Jackson’s two presidential runs brought the civil rights movement into the heart of the Democratic party and opened doors for others to walk through
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He witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Forty years later, he joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Barack Obama’s election victory and had tears streaming down his face.
Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, was hailed by Martin Luther King III and his wife Andrea King as “a living bridge between generations”. He was the most influential African American political voice between King and Obama. His two runs for the Democratic nomination created the imaginative space for a Black president. He was the architect of a “rainbow coalition” that shapes the Democratic party today.
The legacy of Jackson’s commitment to expand voting rights, back marriage equality, pursue racial justice and combine a progressive agenda with Christian values lives on in figures such as Senator Raphael Warnock and Bishop William Barber and movements such as Black Lives Matter. His push to sanction apartheid South Africa, embrace Palestinian rights and oppose the Iraq war were a blueprint for the left’s foreign policy.
