Subterranean Fire (Updated Edition) by Sharon Smith

Author:Sharon Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2018-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

As Ron Walters, who was ­Jackson’s campaign manager for political issues, remarked later, “No one else at that level was talking about environmental racism, ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons; antiapartheid (remember, the ANC was a ‘terrorist organization’); the Arab-­Israeli situation.”70 Perhaps for this reason, Jackson attracted thousands of active supporters and placed third in 1984, after winning five party primaries, with 3.5 million votes.

Jackson’s 1984 speech to the Democratic Party convention could have been a call to arms, had it not taken place within the confines of a party that rejected its central theme:

America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small

farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist,

the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the

American quilt.

Even in our fractured state, all of us count and all of us fit somewhere. We have proven that we can survive without each other. But we have not proven that we can win and progress without each other. We must come together.

From Fannie Lou Hamer in Atlantic City in 1964 to the Rainbow Coalition in San Francisco today; from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we have experienced pain but progress as we ended American apartheid laws, we got public accommodation, we secured voting rights, we obtained open housing, as young people got the right to vote. We lost Malcolm, Martin, Medgar, Bobby, John and Viola. The team that got us here must be expanded, not abandoned.71

In 1988, Jackson received over seven million votes and won eleven primaries, placing him a close second to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Indeed, after Jackson won 55 percent of the vote in the Michigan primary, he briefly surpassed all other candidates and was the front-­runner in total number of pledged delegates. Despite the close race, however, nominee Michael Dukakis did not consider Jackson as his running mate. As journalist JoAnn Wypijewski commented recently, “Again the pundits, here in the New Republic, warned of ‘certain and apocalyptic defeat’ if Jackson were given a spot on the Democratic ticket. He ­wasn’t, and Michael Dukakis, as heedless as Mondale and hitched to Lloyd Bentsen, a DLC Democrat, suffered his own private apocalypse.”72

Even with the handwriting on the wall, the Democratic Party forgot how to mouth the rhetoric for its voting base. The Democratic ­Party’s leadership abandoned its appeals to African Americans and labor, known in party circles as “special interest groups,” after the Democrats’ resounding defeat to Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. Even the Black political establishment inside the Democratic Party had shunned Jackson. They “wanted very much not to anoint Jesse Jackson,” Walters argued.73

Jackson’s loyalties remained with the Democratic Party, unlike many on the left who saw the Rainbow Coalition as a springboard to a “new movement.

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