The Edmund Pettus Bridge rises in a squat, gray arch over the Alabama River in Selma. From either end, only the middle is visible. It`s impossible to know what awaits on the other side.
Halfway up that bridge two decades ago blacks were beaten by police as they tried to march for the right to vote, a day that would become known as
”Bloody Sunday.” John Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, was clubbed to the point of concussion and hospitalized for three days. Dozens more were pummeled and trampled by troopers wearing gas masks.
Just days before this year`s Super Tuesday, Jesse Jackson marched halfway up that bridge and talked about the value of sacrifice, of time and change. He was campaigning to be president. And from where he stood, he could see the other side.
Twenty-three years after many black Americans finally won the right to vote, Jackson would win Alabama and most of the states in the Old Confederacy, and all of America was asking a black man about being president.
His campaign unleashed a his-toric set of hopes and challenges not seen since Martin Luther King Jr.`s day, a sense that barriers have come down and the once unthinkable was now at least possible.
As his opponents found out, it was difficult to run against a cause.
”That`s the thing about historic change, isn`t it?” asked Charles Franklin, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. ”The whole point about a historic election is that after the fact, things aren`t quite the same. . . . It takes a person like Jackson or a person like King who makes it happen in the face of everybody who thinks about it saying it can`t happen.”
Jackson capitalized on his considerable strengths-political wisdom, abundant energy and muscular rhetoric-and kept his past flaws in check.
His 1984 campaign helped build a near-lockstep alliance of black voters, using the sophisticated network of the black church to construct a vaunted fundraising and get-out-the-vote apparatus outside conventional channels.
From the tiny frame Baptist and AME churches of the rural South to the better-heeled congregations of major cities, preachers boomed their fiery summons of suffering and love, never slowing to acknowledge the blur of religion, history and politics. The congregations responded with near unanimity at the polls.
”Whatever we have given tonight, it is a symbol,” Rev. Herbert Daughtry told the congregation of the First Baptist Church in Brooklyn on a cool April night. ”It is to be used for the freedom of our people.
”We are raising funds for those who lost their lives,” he said. ”Bless this donation so we can put our friend Jesse Jackson in the White House. . . . Now our sons and daughters can say, `Yes, it is possible.` ”
After the checks and crumpled bills were counted, Jackson`s presidential campaign was $39,404 richer.
Black-dominated media provided an important forum. Each time Jackson made the covers of Jet and Ebony, he had several million small billboards reminding blacks of his candidacy. WLIB Radio in New York City put a reporter on the campaign full time to offer daily assessments of Jackson`s progress. (The station is owned by Inner City Broadcasting, a privately held company in which Jacqueline Jackson holds an interest that company president Percy Sutton has valued at more than $1 million.)
Private fundraisers were held among the growing black middle class and Jackson played on their sense of history to fund his effort. ”A campaign does not run on soul, it runs on coal and coal costs money,” he told a gathering at an Atlanta nightclub.
Wherever he would go, even at a speech at Wheaton College, Jackson would ask for donations. ”If you will give $1,000, please stand and come forward,” he would say, dropping the amount to $500, $250, $100, $50, $25, until he simply asked for volunteers.
Behind this very public effort, his campaign manager Gerald Austin was overseeing a million-piece-a-month direct mail campaign that would bring contributions in the millions. In March alone, Jackson raised nearly $2 million, more money than Michael Dukakis. Through April, Jackson had raised $11,436,165, nearly $5 million more than his entire 1984 campaign.
The money helped him spread his message to white audiences, and they responded to him with unexpected enthusiasm. Jackson`s own telegenic style gave him free television coverage.
”We don`t have a message gap,” Jackson liked to joke. ”We have a money gap.”
And his message clearly worked. It was simple, easy to understand, and people remembered it.
”We the people can win,” he would say. ”When I win, you win, when you win, I win. We the people can always win.”
He tapped into a colorblind resentment of the policies of the Reagan administration, telling people they were victims of economic violence and that the nation could not afford not to do better.
He gained the support of organization Democrats like Barry Feinstein, president of Teamsters Local 237 in New York, who blunted Mayor Edward Koch`s railings against Jackson by saying he supported the preacher even though he was ”as Jewish as any Jew who ever lived.” He entered the corridors of power in Washington and came away with alliances with party elders Clark Clifford and John C. White.
Jackson`s success also was rooted in his early outreach to white voters.
He spent more than 100 days in Iowa, a state with a minuscule black population. He stood with farmers at foreclosures and negotiated with banks for the return of their land. After the caucuses, he finished well ahead of Albert Gore, Gary Hart and Bruce Babbitt. It would be a telling sign of strength among white voters that would not be fully appreciated for months.
He finished a surprising second in Maine, Vermont and Minnesota. Wrapping his liberal dreams in lyrical aphorisms, Jackson made audiences laugh, and cheer and think. He was the vendor of fire and ice in an otherwise uninspiring field.
”We should have Head Start and day care on the front side of life over jail care and welfare on the back side of life,” he said over and over. He spoke bluntly about ”babies makin` babies” and being a ”charter member of the underclass.” ”Drug pushers don`t wear hoods,” he said. ”They are hoods.”
He refused to be drawn into race-based fights, poking fun at how people clumsily dealt with the issue of his race, often with this story about three Iowa farmers:
”You know, I like that Jesse Jackson message,” the first says.
”Yes, it`s a pretty good message,” says the second. ”But he`s black.” ”I like that message. When we were losing our jobs, he stood with us on the picket line,” the first says.
”I know he knows how to picket,” the second says. ”But he`s black.”
”You`re missing the point,” says a third. ”When we were losing our farms he stood with us at the auction and helped negotiate some of our land back.”
”I know he can negotiate,” the second says. ”He brought Goodman back from Syria. He knows how to negotiate, but he`s black.”
Then Jackson offers the punch line: ”But the third farmer then says
`Yeah, but the guy who was taking our farms is white.` ”
It was a campaign remarkable for its endurance and consistency.
Millions were inspired to vote, hundreds to run for office and scores who had never cared were seriously discussing politics.
”People are saying, yes, I do matter, yes, my vote does count,” said Wilma Webb, a Colorado state representative.
That change would come through Jackson-an outsider even during the most potent days of the civil rights movement, a man who critics still believe puts his own cause above all others-is a curious irony that says a lot about a nation`s ability to forget. It also says something about a nation`s need to be inspired and excited.
Jackson lost his bid for the 1988 nomination, but it came down to a race between the son of a single teenage mother from South Carolina and the son of an immigrant doctor.
”Back in 1984, people viewed him as a radical, one who was all rhetoric,” said Lois Felder, who ran Jackson`s Oklahoma campaign. ”This time there is substance.”
He provided the campaign with its most pungent issue-fighting the war on drugs-with undisputable force and a plan of how to pay for the war. Dukakis and George Bush would follow his lead. He also set the agenda for discussion on increasing funding for Head Start, day care and prenatal care, for placing the blame for the nation`s economy in part on multinational corporations. And he promoted new U.S. alliances that go beyond the Cold War era.
”Jackson is one of the leading contributors to the increased public attention on the (drug) issue that has helped make it the No. 1 issue in the country,” said Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster.
”Jackson`s candidacy helped produced even greater media attention on the problem. It`s also very responsible for the Democrats now having the advantage on the issue.”
Bert Lance, a Democratic stalwart and former Carter administration official who became one of Jackson`s more trusted advisers, believes Jackson`s agenda-setting will be of ”permanent importance.”
”Look at nearly all the focal points, nearly all the issues,” Lance said. ”He has initiated the real discourse-economic common ground, drugs . . . The drug issue is the prime example. He put it on the front page of every newspaper, every magazine and every televison broadcast.”
Babbitt said drugs were simply the most obvious issue where Jackson was well ahead of the curve. ”He has been willing to grapple with the budget dilemma and has been specific and courageous about the need to deal with both expenditures and restraints and cuts and how it fits together,” he said.
”He`s been a real pioneer on Third World issues. He is going beyond the Cold War mindset and is way ahead of current perceptions.”
Despite Jackson`s undeniable strength on the stump, it still took a while for professional politicians to take him seriously.
”You have to remember, there is an inherent bias in white media,” said Aldon Morris, a longtime civil rights activist who was singed by bigotry in the South and Chicago and now is a professor at the University of Michigan.
”White media project him as unelectable. The job then of black media is to put out a more positive message.
”Let`s put it this way: Did the media give us any idea that the race would come down to a two-man race between Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis?” Morris said. ”My answer to that is no.
”We are talking about history being made and new things happening, improving political reality.”
Jackson`s message reached well beyond the black community. ”When the lights go out,” he told scores of blue-collar workers who had lost their jobs, ”we all look amazingly similar in the dark.”
Crusading against economic violence, he brought in a significant number of whites in every primary and caucus state, which many blacks point to as progress much more than the expansion of Jackson`s black base. And even many of those whites who ultimately voted for someone else had seriously wrestled with the idea of voting for Jackson.
”He has a cause to point to, a justification of running for the sake of race that others cannot match,” said Lisa Seeber, a Jackson campaign volunteer at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. ”They have only campaigns.”
Still, he faces polling information that 2 out of 10 whites wouldn`t vote for a black candidate under any circumstances, a troubling number but one that has dropped dramatically in 20 years.
Pollster Maslin said he believes the door to the White House is not yet open to a black candidate. ”But it is opening,” he said. ”And at least the lock is off the door.”
Lance seemed to agree. ”We aren`t totally there yet,” he said. ”But we`ve made progress. America is better.
”And that`s the earned vote. It says a lot. It says to a political leader that if you`re willing to keep your head, not get caught up in the negatives, and work at it, you`re going to start earning votes based on the content of your message rather than the color of your skin.
”After you earn one vote, you earn another. Those first few are the hardest to earn. I`ve talked to people and even where they are not yet ready to vote for him for whatever reason, they have a sense of the fact that he`s accomplished something, that he has developed issues, that he has set an agenda.”
Again and again, Jackson hammered away at the forces of white-dominated conventional wisdom that held that now was not the right time and that certainly he was not the right black.
