SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has died. He was 84 years old. For more than half a century, Jackson was a trailblazing figure for Black Americans, and he also helped shape the Democratic Party that we know today. CNN's Abby Phillip wrote a book, "A Dream Deferred," focused on Jackson's political legacy and the two presidential campaigns he ran in the 1980s. Thanks for joining us.
ABBY PHILLIP: Thanks for having me, Scott.
DETROW: I've been taking in a lot of the obituaries and articles about Reverend Jackson today. And there was one sentence in The New York Times obit that stuck with me, and I was wondering what you make of this framing, essentially that Jesse Jackson was the most influential Black figure in the years between Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. Do you think that's the right way to think about it?
PHILLIP: Yeah, I think that is very much an accurate statement. And in many ways, Jesse Jackson was the bridge between Reverend King and Barack Obama. And he was someone who influenced culture, business, politics, international affairs. And you really can't think of another Black figure who had the reach that Jesse Jackson did for the time that he did. And he was, for decades, one of the most well-known people - forget Black figures - but one of the most well-known people in America.
DETROW: You know, he tries to pick up Martin Luther King's mantle, and his failings, his flaws are on much more display than King's ever were. He runs for president two times. He comes up short. And yet he still amassed all this power. Like, what's the best way to think about where Jesse Jackson's power came from?
PHILLIP: Well, that power came from his ability to capture people's attention. He was a master of the attention economy. This is before the internet, before cable news. He knew better than almost anyone else how to get all cameras on him at all times and to get the entire nation practically tuned into his message. And that became his superpower for much of the last 60 years.
DETROW: What drew you to reporting and writing about Jesse Jackson's story, particularly those 1984 and 1988 presidential runs?
PHILLIP: Those campaigns are some of the most interesting but little-known campaigns. But when you look under the hood a little bit, and you look a little bit more deeply at what happened in the primary, and particularly Jesse Jackson's role in changing his party in those years, what you start to see is the prescience of those campaigns. So much of what Jesse Jackson was running on, things that he was talking about, the type of politics, the progressive populism, so many of those things were before his time.
He was talking about issues like universal health care, poverty, hunger, farmers, even this idea of America first, of the fact that he argued that America should spend way more time and resources and way more of its treasure domestically than it did internationally. And those themes not only became themes that were picked up by Democratic candidates decades later, but also by a Republican candidate in particular, by Donald Trump. And I think that we are in a sort of high-water mark for that kind of politics right now. And that's why understanding his legacy matters more than ever.
DETROW: You're so right about the issues. You know, it's like - I feel like the shorthand is Jesse Jackson was kind of this liberal end of the spectrum in those races. And you look, and it's like, all of this is exactly what mainstream politics is these days. You write in your book about the way that he also cracked open the nuts and bolts of the nominating process in a way that opened up future primaries to outsider candidates. How do you think specifically his oratory affected politics? You know, he's remembered for these big, soaring convention speeches, but those were conventions where his party ended up losing in a landslide. Like, what was the life of those particular speeches to you?
PHILLIP: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people regard the 1984 and 1988 Democratic National Convention speeches that he delivered - both of them - to be two of the best convention speeches ever delivered.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JESSE JACKSON: When I look out at this convention, I see the face of America - red, yellow, brown, Black and white. We're all precious in God's sight, the real rainbow coalition.
PHILLIP: And when you look closely at those speeches, they are really a master class in a moral framing for American politics that tries to argue to people that there is a common thread, a common theme among all of the people in this nation. And when you think about those speeches and the tradition that they came out of, which is the Black church tradition, it's hard not to see the way in which Barack Obama's great speeches were influenced by that kind of approach to politics.
DETROW: You talked to Jackson for this book. He was a lot older when you sat down with him. He was battling some serious health issues by that point in his life. What struck you about your conversations and interviews with Jesse Jackson?
PHILLIP: What struck me actually was the lack of ego in a lot of how he talked about what he did. And when I talked to him about what he was trying to accomplish in these two campaigns, he saw it as moves on a chessboard of trying to move the Democratic Party closer to a form that would allow for a candidate like him to be successful.
And even when I asked him about some of the harder parts of his experience, which was the rejection of his candidacy by a lot of Black elites and establishment types, he wasn't judgmental about it. He wasn't angry. He wasn't bitter. He understood that they had a political calculation that was different from him. As he looked back, I think he kind of sees the arc of his political career as laying the groundwork for all the things that came next, whether it was Barack Obama or even someone like Bernie Sanders and beyond. I think he sees it all as part of the building blocks that he was putting together at that time.
DETROW: That is CNN's Abby Phillip. Her book is titled "A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson And The Fight For Black Political Power." Thanks so much.
PHILLIP: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
