Students across the American curriculum learn about the Civil Rights Movement as early as third grade. Names like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks usually ring a bell because they are often featured in textbooks and classroom discussions. Their fight for equal rights in a time of injustice made them lasting symbols of American history. However, with the recent death of Reverend Jesse Jackson, it’s become clear that many students don’t know of the man who helped carry the movement forward into modern politics.
Curious on how true students’ ignorance towards Jackson appeared to be, I conducted a survey within all 25 students in my AP Language and Composition class (Lang). Only one of my peers knew who he was.
This experience left me surprised. Jackson continued the fight for equality far after the 1960s, so why is his name rarely mentioned in schools today?
Jackson first gained national attention following the later years of the Civil Rights Movement. He began as a young student-leader and later joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he worked closely with his mentor, Martin Luther King Jr. According to the King Institute, Jackson had spoken with King only moments before King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968.
From that moment on, Jackson continued to dedicate himself to economic and racial justice.
In 1971, Jackson founded Operation People United to Save Humanity (Operation PUSH) in Chicago, an organization focused on expanding economic opportunity for African-Americans. He argued that past reform alone had not guaranteed equal access to jobs, education, and housing. Operation PUSH pressured large corporations to promote the hiring of minority employees and to invest in black communities. The group negotiated, met with leaders, and protested in order to demand change. Operation PUSH made it clear that Jackson’s fight for civil rights extended beyond legal policy, and his activism would pave the way for his political ambitions later on in his career.
Later on, Jackson brought his past activism into national politics. He ran for president in the Democratic Party primaries and merged Operation PUSH with the Rainbow Coalition, forming the Rainbow Push Coalition (RPC). This coalition united a diverse group of voters: people of color, the working-class, farmers, and LGBTQ people. Jackson became of one of the first mainstream ally of gay marriage and LGBTQ rights, fighting against discrimination in sectors such as employment and the military.
After placing third in the Democratic primary in 1984 with 3.5 million votes, Jackson ran again for the n
omination in 1988. He secured nearly seven million votes and placed second in a primary against eventual nominee Michael Dukakis. During both of his runs, Jackson promoted a strong progressive agenda that pushed for expanding voting rights and addressing wealth inequality. Jackson proved that a coalition of social and economic justice could have a large impact on the national stage.
His consistent advocacy pressured corporations to diversify their hiring, put progressive politics into mainstream conversations, and created a new coalition of voters that no one had ever assembled quite like it before. Despite this massive influence nationwide, his name barely surfaces in classrooms today. Many of the same students that can pull quotes from King’s “I Have aDream” speech rarely know the name Jesse Jackson.
I keep thinking back to my AP Lang class, reflecting on the silence after I asked who Jesse Jackson was. The silence really wasn’t because people didn’t care for him, however; it is because no one had ever been given a reason to. Maybe that’s the actual issue. If all of us learn about the same figures over and over again, we start to believe that history was only shaped by a few people. In reality, history is a continuous and never-ending process of events. By ignoring figures like Jackson, we fail to recognize how past activism directly builds the present-day. This can lead to a more important problem of failing to recognize the history-makers working in our own time who will one day need to be remembered. If we want to truly understand what’s happening in the present, we should probably start remembering more of the past, including the names that are forgotten.
