By the Freedom Road Socialist Organization African American Commission
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. was an icon of the Civil Rights movement. Forged in the fire of racial terror, he emerged from the brutal Jim Crow era as a steward of freedom fighters, whose contributions were made evident by his activities throughout his life.
Jesse Jackson followed in the wake of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, who fought to take the Democratic Party out of the grip of Dixiecrat control based on the disenfranchisement of Black people in the Black Belt South. Rev. Jackson built on that foundation and pushed for more reforms, which dealt with issues of equality, including jobs and housing for Black people.
His campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 electrified a generation of progressives. He swept the South in 1988, winning Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina and the District of Columbia, amplifying the power of an oppressed people’s aspirations for political power and democracy. He brought Black people into the mainstream of bourgeois politics, contributing to a tidal wave of Black candidates in electoral races. Marxist-Leninists supported the Jackson campaigns, recognizing them as an expression of the democratic sentiments of an African American national movement.
Rev. Jackson took a just stance both domestically and internationally. He promoted the South Africa divestment campaign and opposed U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, Iran and the Gulf War. He was the first Black national leader to address Palestinian statehood and anti-apartheid divestment in a courageous way during his campaign.
A monumental figure of the Civil Rights movement, he is the last of the leaders out of the 1960s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, emerging directly from the Martin Luther King Jr. movement. The thrust of his campaigns carried forward the struggle for Black political power, a component part of Black liberation. We extend our condolences to his wife Jackie and to all his family. His legacy reminds us that the struggle for freedom is constant.
