Jesse Jackson was born in South Carolina two months before Pearl Harbor, an African-American in the Jim Crow South. By the time of his birth, black voters—those who could manage to vote at least, primarily those who had migrated to northern cities for better jobs and opportunities—were already beginning to coalesce behind the Democratic Party. In hindsight, this may seem surprising; Franklin Delano Roosevelt was no champion of racial justice. A master politician, FDR’s priority was always keeping the Democratic Party coalition together, including its segregationist southern wing. Yet by 1940, two thirds of African-Americans who could vote were voting for FDR—a sharp contrast to 1932, when Herbert Hoover won the black vote two to one.
It was the New Deal, and not the Civil Rights movement, that brought African-Americans from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of FDR. It is true that many New Deal opportunities excluded them. Even so, in the midst of a Great Depression that devastated Americans of all races, FDR’s reforms improved the lot of African-Americans and thereby won their loyalty.
A child of the New Deal, Jackson focused throughout his life on questions of economic justice. He poured his efforts into the Poor People’s Campaign which MLK envisioned before his assassination. With de jure desegregation and voting rights achieved, the attention of civil rights leaders had turned to jobs, education, housing, and wages. Though African-Americans disproportionately suffered in poverty, these concerns were by no means exclusive to them. The Poor People’s campaign worked to include not just African-Americans but also Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and white Americans, of whom far too many were poor.
In some ways, the timing of the Poor People’s campaign couldn’t have been worse. In 1968, the New Deal coalition that had seen Democrats become the dominant force in American politics after 1932, winning all but two presidential elections in those thirty-six years, finally broke. The Solid South, as well as many white working-class ethnics in northern cities, defected in large numbers to Nixon. It would be Republicans’ turn to dominate for thirty years, winning every presidential between 1968 and 1992 save 1976. Democrats, meanwhile, had started to become what they are today: the party of minorities and the affluent college educated, wandering in the political wilderness.