With the fight to preserve voting rights, Jesse Jackson's message still resonates
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My fellow Americans, it is my honor to introduce the next president of the United States of America, the Reverend Jesse Lewis Jackson.
In 1984, Reverend Jesse Jackson took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. It was his first presidential campaign, and his speech was an urgent call to action. We are now the perfect people. Yet we are called to a perfect mission, our mission to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to teach the illiterate, to provide jobs for the jobless, and to choose the human race over the nuclear race. Jackson's rousing remarks called upon voters to be a part of a rainbow coalition. of disenfranchised Americans and people of color. My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised. They are restless and seek relief.
They have voted in record numbers. They have invested the faith, hope, and trust that they have in us.
Well, let me just tell you that as a young kid growing up in public housing down in Savannah, Georgia, Jesse Jackson captured my imagination.
Jackson's message resonated with a young Raphael Warnock, now a Democratic senator from Georgia and the first Black senator in the state's history. While Jackson didn't win the nomination in 1984, nor during his second presidential run in 1988, his campaigns reshaped Democratic politics.
I witnessed him call America to live up to its ideals. Watching him do that in real time inspired me. When he said, I am somebody, I believed him.
Jackson died last week at the age of 84, but he leaves a lasting legacy. Consider this. As Congress debates voter ID laws and the Supreme Court reconsiders provisions of the Voting Rights Act, where does the movement Jackson helped build go from here? From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong. Let's consider this from NPR. To better understand the legacy of Jesse Jackson and the movement he leaves behind, we called Senator Raphael Warnock. I spoke with Senator Warnock about how Jackson's message still resonates. When was the first time you heard him speak?
Oh, wow. Yeah, I think just as a kid growing up, he actually came to Savannah, Georgia, and I heard him speak in the gymnasium in one of the local high schools where they had literally bussed hundreds of students from various schools so we could hear Reverend Jackson. His voice rang with such power and eloquence, and it is part of what has shaped my view of how you make your faith come alive in public service.
Reverend Jackson had a practice of standing with people at, quote, the point of challenge. He wanted to be on the front lines himself, to put his body there. What impact do you think this has had?
Well, that's the hallmark of the civil rights movement. It is literally about putting your body in the struggle. That's what Martin Luther King Jr. did. That's what Fannie Lou Hamer did when she stood up to the Democratic Party some 20 years before Jesse Jackson and said, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. That's what John Lewis and Hosea Williams did when they crossed that Edmund Pettus Bridge with brute force under the color of law on the other side of that bridge. But they kept walking. And more recently, in my estimation, Rene Good and Alex Preddy of Minneapolis lived out that same spirit, literally putting their bodies in the struggle. They paid the ultimate sacrifice, but they too were trying to push the country towards its ideals.
You mentioned Dr. King. He decided not to run for president in 1968, though he did consider it. Why do you think Reverend Jackson's decision to run in 1984, to go from activism to politics, to be the person to make that transition, why was that such a watershed moment?
Jesse Jackson is the bridge between civil rights activism of the 1960s and the kind of multiracial coalition politics that we have seen in the modern era that culminated in the presidency of Barack Obama and the work that I try to do every single day in the United States Senate. And there's a whole generation of folks and a couple of generations who are serving not just black politicians, but women.
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