original demands of the Civil Rights Movement.

Today, it is particularly important to recall how Jackson built upon the still-living legacy of the 1960s and ‘70s Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movement to give voice to those being silenced by the Reagan administration’s assault on egalitarianism, democratic rights, and working-class institutions. Jackson’s vision of a “Rainbow” celebrating the multi-racial, multi-cultural character of United States society presented an alternative to President Ronald Reagan’s exclusivist, racist notion of community — social Darwinian, one-against-all — and “greed is good” economics. The opposition between the two perspectives demonstrated two vastly differing models for our country: Jackson envisioned a society rooted in mutual support, while Reagan sowed division and economic devastation. This opposition is drawn even more sharply today, as Trump’s assaults on social good slash even deeper into social need and democratic values.

THREE SPEECHES: THE BREADTH OF JACKSON’S APPEAL

“My commitment as a presidential candidate is to focus on and lift those boats stuck on the bottom full of unpolished pearls. For if the boats on the bottom rise, all boats above will rise … The way I propose to do this is to build a new functional “Rainbow Coalition of the Rejected” spanning lines of color, sex, age, religion, region and national origin. The old minorities — Blacks, Hispanics, women, peace activists, environmentalists, youth, the elderly, small farmers, small businesspersons, poor people, gays and lesbians — if we remain apart, will continue to be a minority. But, if we come together, the old minorities constitute a new majority. That is how I propose to be nominated and elected President.”
Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign Flyer, 1984

It is hard today to fully grasp the multi-faceted nature of Jackson’s challenge to established authority and his outreach to the excluded. His mixture of the spiritual and practical, his respect for the intelligence of his audience, and his awareness of what brought them out to a gathering embodied the democratic ethos of his campaigns. Remembrances of three speeches, each given in sharply different settings, may provide a glimpse of its scope.

The First Spech: During the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, Jackson gave a speech at the Bible Way Church in downtown Washington, DC. The enormous African American church, one with a long history of fighting against segregation and racism, was packed. Jackson’s sermon spoke to those in attendance of the dignity of all labor, the dignity of those who clean bedpans and pick up the trash, drive the buses and serve the food, raise children and care for the elderly, all those who do the hardest and heaviest jobs — often for the least pay. Or none at all. Standing in the rafters, watching those below and around me while listening, I could feel how his words resonated. He acknowledged the spiritual value of labor, of mutuality, of community as the bedrock of African American survival. He connected that acknowledgement with the political demand that the dignity of those who work should be accompanied by wages and rights sufficient to meet the needs and dreams of working people. 

What we heard was a sermon in the form of a call to action.

The Second Speech: It was 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War. There was a national Rainbow conference at a DC hotel — and it so happened that there were numerous soldiers staying there who were about to be deployed to Iraq. Jackson invited those young people about to go off to war to attend, for free, the fundraising gala held at the gathering’s close; many took him up on the offer. Roberta Flack sang that evening, including, appropriately, John Lennon’s “Imagine.” 

Jackson spoke afterward to all present, but with words specifically directed to those who showed up in uniform — words expressed with deep respect for them without apologizing for the Rainbow’s opposition to the US invasion soon to be launched. Jackson stressed that the real war we needed to fight was against hunger, homelessness, and hatred in our midst; that the real needs were education, health care, jobs with a future here in our own country. I looked around and saw people listening attentively, absorbing what was being said. Addressing people who most needed to hear that an alternative is possible, Jackson defined the choices we have to make as individuals and as a society, expressing the values behind the program around which we were organizing.

The Third Speech: In the mid-90s, Decatur, Illinois, was a self-designated “class-war zone,” as industrial disputes were being waged simultaneously at the Caterpillar tractor factory, the Bridgestone-Firestone tire plant, and A.E. Staley — a corn milling subsidiary of global food supply conglomerate Tate & Lyle. The unions survived those fights, but all much reduced in size, strength, and conditions by the time they were over. Perhaps the bitterest struggle was at Staley: militant, well-organized, and determined workers were locked out for over three years. In 1995, a few months before a contract was signed that imposed the concessions that workers had been resisting (and allowed scabs to remain on the job), a last, large rally was held in Decatur as part of a final push to force the company to settle on honorable terms. Numerous union leaders spoke — as did Jackson. He honored the locked-out workers for their courage and integrity. He talked of the need for labor solidarity to spread more widely and sharply, and he talked about Nelson Mandela. About Mandela’s long years in prison and his commitment to endure even when victory appeared to be nowhere within reach. For those listening, the message was clear — this fight may end in defeat, but the war is far from over. Very different in style and substance from the speech at Bible Way or that directed at soldiers, his words struck home — for Jesse was speaking to people, not at them.

BUILDING A RAINBOW

“The Rainbow takes on many combinations. There are ideological rainbows; the Rainbow has a color dimension. The Rainbow makes room for the locked out, the rejected stones. There’s an age dimension to the Rainbow. It makes room for the very young and the very old. There’s another dimension. There are schools of thought … The Rainbow is a call to be progressive.”Jackson’s speech to the National Rainbow Leadership Conference, June 1984

Between the three speeches remembered above, one can grasp the essence of Jackson’s campaigns: linking ending US wars abroad with overcoming poverty, hunger, unemployment domestically; organizing on the principle that ending racial injustice and ending the exploitation of all working people are not separate issues, but are inextricably combined — part and parcel of all liberation movements, of all strivings for a democracy rooted in freedom and equality. From 1985 until the early 1990s, the Rainbow Coalition, a Black-led “movement of movements,” grew as an organization by building community and labor support for those ends.

Acting in tandem with Jackson’s election campaigns, the Rainbow functioned as part of an “inside-outside” strategy — working within the electoral system and mainstream institutions of society while simultaneously working outside those structures to create the basis for more fundamental changes, to transform power relationships within our country. But, while accurate, it is a little too pat to put it that way. Jackson articulated individuals’ right to take life in their own hands and change the conditions in which they lived, and that they had the power to do so as long as each and every democratizing initiative was part of a collective effort across all lines of division. 

The Rainbow sought to become a popular organizational expression of the upsurge of activism that flowed in the wake of Jackson’s campaigns and public events. In the words of Jack O’Dell, a key advisor to Jackson, “the Rainbow Coalition represents the Peace and Justice movement for social change entering the electoral arena, as an independent force … [It] is a mass political movement, committed to the expansion of the definition and practice of democracy in our country, including the realization of economic justice. As such it has to be bold enough to perceive of itself as the historic replacement for the existing two-party system: one prepared to act as a dual authority.”

Working within the electoral system, within the Democratic Party, and within other established institutions is necessary, as Jackson’s campaigns made abundantly evident, in order to engage millions of people in the struggle for justice; people who do not ordinarily see political action as central to daily living, people whose widely varied voices, ideas, beliefs, and values are nonetheless as essential to social change as those of activists and organizers. It is equally necessary to work outside those institutions to change the political climate, the range of possibility, to widen what we can envision as possible, to realize in practice the potential of transformative possibilities — so that ending war and poverty, ensuring dignity for all are not pie-in-the-sky dreams, but hopes that can be realized in our lifetimes.

Washington, DC, provides an example of the way this process unfolded. Inspired by the growth of local Rainbows elsewhere in the country, activists from different Spanish-speaking communities formed a Latino Rainbow in DC composed of activists from Guatemala and El Salvador involved in the solidarity movements with their home countries, immigrant workers inspired by the Justice for Janitors organizing campaign then underway, as well as individuals responding to Jackson’s message of inclusion and struggle from other parts of the community. They organized to build support for Jackson during the Democratic presidential primary in 1988; they also worked to build ties between unionists and solidarity activists within Latino communities around the Rainbow’s domestic program, as well as opposition to US military intervention and economic exploitation south of the United States border.

Taking a cue from that initiative, a number of us formed a local Labor Rainbow encompassing DC, suburban Maryland, and northern Virginia. Our ranks included members, staffers, and elected leaders of different federal worker and teachers’ unions, from AFSCME, SEIU, the Machinists, and locals from other unions. This was not a coalition in the traditional sense of the word, of people representing different organizations — and we never aimed to replace existing union leadership or replicate the work unionists were doing within their own organizations. Rather, we were composed of people working to build support for Jackson’s programs and proposals within union membership.

Partly we sought to bring together local labor networks building support for the anti-apartheid Free South Africa movement and those opposing US intervention in Central America. Partly our goal was to build inter-union solidarity and strike support for local and national labor disputes, such as paper-mill workers on strike in Jay, Maine, and cannery workers on strike in Watsonville, California (and workers at Diamond Walnut in Stockton, California, whose strike was to last 14 years). Connected to this was our support for national legislation to ban the use of “permanent replacement” — i.e., scabs replacing fired workers in industrial disputes, as happened in Decatur and in countless other labor disputes at the time — which was a key element in Jackson’s platform.

We also worked to build support within our unions for the broader progressive agenda of Jackson’s presidential campaign and the issues he was highlighting. Among these were support for DC statehood, defending voting rights nationally and expanding voting registration, and for a broad progressive social agenda: to improve local public education, build affordable housing, establish a public health system, and protect and improve welfare benefits. These were, and are, all working-class needs as critical to working people’s lives as job protection, decent wages, and grievance procedures at work. All were and are issues that spoke to racial and economic justice.

Similarly, we were aiming to build understanding amongst unionists of the need for the nuclear freeze, the need to convert arms production to non-lethal industrial production, and the critical importance of union-based industrial policy proposals such as those put forth by the Industrial Union Division of the AFL-CIO, by the UAW, and especially the more radical vision of the International Association of Machinists. The IAM advocated direct union representation on federal economic planning boards, legislative measures to control the movement of capital, use of pension funds to reinvest in urban needs, and a jobs program to meet public needs.

Ultimately, we became part of the (more bureaucratic) District-wide Rainbow in DC while maintaining our autonomy (as did the Latino Rainbow). Other local Rainbow Coalitions were organized in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties — each with a distinct character. Such initiatives took shape with different emphases and different structures throughout the country and expressed themselves around multiple issues — women’s rights, immigrant solidarity, Black women’s needs, environmental protection. Additionally, Jackson and the Rainbow stood openly for gay rights, something still uncommon in the 1980s; few in organized labor would publicly take such a stance, nor would any mainstream Democratic presidential candidate utter such words. Even more rare at the time, Jackson and the Rainbow welcomed support from the Arab American community and brought an unprecedented number of Arab Americans into the Jackson presidential campaign. And thus, too, Jackson recognized the justice of the Palestinian cause and stood as a voice for peace and justice in the Middle East. 

This recognition that justice is indivisible was itself rooted in a long tradition of African American opposition to war and the linkage of the need to end racism with the need to see the human face of those killed in the US’s endless wars of aggression. This reflected the depth of the solidarity that was built into Jackson’s campaigns — how often he would tell the story of the Good Samaritan, talk of Joseph and Mary as homeless refugees, speak of meeting the needs of the least of us; Christian messages that were wholly and completely ecumenical.

ENDINGS AND NEW BEGINNINGS

“America is not like a blanket, one unbroken piece of cloth, one color, one character, one texture, one religion. It is more like a quilt of many patches, many pieces, many colors, many textures, many religions, many sizes. And yet everyone fits somewhere, everybody is somebody.” Jesse Jackson for President Campaign Booklet, 1984

A couple of years after our Rainbow’s promising beginning, much of the local activity we had been building began to dwindle. The Rainbow, built around Jackson’s presidential campaigns, only lasted a few years, as a national force, after his 1988 run.

The lines being drawn were evident at a 1991 Rainbow Conference in DC, even though it was well attended. About 800 people went to a labor breakfast, with local union members and national leaders present. Mainstream Democrats spoke at the conference, making clear their opposition to Jackson running a third time, making clear their distrust of the Rainbow as an independent force. For them, the issue was simple: a choice between Democrats and Republicans. Any attempt to raise issues of war and peace, any attempt to speak directly of racism, any attempt to advocate universal reforms such as national health insurance were dismissed as divisive and as providing an opportunity for Republicans to hold onto power.

Republican gains were all too often the product of the gap between the words of Democratic Party leadership and their deeds in Congress, where they acquiesced time and again to Republican initiatives.

AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Bill Lucy — head of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and a strong supporter of Jackson — challenged that proposition. Agreeing that it was necessary to defeat the Republican nominee in 1992 and put a brake on the cruelty and destructiveness of the policies implemented by the Reagan and first Bush administrations, he also noted that winning an election was by itself not sufficient. Republican gains were, he argued, all too often the product of the gap between the words of Democratic Party leadership and their deeds in Congress, where they acquiesced time and again to Republican initiatives. The answer, Lucy stressed, was in the program and work of the Rainbow — building independent politics from below to address workers’ needs rather than those of corporations, building power from below to stop Republican reaction, to force Democrats to enact needed social legislation.

That evening, Jackson also directed his remarks to that challenge. The Republican reaction maintained its power by inflaming racial tensions and resentment toward women, he said, thereby inhibiting the ability of people to see their common interests. Jackson’s answer — and the answer of the Rainbow — was to open, not close, debate. It was not to ask those who suffer the most to keep silent, but rather for the Democratic Party, for our society, to allow for more democracy, more voices to be heard. Specific demands spoke to specific needs, be it the needs of a young Black teenager unjustly jailed, a farmer losing his land, a woman unable to secure an abortion or another woman subjected to forced sterilization, a trade unionist on strike, or an unemployed family seeking shelter — Jackson and the Rainbow argued that their concrete demands, when pronounced in unison, are the framework for fighting for the common good.

The rest is history. Jackson recognized that he would be unable to replicate his 1988 gains (let alone win the nomination) if he ran a third time; he recognized that a third-party independent run would be marginalized. Neoliberalism within the Democratic Party won out, closing down discussion, compromising on basic rights, putting in place programs that ameliorated some injustices while leaving an unjust system in place. Although Democrats in office were an improvement on Republicans, the fact is that Democratic weakness — the gap between promises and actions Lucy scored, the shutting down of internal debate Jackson decried — enabled Republican gains and led to the situation we currently face: authoritarian reaction without apology in the Trump administration.

The Rainbow’s failure was not only due to the power of its opponents. Its strength was its amorphous, open character. But that contained a weakness, for once the movement lost momentum (when Jackson was no longer campaigning for president), it was hard to maintain cohesion. More important, although the Rainbow was truly a broad-based organization with far-reaching support, it never developed sufficient roots within the broader public on the scale needed. It never reached organizationally those soldiers sent to Iraq, those churchgoers at Bible Way, those locked-out workers in Decatur. Jackson sensed that. When he moved back to Chicago from DC, he also reduced his commitment to the Rainbow, which ceased to be the vehicle for change it had been. But Jackson’s decision isn’t the substantive issue — putting the matter in another way, had the Rainbow built greater strength during its peak years, it may well have survived and thrived.

Life, however, is not about “what ifs.” It is about facing the present by building upon the legacy of the past. The aim of the architects of the Rainbow was to serve as a form of dual power — an independent, multi-racial movement rooted in communities and sections of working people facing the most intense forms of oppression — and to use that base to challenge constituted authority by working with elected officeholders, union leaders, and public personalities in all walks of life who are the other expression of public power. In such a scenario, those two forms of power are mutually supportive even when not fully aligned; they change public understanding, and they have the strength to bring about the structural changes needed to bring to fruition the vision Jackson so beautifully articulated.

Jackson’s presidential campaigns built upon King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (during the course of which King was assassinated), built upon the original Rainbow of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots, built upon the 1972 National Black Political Convention. As Sheila Collins, an activist within, and chronicler of, the Rainbow, wrote: “almost all the top leadership of the Jackson campaign received their political education either in the Civil Rights Movement or one of the other movements generated by it — the Black power movement, the feminist movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Chicano movement, the Native American movement, and various others.”

Likewise, today we can build upon the still living legacy of the Rainbow.

As our societal crisis deepens, the elements are in place to build a transformative movement broader than was evident in the 1980s. We can see that in the impact of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, in the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, Ayanna Presley, Pramila Jayapal, Greg Casar, Zohran Mamdani, Janeese Lewis George, and hundreds more; in the legacy of Occupy and the Black Lives Matter protests; in the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign; in the mass actions and campaigns called by Indivisible, Move On, Our Revolution; in the movement to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis; in the work to protect abortion providers and seekers and to safeguard trans lives; in union organizing by the UAW at auto plants, in nurses’ strikes across the country, in the actions by workers at Amazon and Starbucks; in the movement in solidarity with Palestine and now opposition to the war against Iran. 

And when we look at the enormous crowds who attended Bernie and AOC’s anti-oligarchy tour, we see today a potential for radical transformation. It is up to us to find a way to seize the opportunity by building, organizing, and cohering based on principles rooted in popular participation, not in lines drawn to keep some in and some out.

A path forward lies in putting all these elements together in a way that allows all parts to thrive. It is difficult to see in these dark times, indeed. But possible, yes. For as Jesse reminded us again and again: “Keep Hope Alive.”

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This piece originally ran in the Washington Socialist