Visualizing a Neo-Rainbow

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Danny Glover, The Nation. Posted February 25, 2005.

In 2004 the winner-take-all system of U.S. electoral politics again proved an obstacle to genuine democracy. While progressives found little to get excited about in the John Kerry campaign, there were no viable third-party candidates, leaving them without a fully satisfying choice at the ballot box, even if most of us ended up voting for Kerry as a statement against Bush. More important, there was no candidate whose campaign offered progressives the opportunity to develop a real political/electoral base that could move us closer to building power and influence.

The most recent campaign that held that kind of promise was the Rainbow insurgency of the 1980s, including the 1984 and '88 presidential campaigns of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, and the building of the National Rainbow Coalition.

The Rainbow movement and candidacies have much to teach us today. While the Rev. Jesse Jackson was a charismatic leader, the Rainbow Coalition movement and the Jackson presidential campaigns were about far more than Jesse Jackson. The approach that Jackson advanced – building an organization and campaign both inside and outside the Democratic Party – points progressives in the direction we should be moving now.

The political emergence of Jackson took place within the context of a larger, black-led electoral upsurge that witnessed campaigns such as the successful Harold Washington run for mayor of Chicago and the unsuccessful but no less inspiring Mel King campaign for mayor of Boston. Those campaigns were not only a reaction to the early years of the Reagan/Bush administration and its economic attacks on working people and veiled attacks on people of color but an outgrowth of the movement for black political power that emerged in response to the unfulfilled promise of the civil rights victories two decades earlier.

Jackson seized the moment to speak nationally on behalf of these movements, but he did something even more important than that. He articulated a political vision that, while based on the African-American experience, did not represent solely a "black candidacy" or "black politics." Jackson tapped into a growing anger and frustration arising on the U.S. political scene among both historically and newly disenfranchised populations. He spoke to issues of economic injustice without abandoning the question of race, thus avoiding the classic error of white populists who attempt to build unity by addressing economic issues only. Jackson linked these issues. His appearances before white farmers and workers brought forth a response that previously had been unimaginable.

Jackson tapped into three key constituencies in order to build and anchor both the Rainbow and his 1984 and '88 candidacies: the African-American political establishment, African-American religious institutions (including both Muslim and Christian denominations) and the left. These constituencies had differing, though often overlapping, agendas, which inevitably led to both vibrancy and tensions within the movement. No one expected Jackson to receive the Democratic Party nomination, let alone win the presidency, but the power of the movement and the potential for something longer-lasting signaled the importance of this initiative [for a full discussion of the Rainbow Coalition and candidacies, see JoAnn Wypijewski, "The Rainbow's Gravity," Aug. 2, 2004].

Of course, it's also important to remember how the movement unraveled after the fateful gathering of the Rainbow Coalition's executive board in March 1989, largely because of Jackson's move to turn the coalition – the core of his movement – into a personal political operation. There is a lesson in this, too: Progressives should beware the charismatic leader who defines movement loyalty as personal loyalty to him- or herself rather than to the movement and its objectives.

After the Rainbow

In the wake of what we would describe as Jackson's coup against himself, alternative views and strategies toward progressive electoral and mass initiatives began to surface. For example, former Texas agricultural commissioner Jim Hightower proposed a "Democratic-Populist Alliance" to fill the void left by the collapse of the Jackson Rainbow; the late trade union leader Tony Mazzocchi founded the Labor Party; through the New Party, Dan Cantor and Joel Rogers advocated a fusion approach to politics – later undermined by a Supreme Court decision in 1997 – whereby independent parties could achieve power by cross-endorsing major-party candidates; former National Rainbow Coalition executive director Ron Daniels campaigned as an independent for the presidency in 1992; and the Green Party emerged at the local level, mounting successful runs for municipal and county positions on a progressive platform.

These initiatives, however worthy, had some problems in common. None of them fully grasped the political moment, which was characterized by the impact of the civil rights movement, the resistance to Reaganism and the black-led electoral upsurge. With the exception of Daniels, they did not understand the importance of race and the political movements of people of color, and for the most part they lacked a base among communities of color, thus denying them the moral authority Jackson and the Rainbow possessed to challenge collective injustice in U.S. society. As a result, they weren't able to build a united-front approach to politics.

Danny Glover is a longtime human rights activist and internationally recognized actor. Bill Fletcher Jr., a longtime labor and international activist, is the president of TransAfrica Forum, a co-chair of United for Peace and Justice, and a founder of the Black Radical Congress. He can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.

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