The Rev. Jesse Jackson died Tuesday morning at the age of 84. His family confirmed the news in a statement released through the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Chicago-based organization he’d led for decades. The civil rights icon had been sick since November after he was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative neurological condition on top of the Parkinson’s disease he’d been fighting since 2017.
“Our father was a servant leader,” his family said. “Not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world.”
Some of the younger folk reading this may not know that Jackson was a protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. He was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when King was assassinated in 1968. He ran for president twice, built the Rainbow Coalition, and spent sixty years pushing and dragging the Democratic Party to live up to its promises on race, poverty, and justice.
But he also did something that most of the obituaries published Tuesday aren’t spending much time on. Shocker – not. He put his career and reputation on the line for gay and lesbian Americans when virtually no one else in national politics would dare or deem to do so. West Hollywood Mayor John Heilman, who was on the city council when Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was reshaping national politics in the 1980s, told WEHOonline this morning Jackson “was one of the first presidential candidates who openly embraced LGBTQ+ people.”
He was the first to say the words out loud
At the 1984 Democratic National Convention Jackson became the first speaker in convention history to say the words “lesbians” and “gays” from the podium. People in the crowd cheered just hearing the word “lesbian” on that stage. By then thousands had already died from AIDS, Reagan still hadn’t said a word about it publicly, and most Democrats treated the whole subject like something you didn’t bring up in polite company.
“People have never forgotten that,” said David Taylor, leader of Manhattan’s Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, in an interview with the Washington Post years later. “We’re usually unmentionable.”
One of the many things the queer community loved about the Reverend, he wasn’t doing any of this for show. Both of his presidential campaigns put queer rights front and center in ways no candidate ever dared to do before. He talked openly about ending employment discrimination against gay workers, pushed for more federal AIDS research money, and wanted the military ban on openly gay service members gone. He hired openly gay staffers and built volunteer networks inside the community, something no presidential campaign had bothered to do.
“We were no longer invisible,” said Allen Roskoff, who directed the Gays and Lesbians for Jesse Jackson campaign in New York. “We weren’t pushed to the side and told to keep quiet.”
Jackson’s West Hollywood connection runs deep
Jackson’s ties to West Hollywood aren’t just symbolic. In January 1987, organizers planning the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights held their second steering committee meeting at West Hollywood City Hall. The city had only been incorporated for about three years, but activists already recognized it as one of the most important LGBTQ+ political bases in the country. Out of that WeHo meeting came the seven demands that formed the march’s platform: legal recognition of same-sex relationships, repeal of sodomy laws, increased AIDS funding, and protections against discrimination.
Jackson co-led the march that October. He walked at the front alongside Cesar Chavez, Whoopi Goldberg, and Eleanor Smeal as more than 500,000 people filled the streets of Washington. It was the same day the AIDS Memorial Quilt went on display on the National Mall for the first time.
“We gather today to say that we insist on equal protection under the law for every American,” Jackson told the crowd. “For workers’ rights, women’s rights, for the rights of religious freedom, the rights of individual privacy, for the rights of sexual preference.”
No other Democratic presidential candidate showed up. The Christian Science Monitor reported at the time that among those seeking the presidency, “only Jesse Jackson has openly supported civil rights demands of gays and lesbians.”
He slept in AIDS hospices when politicians wouldn’t visit
Jackson’s advocacy wasn’t limited to podiums and marches. In an interview with author David Masciotra for the book “I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters,” Jackson said he slept in hospices with gay men dying of AIDS in Illinois and Texas during the 1980s. “It was dismissed,” Jackson said of the media’s reaction to those visits. The mainstream press largely ignored it, even as thousands of gay men were dying from a virus their own president refused to acknowledge.
At a 1988 rally in front of an LGBTQ+ center in New York, Jackson spoke from a flatbed truck to thousands of supporters. Members of Congress were there. David Dinkins, who’d go on to become mayor of New York City, was there. Jackson handed out candles, asked the crowd to light them, and then invited people with AIDS to join him on the truck.
“He was not only dynamic and riveting,” Roskoff recalled. “He was warm.”
Jackson also spoke at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, an event that drew somewhere between 800,000 and a million people. He kept showing up for the community through the decades that followed, and he brought the fight to California when it mattered.
Standing against Prop 8
In December 2010, Jackson appeared at a rally outside the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and called for California’s Proposition 8 to be struck down as unconstitutional. He’d opposed the same-sex marriage ban before, but this time he went further.
“Marriage is based on love and commitment, not on sexual orientation,” Jackson told supporters at the event organized by Marriage Equality USA. “I support the right for any person to marry the person of their choosing.”
He called gays and lesbians “America’s newest second-class citizens” and connected the marriage equality fight directly to the civil rights movement. “If Dr. King and our civil rights movement has taught us anything, it’s the fundamental principle that all people deserve equal protection under the law,” he said. “LGBT people deserve equal rights, including marriage equality. Discrimination against one group of people is discrimination against all of us.”
When President Obama publicly endorsed marriage equality in 2012, Jackson praised the decision and compared the fight for same-sex marriage to the fight against slavery and anti-miscegenation laws that once criminalized interracial marriage.
What West Hollywood should remember
Jackson’s vision of that coalition included everybody. His 1984 convention speech described America not as a blanket but as a quilt. “The white, the Hispanic, the Black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt,” he said. Heilman told WEHOonline that Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition “forged an important alliance among LGBTQ+ people, racial minorities and labor leaders” and that his work “helped expand the Democratic Party’s platform to be more inclusive.” The mayor called Jackson “a passionate speaker and a true ally to the LGBTQ+ community.”
Rev. Jackson was one of the first presidential candidates who openly embraced LGBTQ+ people. His Rainbow Coalition forged an important alliance among LGBTQ+ people, racial minorities and labor leaders. His efforts helped expand the Democratic party’s platform to be more inclusive. He was a passionate speaker and a true ally to the LGBTQ+ community.
For a city like West Hollywood that owes its very existence to LGBTQ+ political organizing, the loss of Jackson carries meaningful weight. The 1987 march that he co-led was partially organized inside WeHo’s own City Hall. The queer community he fought for decades to include in the American story is the same community that built this city from an unincorporated stretch of Los Angeles County into one of the most progressive cities in the country.
“Keep hope alive” was his signature phrase. People parodied it sometimes, but it never seemed to lose its meaning for him. And for the LGBTQ+ community, he didn’t just keep hope alive. He showed up, over and over, when almost nobody else would.
Rest in peace Reverend, Jackson.
I believe it was in 1988 when Rev. Jackson came to LA to organize a march against police violence from the LAPD, lead by the infamous Darral Gates. As political VP with Stonewall Democratic Club, I worked with Jackson to insure we were included as an official contingent. We showed up only to find the folks organizing the march put us at the very end of the line. Not discouraged, we worked our way to the front of the march with our Rainbow flags and we were acknowledged by a delighted Rev. Jackson. Not everybody was happy to see us… Read more »
Thank you for sharing, Steve!
Sadly the New York Times, in another long obituary, also made no mention of Jackson’s support of our community.
Thank you for this thoughtful remembrance, Brian!
While the L.A. Times obituary is quite lengthy, there is zero mention of his early, lengthy, outspoken allyship with our community.
I appreciate your attempt to rectify that!