Connexion
Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” was as political as it was poetic
Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” was more than just another rhetorical flourish from the legendary orator. He gave real substance to the phrase by uniting black and brown people, the poor, and — an important, but less remembered part of his legacy — LGBTQ+ people.
Jackson died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 84.
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How Jesse Jackson helped bring gay rights to the Democratic mainstream
Jackson was a young civil rights organizer when he joined Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the historic 1963 March on Washington D.C. He knew the power of collective action and called for unity among the groups typically disenfranchised from traditional power structures to overcome
He laid it out in a landmark speech to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, when he first ran for president in 1984.
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“We must address their concerns and make room for them,” he said of a constellation of oppressed people. “The Rainbow includes lesbians and gays,” Jackson said to cheers. “No American citizen ought to be denied equal protection from the law.”
Jackson followed up on that commitment in 1987, when he spoke at the second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, soon after announcing his second bid for president.
“We gather today to say that we insist on equal protection under the law for every American, for workers’ rights, women’s rights, for the rights of religious freedom, the rights of individual privacy, for the rights of sexual preference. We come together for the rights of all American people,” Jackson declared.
Jackson won 29% of the popular vote in the Democratic primary the following year, earning the hearts of progressive Democrats, if not the nomination.
Over the next nearly four decades, Jackson continued to speak out for LGBTQ+ rights, including around the issue of marriage equality, denouncing a California ban on same-sex marriage, and celebrating the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision affirming the right to same-sex marriage.
“His support for marriage equality and for LGBTQ+ people affirmed a simple, powerful truth: Our liberation is bound together,” said Kelley Robinson, President of the Human Rights Campaign, following Jackson’s death.
“May we keep hope alive!” said the LGBTQ+ allyship organization PFLAG in a statement.
For all the poetry associated with Jackson as a civil rights activist and candidate, he was also a shrewd political operator.
In his 1988 race, Jackson wasn’t above capitalizing on his fellow Democrats’ anti-gay record. The doomed nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis (D), did not share Jackson’s embrace of the LGBTQ+ community.
“I just happen to think that’s better,” Dukakis said of heterosexual parents, after signing a law in 1988 that banned same-sex couples from being foster parents.
The governor, described as the original “Massachusetts liberal” by Republicans that year, had also failed to support an anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination bill in the state legislature, and tacitly endorsed the social hysteria around the growing AIDS epidemic by allowing insurance companies in Massachusetts to require HIV tests for new enrollees.
Jackson had a surrogate tell the press that Dukakis had “a very fundamental homophobia.”
At a 1988 primary debate with Dukakis, Jackson implicitly tied his opponent to the Reagan administration with his description of the Second March on Washington: “I saw people in their wheelchairs who are dying of AIDS…. Not one of the [Reagan administration] officials would come downstairs and shake their hand.”
Jackson’s pointed denunciation of AIDS “hysteria” drew applause from the Democratic voters, while portraying Dukakis as complicit in the administration’s woeful response to the AIDS epidemic, and that of the eventual Republican nominee, George H.W. Bush.
While conceding the race to Dukakis at the Democratic convention that year, Jackson doubled down on his vision of a social justice “rainbow” guiding the Democratic Party. He alluded to the AIDS Quilt that made its debut on the Mall at that Second March on Washington the year before.
“Gays and lesbians, when you fight against discrimination and a cure for AIDS, you are right – but your patch is not big enough,” he said.
“But don’t despair. Be as wise as my grandmamma,” he said. “Pull the patches and the pieces together, bound by a common thread. When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground, we’ll have the power to bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to our Nation.”
While Jackson’s presidential ambitions ended there, his “Rainbow Coalition” endured, electing Bill Clinton to two terms, handing Al Gore the popular vote in 2000, and sending the first Black president to the White House in 2008.
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