Starting hands with other eminent black leaders, Reverend Jesse Jackson crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 9, 2025, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of “Bloody. “Like several survivors of this day violated in 1965, when the police brutally attacked civil rights demonstrators, Jackson crossed the bridge in wheelchair.
Jesse Louis Jackson was born October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South CarolinaA city firmly rooted in the south racically segregated in the south. This time and this place are not football notes in Jackson’s life, but rather key facts that have shaped his Civil rights activism And Historical races for the American presidency.
Growing up in the separate southern jackson’s attitudes, opinions and perspectives so as to avoid today. While living in Chicago for most of his adult life, he has remained a southern. And other southerners considered him as such.
Jackson biographer David Masciotra said The South gave Jackson “an idea of the oppression and the persecution he wanted to fight”.
As scholars of southern politics, we consider Jackson’s southern identity as essential to understand his life. Southerners often identify With the region, even after leaving the South Geographic. As the sociologist John Shelton Reed wrote once, the South more to do with attitude than latitude.
A separate childhood
In South Carolina of Jackson youth, water fountains, bathrooms, swimming pools and counters for lunch were all separated. While the whites of his age frequented Greenville high school, Jackson attended the Sterling All-Black high school, where he was a star quarter and class president.
His experience of segregation has shaped how Jackson considers his life.
“I continue to think of the chances,” Jackson told his biographer and his South Carolinian compatriot Marshall Frady In 1988, I am marveling from the “responsibility I have now against what I expected to do at this stage of life”.
“Even the wickedness of segregation could not penetrate me and steal my soul”, ” He said later to Frady.
If Jackson had been white, a star student like him could have registered at Clemson University or the University of South Carolina. Or he could have said yes when he was Offer a contract to play professional baseball.
Instead, Jackson rejected the contract because the salary would be about six times less than a white player and went north, at the University of Illinois.
He did not find a more welcoming atmosphere in Champaign, Illinois. According to the biographer Barbara ReynoldsThe segregation he thought he had left “his appeared in Illinois to convince him that it was not the place to be”.
In the fall of 1960, Jackson was transferred to the Caroline du Nord Agricultural and Technical University, a Historically Black College In Greensboro, in North Carolina, to finish her sociology diploma.
His return to the South marked the emergence of Jackson as the leader of the Crying Civil Rights movement.
Greensboro was A center of this struggleWith large regular demonstrations, often led by local colored students. Six months before his arrival in Greensboro, four black students from North Carolina A&T refused to leave the Woolworth lunch counter reserved for reserved whitesLaunch of a sit-in movement that quickly attracted national attention.
Jackson himself conducted events to integrate Greensboro companies. After Pivot students At the town hall, he was arrested and accused of incitement to a riot. In prison, Jackson wrote a “Letter from a Greensboro prison“A rhetorical point of the hat to the” Birtingham letter “by Martin Luther King Jr.
A movement towards the north
The second Jackson movement towards the north in 1964 remained.
Like so many other black southerners who participated in what became later known as “Second great migration“, Jackson went to Chicago. He attended the Chicago Theological Seminary, inspired not by a deep love of the Scriptures but by what Jackson perceived as the capacity of the Church to do good on this earth.
As president of North Carolina A&T, Dr. Sam Proctor, Jackson recommended“You don’t have to enter the ministry because you want to save people from a burning hell. It may be because you want to see his kingdom coming to earth as he is in heaven.
Jackson thought of his time in Chicago “Would be calm and peaceful and I could think.”
It was anything but. Following the King path and other militants of inspired civil rights, Jackson continued his organization of civil rights, leading operation Breadbasket, a King initiative Boycott of companies that did not use black workers.
African-American newspapers / Gado / Getty
Presidential aspirations
In the coming years, Jackson has undertaken more and more high -level organized, with a reason for King’s life and work – another southern. As a former king Help Bernard Lafayette said once“I mean, he cloned from Martin Luther King.”
In 1984, Jackson turned to politics. He became the second African-American to present himself to the highest office in the country, according to the traces of Shirley Chisholm and its 1972 candidacy.
AdvertiseJackson is committed to “helping to restore a moral tone, a redemptive spirit and a sensitivity to the poor and to the dispossession of this nation”.
But the campaign always represented more than a political platform. Jackson wanted to mobilize more Americans to vote and come to the elections, especially the “speechless and oppressed”.
Jackson finished third in the 1984 democratic primary but with remarkably strong performance, taking 18% of all primary votes. He played particularly well south of the Mason-Dixon line, winning both Louisiana and the Columbia district. He also performed well in the Mississippi And Caucus Democrats de Caroline du Sud.
This surprising success inspired Jackson to present himself again as the presidency. In 1988, he did even better, win nearly 7 million votes and 11 competitionsAnd sweep the south during the primary season.
Diana Walker / Getty Images
He won the South Carolina caucus and the Super Tuesday of the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virgina. In his second round, Jackson more than doubled his share of white voteFrom 5% in 1984 to 12% in 1988.
Jackson finished second in the Democrat primary to the Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis, who would go to Losing the 1988 presidential election in George HW Bush. But the solid results of Jackson have reinforced its major position of figure in American policy and a Power broker in the Democratic Party.
An imposing figure in American policy
The two presidential races of Jesse Jackson fundamentally changed the American political landscape.
Beyond being the first black candidate to win a primary state competition, Jackson also helped put an end to the main system by which the winner of a State would receive all the delegates of the State. Jackson claimed the system injure black and minority candidates And recommended to implement reforms which had been recommended for the first time after the 1968 democratic primary.
At the time, the party had pushed a system in which the delegates could be allocated On the basis of the proportion of the vote won by each candidateBut it was not adopted in each state.
From 1992, after the intervention of Jackson, candidates receiving at least 15% Voting officially received a proportion of delegates. These reforms have opened the possibility that a minority candidate can guarantee democratic appointment by a more proportional allowance of the delegates.
Jackson’s history also strengthened the Importance of the black church in black political mobilization.
Perhaps the most important, Jackson has widened the size and diversity of the electorate and inspired a Generation of African Americans To search for functions.
“It is because people like Jesse have run that I have this opportunity to present themselves to the presidency today”, ” said Barack Obama in 2007.
Buyenlange / Getty images
The long strategy of the South
Jackson’s political increase coincided with and probably encouraged The exodus of racily conservative white voters outside the Democratic Party.
The Republican Party Long South Strategy – an opportunistic plan to cultivate white voters from the south by capitalizing on “white racial anxiety»And conservative social values - had been in progress before Jackson’s presidential offers. But his concentration on social and economic justice has undoubtedly helped Drive the conservative whites from the south of the GOP.
Today, Some political thinkers question If a distinct “Southern policy“Continue to exist.
Jesse Jackson’s life and career reflects that this place still has – even for people who have left this region for colder pastures.