Activism / February 19, 2026
Jackson’s lessons for today’s Democrats.
Rev. Jesse Jackson addresses supporters ahead of the 1988 Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses, February 1, 1988. (Jean-Louis Atlan/Sygma via Getty Images) In 2000, I had the opportunity to spend some intense hours with Jesse Jackson, when he and his son Jesse Jackson Jr., then in Congress, collaborated with me on a book about capital punishment. Commitments across the country kept the elder Jackson constantly on the road, so I took time to write with him in hotel rooms, airport lounges, breakfast restaurants.
It was the year of the Bush-Gore presidential election, and almost every time I came in, Jesse was working the phones. I was able to hear a strikingly different style of persuasion than the stentorian public speaker I had covered intermittently. Jesse’s off-camera political voice was generally forgiving: he connected gently, cajoled with humor, made deals with the artful rhythm and grace of a choreographer. Jesse held in his head a map of the grassroots Democratic Party nationally: Which clergy could organize church busing in East St. Louis? What banker could organize a campaign donation in Des Moines? Which local could rock Maryland? Jesse knew all the players, knew the tone and the particular words that would spur each to action. He was the great national Democratic president we never had.
After Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, I often thought about Jesse’s relentless grassroots organizing at the neighborhood level, especially when I looked at the 2024 election results in my own city of New Haven and realized how far Democratic turnout had fallen since 2020: another election lost, in the words of Jesse’s 1984 Democratic Convention speech, “on the margins of our despair.” Our current catastrophe is the sum total of tactics adopted by two generations of liberal campaign technocrats, with their eyes on deep-pocketed contributors and computer modeling, who willfully ignored the lessons of Jackson’s transformational, cross-class, cross-racial upheaval.
Jesse’s obituaries in the mainstream media dutifully note the complications and contradictions of his career. (The best assessment of much of the media coverage of his death can be found in Jesse’s own book. 1984 SNL opening monologue. Look it up.) But I thought about the issues that Jackson simply continued to dwell on, unfazed by the changing political winds. One of them was capital punishment. In 2000, the Clinton administration expanded the death penalty to the federal level. Racially coded mandatory minimum sentences have been adopted across the country; criminal justice reform was defeated, and soon 9/11 would spark a new national race to the bottom on human rights. No politician had anything to gain at the time (or ever) by writing a book arguing for the abolition of the death penalty—let alone anything remotely resembling Jackson’s investment of several thousand hours, throughout his career, intervening with death row inmates in the United States and abroad.
Jesse could read a room with extraordinary acuity. Like Babe Ruth gesturing to the bleachers before hitting a home run, he would choose which politician, at a breakfast or rally, was about to approach him for an autograph or a favor, and in my experience, he was always right. But during these few months of working together, I also saw another side: some days, how difficult it could be to be Jesse Jackson. He sometimes woke up exhausted, faced with a day of more than 20 hours, with frayed nerves and dark circles under his eyes. His aides would persuade him to put his suit and tie back on. But then he would walk into the hotel hallway and instantly resume his role as Jesse Jackson. He had perfected this skill in instantaneous transformation for the benefit of the maid or doorman who, every day, wherever he was staying, almost immediately approached him to share a moment of grace: a word, a touch or a blessing from the man who had moved them to say out loud: “I am someone.”
Bruce Shapiro Bruce Shapiro, editor-in-chief of The nationis executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
