How Jesse Jackson Completed the Destruction of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States

Jesse Jackson (1941–2026)

It’s a sad state of affairs when supposed experts on Black history and politics speak of Jesse Jackson as the personification of the fight for Black political power and speak comfortably of him as an American icon. A warrior for justice? Only if we confuse warriors with charlatans and define justice like a fool. One of the problems of remembering him for passionate oratory and populist rhetoric, is while he could excite and incite, he confused his audiences. He tried to speak for oppressed toilers and ambitious scheming capitalists at the same time — that’s what ordinary politicians do.

If he is remembered for the slogan ‘Keep Hope Alive’, just like Barack Obama’s memoir The Audacity of Hope, not enough people could grasp he was giving official society’s imperial conquerors and capitalist crooks a lifeline. In no way was he a voice for the voiceless. Who defined themselves as having no voice?

If he was a trailblazer extraordinaire, we question the integrity of those who admire the paths he paved. If he was a gifted negotiator and dedicated bridge builder this is a peculiar way of saying he subordinated the poor to the rich and powerful. As someone said to have opened doors, there are certain places we should not wish to enter and people we should not wish to associate.

It is crucial to recognize why someone like Jackson could not have possibly advanced the moral conscience of the American nation; unless being a servant leader not of the dispossessed but of its ruling class brings righteousness closer. If Jackson helped project a ‘progressive’ vision for the Democratic Party, it was an idiotic premise that a lesser evil could serve toilers and management at the same time. This is a strange way to claim, as Jackson did, one is advocating education for the illiterate.

The fact that the Democrats had to be convinced (they weren’t) of a multi-class alliance by Jackson only meant that normatively the bourgeois would speak for, appropriate the identity of, and betray commoners. And that is what the imperial party that he was a functionary has always done. For Jackson to be celebrated for challenging the American nation to live up to its highest ideals or promise is to have a false idea of its history and a poor estimate of what it structurally stands for at home and abroad in the post-civil rights, post Black Power era.

Those deranged with apparent expertise commenting on Jesse Jackson’s life and contributions cannot sufficiently address history if they insist on denying that the search for Black empowerment, as a liberation struggle, was once seen as fundamentally in conflict with Imperial American Exceptionalism. Further this transformation, the inclusion of Black people within Imperial American Exceptionalism, has not been an ethical advancement.

While no one personality is monumentally significant, behind certain historical characters are the rise and fall of social motions. By peering behind such types we recall the actual movement, what it was once searching for. It may be that the emerging generation of activists finds no meaning or merit in Jesse Jackson. Yet we cannot resist ethical crises in aspiring Black freedom movements if we don’t study the historical patterns of how they surface.

Jesse Jackson will be remembered for his presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 that paved the way for Barack Obama to be the first Black president and Emperor of the World in 2008. But what this development really personified was the completion of the destruction of the Black freedom movement in the United States. We know this because we can’t even discuss who is qualified to be president without underlining that the qualifications are to preside over conquering, murder, and thievery. It cannot be done ethically. Any forerunner of Black people running (and successfully) for Emperor of the World should be a disturbing figure. Unless whites and Black people are no different in placing their own propertied interests and personal advancement above genuine solidarity with the most oppressed. We should be interested in how the search for social equality can be corrupted. It starts by identifying with hierarchy and what it can deliver us, instead of wishing to abolish it.

The Civil Rights movement (1955–1965), when it was not a direct action movement against white racial fascism in the American South, was stage managed from President Kennedy’s and President Johnson’s White House. Most civil rights advocates (some recognized this strategy was problematic) wished to dismantle the Jim Crow white racial state as partners with the federal government.

The US ruling class, in crisis and substantially discredited, wished to usher in Multi-Cultural America and integrate African Americans into Imperial American Exceptionalism. The passing of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in 1964–1965 was not enough, the impulse to affirmative action moved too slowly to consolidate what were perceived initially as token Black leadership among the managerial elite. There was always a dynamic tension within recognizing this problem. Did the Black freedom movement hate bosses (given their experience of white overseers) or wish the right to be in their number?

The discourse of ‘who’s the man?’ started to reveal a lack of clarity on whether it was empowering to have power above society on the same terms white men did in the past. Did Black people have a special ethic that when integrated into the power structure would transform society?

The Black Power movement (1965–1975), while distinguished by insurgent urban rebellions against police brutality, the Black Arts, Black Studies, and Africa solidarity movements, was torn between socialist-internationalist perspectives and aspirations toward Black capitalism encouraged by President Richard Nixon.

The struggle for radical democratic multi-racial socialist movements and organizations appeared, disappeared, and reappeared with the transitions between Civil Rights and the Black Power movements until the socialist and anti-imperialist content of freedom movements were defeated, and where peculiar coalitions and united fronts emerged around Black city mayors. Long before the discourse of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, emerged in the new millennium, the search for social equality lost its way even among ‘radical’ thinkers.

Too many rallied around equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy, propertied individualism and the management of servile lives among Black people. In 1967 the first Black mayor emerged in Cleveland. From 1970–1976, Black mayors emerged in Newark, Los Angeles, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Gary, Indiana. In the early 1970s, what appeared to be radical Pan African conferences and Black assemblies were actually the subordination of grassroots movements to the new Black electoral machine politics. Soon open collaboration with larger capitalist powers emerged.

Jesse Jackson was initially affiliated with Dr Martin Luther King’s SCLC. At the time of King’s assassination in 1968 as a younger activist he was present when King was killed in Memphis. Following the 1969 assassination of Fred Hampton of the Chicago, Illinois Black Panther Party who tried to build a rainbow coalition of Black Latino and White street gangs, Jackson became a major activist in Chicago who blurred the lines between organizing the grassroots and organizing the opportunity for smaller but aspiring Black capitalists to receive contracts from the state and multi-national corporations. That is what Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH was.

If PUSH stood for People United to Save (later Serve) Humanity, what began as Operation Breadbasket (affiliated with SCLC) combined selective boycotts in search of patronage, Jackson showed soon enough it stood for Black capitalists united to take advantage of counter-revolutionary impulses above and below society for their own personal advancement.

While Jackson developed an amorphous reputation as a ‘progressive’, in the early 1970s before and after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, in the name of civil rights he mobilized people against this reform arguing that the right to privacy (one argument for abortion) justified slavery. Later he used the same slavery metaphor to argue for reproductive freedom. Honest people can evolve on ethical questions. But how can we tell if they are known for carrying out campaigns where they are personally compensated?

Jackson took Dr. King’s ‘Dream’ toward its logical conclusion, equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy under American Exceptionalism. He was often smeared in public discourse suggesting that Jackson was a fraud who lived by myths in contrast to King the saint and martyr. Separate from their personal and intimate lives that too many gossip about, their basic worldviews were the same.

Both played around with a thin version of criticizing capitalism, war and empire, as a veil for pursuing integration into the American power structure. Apparent critiques of institutional racism could allow the aspiring Black elite to gain power (while ludicrously insisting Black people would never have power) and even become part of the ruling class of the country at the local and national level. Superior wealth, equal to the white super-rich, was not the key to ruling class formation in Black communities. Lending the cultural idea that Black people were God’s humanizing agents to commerce and renewal of imperial state power helped earn a place at the table.

Jackson pursued this by maintaining an ambiguous vision of dignity and ‘I am Somebody’ seeking to complete the false historical notion that African Americans were forgotten by the promise of the United States. The US as a historical project, its form of government was either valid or not. While alert to discrimination and dispossession, it could not become legitimized by new ethnicities and genders administrating it. Neither by those who toiled to build the nation’s wealth. The terms of order either can be recommended or must be discarded.

But the Jackson-led search for power under any terms, discarding ethical considerations, would always wield an ambiguity, with different emphasis within the hearing of American national and Black community audiences. The grassroots when it no longer could be rallied to a radical democratic vision would be rallied to narrow narratives of liberal ethnic success that always denounced privilege to otherwise grab for it.

While Jesse Jackson played around with Africa solidarity and Third World themes for a time (when they were popular, he did not invent or fundamentally contribute to enhancing them), before the Anti-Apartheid South Africa solidarity movement came to an end he already accepted and helped shape a vision of the Black United Front. Jackson no longer spoke of ‘Nation-Time’ (in the black nation within a nation sense) but made claims in terms of establishing African Americans’ foundational contributions to building the United States.

When Jesse Jackson started his national campaigns it was at a moment where almost the entire New Left generation (the baby boomer generation), starting with local coalitions, built themselves into the left block of capital and its electoral party, the Democrats. This was preposterous to consider, given that during the 1970s, most of the same social forces demonstrating an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist mentality, claimed to revile and despise it.

When looking back on Jesse Jackson up to 1975, the last year of the Black Power movement, and ten years before he ran for president, he was still held in contempt by radical political critics. The organizational documents of that time associated with Jackson are still timely exactly because they expose the political thinking that destroyed the popularizing of a radical democratic movement within the Black community.

Jackson mobilized the Black community in Chicago like a ward healer. A ward healer is a local district political boss who doles out patronage for mobilizing the vote. Jackson later tried to play a similar role in Washington DC. Though overlapping with some of his supporters, he could not finally overtake the influence of Marion Barry. Whatever his initial discontent with the Richard Daley electoral machine in Chicago (before and after Harold Washington was elected mayor with Jackson’s assistance), social criticism of top-down personalities, usually with implication of ethnic conflict, was made a means of negotiated concessions.

Racism in ethnic politics is very real. But denouncing systems to be bought off by ruling class capitalists as a special method or strategy can be termed corruption if one really is unbought and unbossed. But too many in the name of ‘black power’ and ‘nation-time’ wanted to be someone’s boss and be compensated for collaboration with other ethnic bosses. Jackson personified this tendency toward personal advancement as movement organizer. He was not the first or the last with this disposition. Jackson merely made the most out of it as a race man who was the most successful superstar individualist of his generation posing as a freedom fighter.

Jackson was aware in in the mid 1970s that many community critics thought he was hiding something; particularly the false management of money gathered in the name of community advancement. Jackson did openly convey a messiah complex, that he believed he was born to lead. Jackson peculiarly insisted that Black people don’t have the power to save ‘our people’ but white people do. He meant the super-rich white people and the white statesmen who had the power of budgets to distribute wealth under capitalism. Jackson openly acknowledged that his speaking engagements provided him his personal income and growing signs of personal wealth. But who would pay significant sums to hear a substantial Black liberation speech? No powerful institution would. This should remind us of the protean character of his speeches in ever changing times.

Jackson blurred the lines in this turning point in history between embodying the spiritual qualities of the ‘Black Nation’ and when it was no longer viable for personal advancement the ‘American Nation’. Acknowledging the lack of ethics and integrity of white national leaders, Jackson believed there was an opening for Black leaders to play the role of moral authority.

While his critics saw him as opportunistically playing a role, Jackson insisted he was serious. While PUSH had 60,000 members in 20 cities, its executive board was full of celebrities who wanted to advanced their riches, corporate figures, but also civil rights scholars and activists who over time revealed their Black capitalist tendencies.

Still, Jackson swore that he evolved to be a spiritual force among nameless and faceless Black masses far removed from the commanding heights of influence. This dual character was reasonable if he was an ordinary politician. But he admitted the average politician could not credibly save the soul of America and implied he was something else.

Still, Jackson openly spoke of political power as personified by those who could put people on payrolls and could hand out patronage. He was never a visionary of a new society. But where Black people could pursue power on any terms and many believed this was ‘new’, Jackson was able to expand on this flawed opening in the popular will.

Many saw a dynamic tension between Jackson’s apparent divine words and actual deeds. But this was a result that many did not understand the African American and American Christian jeremiad tradition of preaching. One could apparently in militant tones warn the imperial nation and rulers, while seeking to advise them. The discourse of ‘time running out’ and martyrdom could be placed in the service of the oppressed and its conquerors. Jackson’s rhetoric while leaning toward affirming America instead of condemning it, and his approach to Black capitalism, was very similar to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, who as his ally showed himself eventually to be a friend and liability during his presidential campaigns.

It was absurd to see Jackson before and after his presidential campaigns perceived as a labor leader. But within an American culture marked by trade union hierarchy and Marxist cadre who really were not against capitalism but wished to plan it, with more public and nationalized property, and Black Nationalist trends that overlapped with both bureaucratic sentiments, Jackson emerged as a mass leader of an electoral coalition. Many forget that Jackson’s faction within the Democratic Party during his presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988 were full of Moscow oriented, Maoists, and Black Liberationists (some who returned from Africa), from many cities from Detroit to Atlanta, who had given up on projections of a new society. Some cynically, others enthusiastically, were renewing their ‘American’ affinities.

When Jackson addressed the Democratic Convention in 1984 and began by saying ‘tonight we come together bound by faith… with genuine respect and love for our country’ we should have no doubt he personally meant it. Given all the crimes against oppressed people before and since it was not a sign of moral or ethical leadership at all. It was an address to a convention of professionals and elites, in this session overwhelmingly of Black people, who liked to pose as an assembly of the people, who shaking glossy signs for Jackson or another preferred candidate, knew they would be compensated (directly or indirectly) to do so. That is what the Democratic National Convention has always been, a unification of the local and state bureaucracies of those who like to pretend.

When Jackson said the Democratic Party ‘was not a perfect party, we are not a perfect people, but we are called to a perfect mission’ it was very Christian of him. But was he speaking for Jesus or Caesar? When Jesse Jackson said his ‘constituency’ was ‘the desperate, the damned, the disinherited’ it was not true. Or in the worst way, he was helping them carry their cross where their freedom dreams would be given the death penalty.

Nobody who ever claimed to follow Jackson’s words as a moral leader ever ceased siding with those who nailed the ‘disrespected’ and the ‘despised’ to that cross. That is why imperial presidents of both parties salute him today while others were killed, made political prisoners, or struggled with the rent money all their lives while Jackson early came to personally live the lush life.

Those who become self-directed and not powerless take the initiative without being led around by people who are saluted by those who either don’t know where they are going, or always have gone in for personal advancement and falsely termed this a communal achievement. It is nutty to accept that Jackson was a voice of ‘conscience’ if one really knows the heritage and pillars of the Black radical tradition.

Many with a long memory remember the great songstress Roberta Flack singing about ‘Reverend Lee’, a Southern Black Minister, who she apparently loved for his strength and sexiness who ‘thought he had his program altogether’ but who was full of himself. What were the real goals of his political platform?

Jackson wielded a ‘Kingdom Theory’ for urban redevelopment to make alliances with bankers and corporate entities to promote branded consumer items that appeared to be independent Black economic production but were partnerships with those who owned the means of production with new “pro-black’ or ‘African-centered’ labels. Projecting ownership of Black businesses suggested a false collective impulse where this would determine in a hierarchy who would be the accountants and minimum wage clerks, what janitorial, salvage, and exterminator services would be hired. This vision also bragged it would hire Black contractors to do construction. And that it would make sure community and school boards gave contracts to Black businesses. And Black foremen and supervisors would be appointed or find work. It was a vision of Black Power, with a Christian veneer, that promised every social class in a hierarchical vision of the community empowerment, while keeping them in their exact place. To suggest then that the Black community needed to know they had the authority of kings in their dominions showed this was an appeal to the false logic of encouraging the poor to identify with ‘building their own empire.’

Jackson on a national level promoted Black Expo which before the Age of the Internet, made a type of concert tour or mobile flea market for Black capitalists to trade their wares, from t-shirts and hats, to films and music. But opportunity was also created for multi-national corporations normative markets to expand to Black communities, and these and universities and city governments would also be able to advertise employment or scholarship opportunities.

As Jackson increasingly had a vision of networking Black media and banks owned by, and friendly to lending to, Black capitalists, soon he would make ‘covenants’ with multi-national beer and soda-pop companies. They would agree to work toward what later would be called diversity and inclusion goals all up and down their operations. Under Jackson’s advice, they would contract services with Black businesses, hire Blacks in supervisor and wage-earning roles, engage minority doctors for medical care, minority lawyers, minority owned transportation services, and minority advertisers. Jackson would use his sway for wealthy and high profile Black celebrities to purchase factories or distributorships. The Black grassroots, where seeing Black Power as Black capitalism delighted in the advancement of their overseers as if they were partners.

The most important thing to understand about all this was where Jackson responded to concerns of racism, discrimination or labor grievances, just as a trade union bureaucracy negotiates contracts in exchange for making rebellion go away, his extraction of concessions was a counter-insurgency strategy. This approach allowed for his partnerships with white owned multi-national capitalists and city and state governments to deliver power to his affiliates, while disorganizing and demoralizing the insurgent.

When we understand that Jesse Jackson led boycotts of Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Budweiser, Burger King, and Kroger (or joined these to toilers protesting at these workplaces), the securing of jobs for managerial elites and contracts for Black capitalists meant subversion of grassroots discontents. Unless we believe Black workers were advanced by the capitalist endeavors of Bill Cosby, Julius Erving, Hank Aaron and Jackson’s own family members.

Jesse Jackson after his presidential campaigns evolved to be a mobilizer of the vote disciplined to the professional bureaucracy of the Democratic Party. Perhaps he always controlled a wing of it until Barack Obama showed up. In response to the Bush/Gore election recount controversy in Florida, Jackson first appeared in that state and prepared to mobilize activists to go down to Florida from Chicago. But when the Imperial Democratic Party conceded, Jackson ceased to mobilize and brought his stage-managed protest to an end. When Jackson is historically understood, one can then begin to comprehend how false ‘activism’ is orchestrated in the name of the Black church in a plurality of local communities.

This reminds us that both Democrats and Republicans suppress (or don’t wish to count) the vote. Close observers of presidential elections, following the Trump/Biden election, came to a realization. All their life the winner of presidential elections was announced the same night or the next morning exposing the vote normatively in fact is rarely or never counted.

A shadow senator for Washington DC, an advisor to President Bill Clinton, Jackson was also an informal diplomat and special envoy traveling to Syria, Iraq, Cuba, Kenya, Yugoslavia, and Ireland. What is called Jackson’s ‘international activism’ almost always was imperial government sponsored and showed how he was blessed by national security authorities. He certainly didn’t travel around representing American government interests as an anti-imperialist. If Jackson spoke at many anti-war demonstrations, few realize how these are orchestrated by activists close to the Democratic Party.

An apparent social-democratic voice in official politics that had already discarded the welfare state of mind as too extreme, Jackson was exemplary of a historical and political problems still with us. While white supremacy in the United States denied Black people the vote from 1896–1964 under Jim Crow lynch law, what is denied we should now know is not inherently empowering. Many have come to an understanding. Despite a desire to honor ancestors who could not vote, the vote is a tool of oppression in a nation-state or republic where in the name of democracy in fact a minority (as in a few) rules above society.

Jesse Jackson, the personification of the professional vote mobilizer never explained to his public transparently, as no aspiring wealthy and powerful professional vote mobilizers do, behind mighty fine speeches (and some that make us yawn), what will exactly be delivered to ordinary people for their vote? Whatever is delivered to a few Black toilers, as a social class, they will be kept in their place. It could be argued that Jackson’s activism transformed the search for equality to equity, propertied top-down stakes in an imperial project. It was like being responsible for the redefinition of the word liberty to mean chains.

Some who mourn Jesse Jackson give him credit for initially speaking of multi-racial unity and defending women and LGBTQ together, and for raising Palestine solidarity in public political life for the first time forty years ago. This is outrageously false. He raised sentiments found first in insurgent freedom movements and placed them in a faction of the national bureaucracy of official society’s electoral politics. This means he was a transmission belt to the demise of popular self-directed liberation movements.

Jesse Jackson, quiet as its kept a friend of Donald Trump, was a master of the machine politics of elite brokerage and ethnic patronage that in the transition from the Black Power movement destroyed the element of the Black freedom movement that was in search of a new society, that wished to take a democracy of local people and social equality seriously, and instead planted African American identity firmly in the center of Imperial American Exceptionalism. The fact that many view Barack Obama, another counterfeit activist for hierarchical government, as an intelligent and ethical person, even a great statesmen, and have lost the habit of thinking of themselves as bringing a new society closer, has a genealogy that goes back to Jesse Jackson. That Jesse Jackson shared tears with many Americans on the night that Barack Obama was elected does not show how far formerly enslaved populations have come.

Rather, it shows how in post-civil rights, post-Black Power America it is difficult to renew freedom movements, where we don’t understand what the content of the job of Emperor of the World really is, the character of functionaries who serve them, and few can stand up to the minority who rule above Black communities who have stolen ordinary people’s name, image, and likeness. If Jesse Jackson inspired generations of Black Democrats, that is who is administrating police brutality, mass incarceration, labor exploitation, and poverty in Black communities today. This reveals the emptiness of his words and how they really were understood.