“Talking to…Jesse Jackson,” by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, was originally published in the January 1988 issue of Vogue.
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One of the most dynamic forces on the political scene today, forty-six-year-old presidential candidate Jesse Louis Jackson grew up in the segregated South. He attended an all-Black high school, where he was star quarterback and a popular class leader, while working at Greenville, North Carolina’s all-white hotel and the all-white golf course—an experience that gave him the motivation that helped to propel him “from the back of the bus to the front of the polls.” An active participant in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, as an aide to Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jackson is that movement’s living logical next step—a man who has moved from protest to politics.
When Jackson made his first bid for the presidency in 1984, his role as a “super gadfly” effectively articulating issues in the Black community garnered him unprecedented Black support: “Run, Jesse, run,” could be heard from Black churches in the South to the more sedate living rooms of Black urban professionals. Since then, Jackson—who is married with five children—has been working to broaden his base beyond the Black community to form a “rainbow coalition” made up of groups he’s described as “the damned, disinherited, disrespected, and despised.” The chant this time is, “Win, Jesse, win.”
Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Early in this century, W.E.B. Du Bois said: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” What does it say to you that you are the front-runner in a field of white candidates, but the majority of white people say they won’t vote for somebody Black?
Jesse Jackson: The point is how the question is put. If you ask, Will you support a Black president?, the answer no is almost instinctual. Ask instead, Will you support someone who will stop drugs from flowing into this country and stop jobs from flowing out, who will put our foreign policy on track and restore our credibility? Many people would say yes. Does it matter if he’s Black? No, we want the problems solved. Depending on how the question is put, people will rise to the challenge. My confidence grows out of watching twenty-five years of rather pronounced social growth in this country.
I believe there’s a lot of hope in Archie Bunker. Archie Bunker’s daughter is dating interracially. Archie Bunker’s son protests Central American policy, South African policy. Archie Bunker protests Blacks’ moving down the street from him—but he doesn’t move. He complains, but his children go to public school, not Catholic school. He complains, but he works in an assembly line with Blacks and Hispanics. He’s in the stadium, in the bleachers, in the rainbow. Over a twenty-five-year period, Archie Bunker has become a much better person, a much more integrated person.
CHG: How do you consider race relations today, in light of the violent racial incidents that occurred in Howard Beach, New York, and Forsyth County, Georgia?
JJ: To the extent that racial divisions are instituted by law and perpetuated by leaders, there’s a problem. What’s different today is that there are legal constraints against racial violence. But many people live indirectly through television, where Blacks and Hispanics are projected every day as less intelligent, less hard-working, less patriotic, more violent. To the extent that we can pull down the walls separating the American public, people will begin to see the sameness of everybody else’s predicament.
CHG: No matter how you slice it, your relationship with Jewish people and your failure to repudiate Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan still keep coming up.
JJ: That bothers me, but all you really can do is keep on reaching out to people. But reaching out is a two-way street. You hope that you can build upon things you have in common—a coalition for jobs and peace and justice. We have more support among Jewish citizens than before. We can only hope that our relationship will improve.
CHG: To what extent does the media’s description of you as a front-runner “for now” become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
JJ: I have learned to let underestimation inspire me, and not depress me. The polls, the “big political analysts,” completely misread the picture of my last campaign and candidacy. They had no way of assessing the number of people that I would bring into the process. They said I couldn’t survive the campaign. They said I’d get a hundred delegates. I got four hundred sixty-five.
The last time I was on the cover of Time, the headline said something like this: The real significance of the Jackson candidacy lies in the forces it may unleash. I think that is a sound analysis. We unleashed a vote across the South that changed the makeup of the U.S. Senate—at the height of Reagan’s popularity. It liberated the Black vote and liberalized the South.
CHG: How significant is Super Tuesday?
JJ: Super Tuesday creates the possibility of a New South coalition that could affect the presidency and the direction of domestic and foreign policy. Basically, in ’86, across the South, the senators and representatives elected got only about 40% of the white vote. Yet they won—because of a new coalition, made progressive by a new generation of voters.
CHG: Black voters.
JJ: Yes. And these legislators used interesting rationales against Supreme Court nominee Bork—that he was an extremist, insensitive to workers, Blacks, women, to our rights to privacy. For Southern senators and congressmen, that’s a historically different cultural and political orientation.
CHG: If you were to sweep Super Tuesday, that would create havoc in the Democratic Party, because the Democrats are trying to get the party into the center, and you’re taking it to the left.
JJ: The issue is not the left or right. Because of my presence, the party is more stimulated now to go forward. My position is, cut the military budget without cutting defense. All the candidates agree with that now. They all agree with me that national corporations must pay their share of taxes, that we must shift from merging and leveraged buyouts to reinvesting in America. Gephardt and Dukakis now agree that it may be necessary to support the ANC in South Africa. This is the success of my campaign. These candidates hadn’t taken those positions before.
Most politicians nurture their constituencies. I build and nurture, following civil-rights techniques. I registered two million new Democrats who hated Bork. Well, that’s better than any other Democrat’s done in the last ten years. So I built a constituency for myself. And for our cause—fighting for rights for the disabled, rights for women, civil rights, for worker’s rights, and for a foreign policy in Central America and South Africa that’s coherent and sound. This is politically feasible, intellectually sound, and in our national interests at the same time. And it’s morally correct.
CHG: I want to follow up on that notion of morality because there is a perception that there is a morality crisis in America, particularly among politicians.
JJ: If one’s behavior affects national interests and national security, it’s a matter of discussion. But in a democracy, it’s a mistake to apply the puritanical ethical standards of one’s faith to the constitutional government. Some of the behaviors now being judged by the press are not illegal; they are sins. Well, the church deals with sin. The law deals with crime. Of course, right now, the media are just obsessed with sex and immorality. They’re less interested in sexism and racism, both of which are illegal.
CHG: Why are they less interested?
JJ: If you put the focus on racism and sexism, those who write, publish, and program may get the lens turned on them. People try to write away from their weakness.
CHG: Is it valid for a reporter to ask you about something that is true but happened in your private life?
JJ: Such a matter is among me and my family, my conscience, and my God.
CHG: But how important is character?
JJ: Character’s very important. You can’t condone immorality or human weakness. But you have to understand that since nobody’s perfect, you simply have to accept the limitations of all public servants, and get the best out of them that you can. Once you start judging private morality as opposed to public service, you move further and further from what you want to do, which is to uphold the law or to create law. We respect freedom of the press for all the right reasons, but we also respect rights of privacy.
CHG: Could intense media scrutiny chill people’s desires to go into public life?
JJ: I doubt it. It’ll probably drive people into being more discreet. It’s not going to stop somebody who has a drive to be mayor, congressman, senator, governor, president.
CHG: It’s assumed that even if you don’t get the nomination, you’ll play a major role in selecting the nominee. Can you give the party an identity?
JJ: Right now, I’m leading the mainstream Democratic Party. The party is the people who make it up. It’s gaining an identity because it has new blood. There’s more water in the stream. Last time around, hot and cold water came together. No trauma. When hot and cold water come together, the hot water becomes a little cooler, and the cold water becomes a little hotter. They flow together into a broad mainstream.
CHG: When I asked you back in ’84, Are you going to win this nomination?, you said there were all kinds of definitions of winning: registering more voters, getting more people concerned about issues. Is that still the way you define winning?
JJ: That was correct then, and it’s correct now. We did register more voters. We are responsible for the Senate’s going back to Democrats. We did increase the number of progressive officials. We’re winning. This time, we will win the nomination, too.