AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Reverend Jesse Jackson is an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and a protege of Martin Luther King Jr. But he was also a politician whose groundbreaking campaigns in the 1980s would eventually pave the way for the first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama. Here's Jackson addressing the Democrats during his 1988 presidential campaign.
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JESSE JACKSON: Support economic development. You know it's right. Be consistent and gain our moral authority in the world. I challenge you tonight, my friends. Let's be bigger and better as a nation and as a party.
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RASCOE: A new book by CNN anchor Abby Phillip charts Jackson's rise and his political legacy. It's called "A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson And The Fight For Black Political Power." Abby Phillip joins us now. Welcome to the program.
ABBY PHILLIP: Thank you so much for having me, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So this book looks at how Jesse Jackson became one of the most powerful and influential Black politicians of his time, but a lot has changed. What made you want to explore that now?
PHILLIP: It's exactly for that reason that I wrote this book because a lot of people think of Reverend Jackson today as a civil rights leader, as an activist. And they kind of skip completely over this extraordinary chapter when he was, as you put it, one of the most powerful if not the most influential and powerful Black figures in politics.
And that chapter of his very long life as a public figure, even at the time that he was running, was not very well understood. He was viewed as something of a kind of gadfly type of figure, somebody who was running to make a point. But it was only until decades later that it really became clear how prescient he was, both on the issues and also in terms of the rule changes that he ushered in that allowed for, most notably, Barack Obama to become the Democratic nominee in 2008.
RASCOE: You know, what you get from the book is how extraordinary Jesse Jackson's rise was. I mean, from the Jim Crow South - and I didn't realize that Jackson had this complicated father relationship he had. He was raised by his...
PHILLIP: Yeah.
RASCOE: ...Stepfather, but his birth father was this prominent neighbor of his who was married and had a whole other family. How did that complicated dynamic affect Jackson?
PHILLIP: He was a man in search of a father, and that's partly how he ended up in the orbit of Dr. King. You know, when I'd spoke to Ambassador Andy Young, who was Dr. King's closest aide, he said, you know, when Jesse Jackson came into the circle, he wanted both King and Young to be father figures to him even though they were just a few years older than him. They weren't old enough to be his father.
RASCOE: Yeah.
PHILLIP: But he was a man sort of yearning for that kind of connection, that mentorship and a sense of purpose.
RASCOE: Eventually there comes a point where it's run, Jesse, run. Jackson does run in 1984, but he's really hurt by claims of, like, antisemitism...
PHILLIP: Yeah.
RASCOE: ...And his use of this derogatory term for Jewish people. What do you think he learned from that initial campaign...
PHILLIP: Yeah.
RASCOE: ...That set him up for 1988?
PHILLIP: I think that the '84 campaign surprised even him in the sense that it resonated that he was able to get millions of voters. He was starting to get the interest of white voters, that there was something about what he was arguing for, which is that - which is basically core populism at its heart, which is essentially that the working people need to unite together in an agenda against a government and an economic system that benefits the wealthy and the powerful.
What he didn't take away was that politics is very different from being a moral leader, a religious leader or an activist. And his ties to figures like Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, were devastating for him. Farrakhan was a constant presence in the 1984 campaign, creating negative headlines and reinforcing this perception that Jesse Jackson was antisemitic. And Jackson did not want to denounce people just in general. And when I'd spoke to people around him, I just kept asking them, why? And a lot of people said it's because of his belief that you don't abandon anybody. And politicians, frankly, wouldn't do that.
RASCOE: Yeah.
PHILLIP: And I think Jesse Jackson hadn't really learned. In fact, maybe he didn't even want to be a politician in that respect.
RASCOE: Well, what could modern movements like Black Lives Matter, you know, et cetera, learn from Jackson, especially with the current attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion?
PHILLIP: Jackson is a student of the Civil Rights Movement, and so he was focused not just on the message but also on the strategy and using the political system as a means to an end. And I do think that, in a way, the political movements, perhaps like Black Lives Matter and others - the activist movements, I should call them - today have figured out the protest part of it but never really figured out the power part of it.
And I do think that is a core lesson of Jesse Jackson's - his own personal move from activism to actually figuring out how to operate within the political system, to put people in power that can execute on those goals. And we haven't seen that happen - which is one of the reasons why it seems that the backlash is winning, frankly - to the sort of movement of the 2020s where there was this big conversation about race in America.
But it's also fair to say that this cycle of protest and reform and then backlash is a normal American cycle. And even in those cycles of backlash - which also existed in the 1970s and the 1980s at this exact time that Jackson was running - those backlash cycles do happen, and there are setbacks. And even still, that doesn't mean that the story is over.
RASCOE: That's Abby Phillip. She's the host of CNN's "NewsNight With Abby Phillip" and the author of "A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson And The Fight For Black Political Power." Thank you so much for joining us today.
PHILLIP: Thank you so much for this. I appreciate it.
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