“Talking to…Jesse Jackson,” by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, was originally published in the January 1988 issue of Vogue.
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One of the most dynamic forces on the political scene today, forty-six-year-old presidential candidate Jesse Louis Jackson grew up in the segregated South. He attended an all-Black high school, where he was star quarterback and a popular class leader, while working at Greenville, North Carolina’s all-white hotel and the all-white golf course—an experience that gave him the motivation that helped to propel him “from the back of the bus to the front of the polls.” An active participant in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, as an aide to Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jackson is that movement’s living logical next step—a man who has moved from protest to politics.
When Jackson made his first bid for the presidency in 1984, his role as a “super gadfly” effectively articulating issues in the Black community garnered him unprecedented Black support: “Run, Jesse, run,” could be heard from Black churches in the South to the more sedate living rooms of Black urban professionals. Since then, Jackson—who is married with five children—has been working to broaden his base beyond the Black community to form a “rainbow coalition” made up of groups he’s described as “the damned, disinherited, disrespected, and despised.” The chant this time is, “Win, Jesse, win.”
Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Early in this century, W.E.B. Du Bois said: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” What does it say to you that you are the front-runner in a field of white candidates, but the majority of white people say they won’t vote for somebody Black?
Jesse Jackson: The point is how the question is put. If you ask, Will you support a Black president?, the answer no is almost instinctual. Ask instead, Will you support someone who will stop drugs from flowing into this country and stop jobs from flowing out, who will put our foreign policy on track and restore our credibility? Many people would say yes. Does it matter if he’s Black? No, we want the problems solved. Depending on how the question is put, people will rise to the challenge. My confidence grows out of watching twenty-five years of rather pronounced social growth in this country.
I believe there’s a lot of hope in Archie Bunker. Archie Bunker’s daughter is dating interracially. Archie Bunker’s son protests Central American policy, South African policy. Archie Bunker protests Blacks’ moving down the street from him—but he doesn’t move. He complains, but his children go to public school, not Catholic school. He complains, but he works in an assembly line with Blacks and Hispanics. He’s in the stadium, in the bleachers, in the rainbow. Over a twenty-five-year period, Archie Bunker has become a much better person, a much more integrated person.
CHG: How do you consider race relations today, in light of the violent racial incidents that occurred in Howard Beach, New York, and Forsyth County, Georgia?
JJ: To the extent that racial divisions are instituted by law and perpetuated by leaders, there’s a problem. What’s different today is that there are legal constraints against racial violence. But many people live indirectly through television, where Blacks and Hispanics are projected every day as less intelligent, less hard-working, less patriotic, more violent. To the extent that we can pull down the walls separating the American public, people will begin to see the sameness of everybody else’s predicament.