The white South made a villain of a native son, but the region never had a better champion for it on the big stage than the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
By Billy Ball
The Living South
In 1984, the Rev. Jesse Jackson lost his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, just as he did in 1988.
Big party politics has an inertia to it, and it favors the surer bet. Jackson—who died Tuesday, February 17, at the age of 84—was never that, even if his 1984 speech at the Democratic National Convention is the purest distillation of modern liberalism you will ever see.
Jackson may have been known as a national figure, but he was a preacher born in the “slums” of Greenville, S.C., and educated at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, N.C., the same place that birthed the South’s sit-ins.
In the years that followed his presidential campaigns, Jackson became a joke in white homes like mine, especially in his native South. This, even though he picked up 13 primaries and caucuses in the 1988 Democratic primary race — and came in a close second in North Carolina.
Jackson was ridiculed for his speaking style. He was divisive and scary, they said. He sounded too Black. He hated white people. He was a perennial loser. The right-wing pundit Rush Limbaugh joked that all police composite photos looked like Jackson.
The lies they told about Jackson persisted after he retired from electoral politics, even as he negotiated the release of hostages in places like Syria and Iraq.
In Jackson, many white Southerners made a villain out of a native son, but it’s possible that the region never had a better champion on the big stage.
His message is one the South would do well to reconsider today.
In his marathon 1984 address at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Jackson promised that “the linchpin of progressive politics in our nation will not come from the North,” but from the South.
“President Reagan is depending on the conservative South to return him to office,” Jackson told the DNC. “But the South … is the poorest region in our nation and, therefore, [has] the least to conserve.”
He was a presidential candidate who spoke passionately against the anti-poor policies of the conservative Republican Party, and the contented obeisance of moderate Democrats.
“Rising tides don’t lift all boats, particularly those stuck at the bottom,” he said. “For the boats stuck at the bottom, there’s a misery index.”
Jackson wasn’t the joke his biggest critics made him out to be, though. He just told us the punch line. In 1984, he mocked the exchange of “flags and prayer cloths for food, and clothing, an education, health care, and housing,” but in 2026, that swap is still happening.
In former President Ronald Reagan’s time, Jackson called the white evangelical alliance a lie, and in our time, Trump—a preening, billionaire bully and convicted felon who lingered with sexual predators—proved it by winning their votes again.
He was a part of big party politics, but rarely seemed to take the easy path, advocating for LGBTQ people, Palestinians, the environment, and women leaders when such things weren’t mainstream.
When young people today say they want a stronger liberal party, Jackson was passionately speaking for it before they were born.
If Jackson was “divisive,” it was because the truth can divide. If he “obsessed” with race, it was because he lived in a time and a place that told him he could not be a Black civil rights advocate and a major party candidate at the same time.
Someday, Southern white homes, like the one I grew up in, must hear the wisdom in many of the things Jackson said. The system isn’t strictly anti-Black or anti-Brown. It is anti-working class, anti-poor. And no one group will make it better without the others, without the “patchwork quilt” Jackson spoke of.
In his 1984 speech at the DNC, Jackson, a man well acquainted with tragedy, often cut the bitterness with the sweet.
“If in my high moments, I have done some good,” he said, “offered some service, shed some light, healed some wounds, rekindled some hope … then this campaign has not been in vain.”
Look at his eyes in coverage from 2008 as he watched Barack Obama become the first Black president in American history—nearly 25 years after Jackson made people, against all inertia, talk about such a thing.
It was not in vain.
This column is adapted from the original from The Living South by N.C. journalist Billy Ball focused on changemakers in the American South. Every week, Billy writes about the South and its most interesting people. Billy is also a senior editor at Cardinal & Pine, an online news site that covers North Carolina politics.