Bishop William Barber II is the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and was a friend and mentee of Jesse Jackson:

Peter Applebome writes:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and forgotten made him the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama, died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by his family in a statement, which said that Mr. Jackson “died peacefully” but did not give a cause.

Mr. Jackson was hospitalized in November for treatment of a rare and particularly severe neurodegenerative condition, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), according to the advocacy organization he founded, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. In 2017, he announced that he had Parkinson’s disease, which in its early stages can produce similar effects on bodily movements and speech.

Mr. Jackson picked up the mantle of Dr. King after his assassination in 1968 and ran for president twice, long before Mr. Obama’s election in 2008. But he never achieved either the commanding moral stature of Dr. King or the ultimate political triumph attained by Mr. Obama.

Instead, through the power of his language and his preternatural energy and ambition, he became a moral and political force in a racially ambiguous era, when Jim Crow was still a vivid memory and Black political power more an aspiration than a reality.

With his gospel of seeking common ground, his pleas to “keep hope alive” and his demands for respect for those seldom accorded it, Mr. Jackson, particularly in his galvanizing speeches at the Democratic conventions in 1984 and 1988, enunciated a progressive vision that defined the soul of the Democratic Party, if not necessarily its policies, in the last decades of the 20th century.

It was a vision, animated by the civil rights era, in which an inclusive coalition of people of color and others who had been at the periphery of American life would now move to the forefront and transform it.

“My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” Mr. Jackson said in the rolling cadences of the pulpit at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. “They are restless and seek relief.” [Continue reading…]

In March, 1988, William Greider wrote:

Every seat in the high-school auditorium in Hibbing, Minnesota, was filled, and all the white faces strained forward, caught up in the black preacher’s melodramatic cadences: “Save the family,” the preacher intoned. “Save the farms … Save the environment … Save our jobs in America.”

The Reverend Jesse Jackson‘s audience picked up the beat and cheered. Jackson was addressing a group of hearty and hard-working Midwesterners, iron miners and their wives and their glowingly blond children — not exactly a funky audience. But as Jerry Garcia once said about disco music, Jesse Jackson’s beat is so strong that even white folks can dance to it.

“If a mother has two pork chops and three children, she doesn’t get rid of one child,” Jackson thundered. “She cuts up the pork chops and makes gravy.”

Nobody in Hibbing had trouble understanding what pork chops and gravy meant. The iron range of northern Minnesota is one of those places where the lives of working people have been devastated in the 1980s. Jackson was speaking to their pain and anger and fears — bills piling up from long layoffs, kids who can’t afford to go to college or are messed up on drugs, old people terrified by hospital bills.

Above all, Jackson left these people with hope born of his analysis of what’s wrong with the American economy and his agenda for halting the deterioration — restoring growth, jobs and equity. Jackson’s plan, in brief, would reverse the priorities of the Reagan Eighties — shifting scarce capital from the production of useless defense weapons to productive industries; shifting income through taxation and spending from the luxurious top to the broad middle class as well as to the neglected bottom.

“Together we cannot be defeated;’ Jackson concluded. “I stood with you! I want you to stand with me!” The white audience was on its feet at the end, fired up by Jackson’s exhortations.

This is an extraordinary show, probably the most compelling spectacle of the 1988 campaign. Jesse Jackson has learned how to do crossover politics. In 1984 he played mostly black venues. This time he is talking to white working-class audiences in a language that speaks to their distress. When I followed his zigzag trail across the Midwest recently — a paper workers’ strike in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Teamsters hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a crammed college gym in Duluth, Minnesota — everywhere the response to him was stunning. The same show has played to raves across the white South and in northern industrial cities. [Continue reading…]