Socialists From The United States

""Jesse Jackson's advent was really very important", Baldwin told me. "And this is for two reasons at least. One of them was that though he knew he could not possibly become president-which says a great deal about American society-he did get a great many people out to vote. This includes white people, not only those whites who voted against him, but those whites who voted for him". He pauses and smiles: "There is another America beneath Time Magazine. And he is also important because of his global presence. The American government did not like at all what he did in Syria and they don't like what he is doing in South Africa"."

"("Who are today's black heroes?") MA: Jesse Jackson is one. And any person who's really intent on making this a better country for all the people. Not a divisive person."

"Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don't you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint. You must not surrender. You may or may not get there, but just know that you're qualified and hold on and hold out. We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive!"

"Reaganomics. Based on the belief that the rich had too little money and the poor had too much. That's classic Reaganomics. They believe that the poor had too much money and the rich had too little money so they engaged in reverse Robin Hood - took from the poor and gave to the rich, paid for by the middle class. We cannot stand four more years of Reaganomics in any version, in any disguise."

"We, the people, can win! We stand at the end of along dark night of reaction. We stand tonight united in the commitment to a new direction. For almost eight years we've been led by those who view social good coming from private interest, who view public life as a means to increase private wealth. They have been prepared to sacrifice the common good of the many to satisfy the private interests and the wealth of a few."

"Gays and lesbians, when you fight against discrimination and a cure for AIDS, you are right - but your patch is not big enough. Conservatives and progressives, when you fight for what you believe, right wing, left wing, hawk, dove, you are right from your point of view, but your point of view is not enough."

"Common ground. America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth. When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina my grandmama could not afford a blanket, she didn't complain and we did not freeze. Instead she took pieces of old cloth - patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack - only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn't stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt."

"When we divide, we cannot win. We must find common ground as the basis for survival and development and change, and growth."

"white media reporting on Jackson's campaign failed to disseminate even halfway fair, or accurate, accounts of his proposals, or live audience response to his ideas, until the very beginning of 1988. In short, national white media colluded with Democratic party bosses to silence, to slander, and, finally, to stop Jesse Jackson."

"But media apart, hundreds and then thousands and thousands of white and black Americans found themselves standing in front of this indisputably charismatic orator. From his own mouth they understood that, regardless of ethnic or regional or age identity, they would have to surrender nothing in order to gain a great deal: alliance need not produce merger or submergence. Even racist habits of mind became beside the point-you could vote for "the nigger" not because you wanted a Black man in your family but because you thought he might save your family farm. Counted multitudes of white Americans eschewed stupidities of racist reflex for the sake of their own self-interest. More and more listening Americans realized that you don't have to be Black to become "an outsider" in your own native land: our democracy."

"Twenty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Reverend Jesse Jackson was standing up, by popular vote, the front-runner Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States. This was the situation for more than half of the official primary season! He was standing on the principled vision of his predecessor, whose humanity had persuaded an awesome number of white Americans to reexamine their notions about "minority" and "majority" issues. Was hunger a Black problem or an American disgrace? Was equal access to good housing and education a Black demand or a necessity inside a democratic state? Was "Jobs or Income" an unreasonable, left-wing slogan or a matter of human survival? I look upon the political phenomenon of Jesse Jackson as vindication of Dr. King's deepest faith in our collective potential as a democracy. And, what's more, Jackson's own radiant temerity in the face of negligible funding, press censorship, and attack has elicited the respect, and restored the activist self-respect, of a new American majority: a multiracial populist coalition of citizens intent upon the humane expansion of their citizen entitlements."

"I remember a friend of mine telling me that when, in 1984, at the Democratic National Convention, Jesse spoke on behalf of lesbians, that moment was absolutely the first occasion on which she had heard "a politician say my name, he said the word, lesbian.""

"Jackson was the first presidential candidate, 1988, to plead and repeat the plight of 650,000 American farmers losing their farms within the eight years of Reagan's reign. He was the first to identify drugs as the number one menace to domestic security. He was the first and only American contender for the U.S. presidency to demand that South Africa be designated a terrorist state and treated accordingly. He was the first and only candidate to call the name of the Palestinian people; he said the words the Palestinians, and he called for self-determination, and statehood, for these beleaguered, taboo human beings. Jesse Jackson was the first and only candidate for the Democratic nomination to assert that there must be a single standard for the measurement, and protection, of human rights throughout the world: No country-not France nor Israel nor Nigeria nor South Korea nor Iran nor South Africa should be exempted from the requirements of that single standard. He was the first and only presidential contender to propose a world view profoundly alternative to the traditions of imperialist perspective. Jackson proposed that the majority of human life / the peoples of the Third World be accorded proportionate political respect, economic aid, and inventive consideration as potential social and economic partners. No longer should the Third World serve as a playpen for greedy, killer interventionist maneuvers by aging cold warriors. And he was the first and the only Republican or Democratic candidate to propose an international minimum wage."

"they attempted to clear the mythical American mainstream of his contamination: he was "radical" and "harebrained" and "naïve," even though American opinion polls taken during Reagan's reign repeatedly showed, for example, most Americans opposed to intervention in Central America, and opposed to collaboration with Pretoria."

"American powers threatened by the content and the constituency of Jackson's campaign had little to do with asinine prejudice or any other emotional disorder: Antidemocratic-politics-as-usual and the Democratic national party and multi-national corporations and the American banking community and the American Medical Association and the Pentagon and right-wing fundamentalists rightly assessed Jackson's explosive arrival as a comprehensive, coherent, programmatic, moral, and populist rejection of government unrelated to the welfare of the governed, of labor at the mercy of "the marketplace," of the sick kneeling to those who should heal them, of the weak systematically abandoned to the streets and the bully violence of random/crackpot America."

"America is not the same old anything it was, prior to the 1988 leadership of Jesse Jackson...Jackson has transformed the nature and the substance of acceptable political discourse in America."

"Up against Dukakis and the Democratic party, Jackson set the agenda for the platform debate. And, while many of the demands of his program met with resolute derision, he did succeed in gaining the Democratic party's designation of South Africa as a terrorist state, and he did push Dukakis into a posture of unequivocal opposition to aid to the contras, unequivocal support for child care, and, alas, equivocal support for universal health insurance. He did embarrass the Democrats into public refusal to establish a "no first strike" nuclear policy, and he did force the Democratic Party to reduce by 50 percent the number of "Super-delegates" who will be anointed for the next presidential election campaign. He did, irreversibly, tutor American consciousness about the continuing anti-democratic political structures that block our decisive exercise of the vote, and he did, again, embarrass Dukakis into publicly waffling on Dukakis's own promise to fund a nationwide voter registration drive and to vastly simplify the whole voting registration process. He did lead the reentry of concepts of right and wrong back into the center of political deliberations. He did meet with Israel's ambassador to the United States, August 8, 1988, and Israel's ambassador to the United States did meet, August 8, 1988, for more than two hours, with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and, you know, Jesse just really came really, really close to opening up the White House to the world's best barbecue and general/populist celebration of all time. And as for those millions and millions of us who chose Jesse Jackson as our candidate, we would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to notice how much we scared the currently powerful: literally, we scared them almost to death!"