Senator Jesse Helms made Jesse Jackson a political target in the 1984 Senate race against Governor Jim Hunt.
Helms won, but I’m proud to say I was on Jesse Jackson’s side.
Helms’ campaign distributed a flyer headlined: “Helms-Reagan vs. Hunt-Jackson.”
It had a photo of Governor Hunt meeting with Jackson. The caption read: “Jesse Jackson All Out to Help Hunt. Says 250,000, Mostly Blacks, Can Be Registered.”
Jackson was a polarizing figure then, even with Democrats.
His campaign for President that year gave conservative Southern Democrats the heebie-jeebies.
And gave Helms one more race card to play.
Helms already had filibustered against a holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Governor Hunt supported the holiday.
I was on the convention floor in San Francisco in 1984 when Jackson gave his powerful “Rainbow Coalition” speech.
The convention chaos and cacophony stopped as Jackson, with his preacher’s cadence, intoned:
“Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white — and we’re all precious in God’s sight. 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.”
Twenty years later, in the keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention that launched him like a rocket, Barack Obama echoed Jackson’s language:
“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
Naïve, some sniff today.
And Donald Trump has done his damnedest to rip apart America’s quilt.
But the image of Jesse Jackson that came back to me when he died this week wasn’t from his days as a civil rights leader or a presidential candidate.
It’s from election night 2008, when Jackson – in tears – stood with 200,000 people in Grant Park in Chicago, celebrating Obama’s election as America’s first African-American president.
As our Jesse would say, “keep hope alive.”
