Kopkind Colony

A most remarkable human being and political figure, Jesse Jackson died today in Chicago, February 17, 2026. His trademark call and response “I Am Somebody”, above from his appearance on Sesame Street in the 1970s, represents, in its simplicity, the timeless radical rejection of dehumanization — salient feature of slavery, dispossession, genocide, capitalism, and the unabashed program of the regnant politics of our time. If a life could be reduced to one sentence, Jesse spent his fighting systems that dehumanize, and advancing a vision of a society based on respect, equality, internationalism: on human values and an enthusiasm, a love, for life, which he embodied. Andrew Kopkind covered Jackson’s historic campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, reporting from the trail for The Nation in ’88. A few selections from Andy’s writing then give not only a feeling for what Jackson described in ’84 as “a campaign through the eyes of the hurt” but also a view of the landscape of hurting. The latter provides hints to how we got where we are; the former exemplifies a politics of solidarity, the only hope for humanity.

From 1984

The political demands of the Rainbow Coalition, implicit in its construction and explicit in Jackson’s speeches, are extraordinary. They are racial, sexual, economic and ideological. “All of us are deprived in twentieth-century America,” he told an audience at the Waldorf Astoria, “and America is still organized by cash — the cash system that is still dominated by white males.” What other major-party candidate in this century has talked about deprivation in “a cash system dominated by white males”? No wonder Jackson scares conventional politicians half to death.

From Iowa 1988 (before the primary)

Jesse Jackson, a year older than Joe Biden [then also running for the nomination], had come to the same hotel ballroom four days earlier, but the scene couldn’t have been more different. Jackson spoke to a local convention of the American Federation of State County Municipal Employees and gave a detailed populist sermon meant to rouse the coalition of “the displaced and the dispossessed” that has no other obvious haven in the party. Biden had talked about ‘excellence’ and warned that “foreign workers are better educated and work harder” than Americans. Jackson said, “Foreign workers are not better than American workers; they are cheaper workers.”

Jackson’s was not a speech about the new social compact between business and labor that other Democratic candidates are promoting; it was a demand for ‘economic justice.’ US corporations, he said, are fleeing these shores and setting up ‘slave labor’ shops in the Third World, from which they export cheap goods back to America in a flood that destroys jobs, lives, communities. As he does in nearly every talk, Jackson exhorted the unionists to make ‘common ground’ with others similarly situated; to forget racial divisions; to accept women, minorities, immigrants and the unemployed as comrades in arms; and to change the distribution of power to their own advantage. “The fight is not at a pizza parlor in New York, not on a lonely road in Georgia,” he said in one of several preliminary crescendos before the final, familiar rhetorical arpeggio that has become the hallmark of his style. “The fight is at the shipyard, where they bring in goods made by slave labor. We should turn to each other, not on each other.”

On his first trip to Des Moines in the spring, Michael Dukakis [the Democrats’ ultimate nominee] recommended that the feed-corn and bean growers, virtually the entire agricultural sector, start raising Belgian endive and blueberries, like the trendy truck farmers beyond the Boston suburbs. The idea didn’t go over in a big way. Jackson has different ideas about what’s happening to Iowa farming. The threatened demise of the family farm system cannot be averted by managerial maneuvers or market gimmicks. What is required is a wholesale assault on the political economy of American agriculture. The Reagan Administration has accelerated a process that began decades ago, in which the family farm is being replaced by ‘megafarms’ increasingly owned by absentee management firms and agribusiness corporations. Some companies are building vertical monopolies in the industry, with land as the bottom layer of a structure that will include feedlots for cattle. meatpacking houses, machinery manufacturing plants, grain exporting companies, supermarkets and shopping malls — all in a transnational system.

Like Stalinism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Reaganism in America in 1980s seeks to rationalize agriculture to make it responsive to centralized planning and presumed economies of scale. Here the centralization is corporate rather than collective, but many of the methods of forced removal of farmers and the consequences to traditional communities are remarkably similar to those used in the Soviet Union. No kulaks have been shot in Iowa, but tens of thousands of families have been driven from their homes, many after three, four or five generations on the land, and sent to distant towns where they shovel chicken manure in poultry ‘factories’ or fast food in roadside stands. They migrated to the losing end of the agricultural chain they once helped forge. Unless radical reforms are instituted — a most unlikely prospect, to be sure — half the farms in Iowa will go under in the next ten years.

Seventy miles north of Adair County, in the little town of Churdan, the remaining farm families are watching their community dissolve and their lives changed for the worse with no recourse to the established political means of reform. Johnny McGuire (he’d rather I didn’t use his real name) took over the family farm when his father retired, and he works several more rented pieces of land for a total of some 1,200 acres — a large spread by local standards, but he sees himself as one of a dying breed.

“I’ll be 29 in September,” he said, “but there’s probably not more than a dozen that’s younger than me in the whole area.” A quiet, rather reserved man, he swung his arms to indicate the extended region to which he referred. “A lot of the farmers, they’re 45 years old and up, so they’ll be retired in fifteen, twenty years, and that’ll be the end of it. Most of my friends in my class at Iowa State went into jobs where they got $20,000 or more to start, and they didn’t want to come back to the land. Oh, this ground will always be farmed one way or the other, but not by the people who live here. As for me, I’m going to stay a farmer for the rest of my life.”

What Jackson calls a “a new feudalism” is settling over the rural heartland. Farmers default on their loans; banks and insurance companies (and sometimes government agencies) foreclose; sometimes they burn and bulldoze the lovely old white farmhouses, the barns, the silos and the stands of trees that protected the homestead from the prairie winds. Scorching the earth lowers the property taxes. Families who simply cannot tear themselves from their birthplaces are sometimes allowed to stay on the land by the new management companies or megafarmers in return for work done. Those new tenants represent the saddest sector of a shift in productive relations that will amount to billions or perhaps trillions of dollars by the end of the century….

On the trail in Iowa, Jackson excites voters more by promising them participation in the power structure — the organizing principle of the old civil rights movement — than by offering them specific programs and policies to cure their complaints. Unlike most other Democrats campaigning in the state, he does not hurl a string of neoliberal proposals from the hustings. His delivery is at once personal and political rather than procedural and managerial…. In a hot town square in Iowa Falls, a crowd of recently laid-off workers cheered when he said, “We must change the equation. There’s no sense of corporate justice, of fairness. we’d better wake up and fight” to stop the “merger maniacs.” The town was reeling from the decision of Farmland Foods to close its pork packing plant and idle one-quarter of the local industrial workforce…. Fred Gandy — the local congressman, who previously won celebrity in the role of Gopher on Love Boat — was promoting his efforts to get a small retraining grant for the displaced workers, but surely was not concerned about ‘corporate justice’. Jackson was there to say that only a radical political realignment could achieve some semblance of equity in the economic equation. “We have the money to bail out the American farmer”, he said “but we don’t have the priority to do it.”

… Farmers who have never seen a black person in their town, let alone in their kitchen, told me they’d vote for Jackson because, as one of them put it, “he’s meeting the issues” … Jackson “understands the farmer, the blue-collar man, the working man.”

From Detroit 1988 (after Michigan win)

In 1950, when she was 19, Bertha Gillespie left the hot, rich farmland of Columbus, Mississippi, and rode the train a thousand miles north to Detroit to find good work and raise her family. She had high hopes. Right away she got a job as a housekeeper in the new Howard Johnson’s motel, the perfect orange-and-aqua symbol for the triumph of the auto-industrial age and the mass car culture it spawned. She already had two children, and they moved into the sprawling Brewster housing project. Her new neighbors were black migrants from all over the rural South who had come to work in the factories — and make the beds — of the corporate families that had fashioned Detroit into a great war machine and the foundation of the consumer civilization.

“Oh, things were nice then”, Gillespie told me as we walked around Brewster-Douglas, as the project is now known, just behind Jesse Jackson and a platoon of Secret Service men on the afternoon of the Michigan Democratic caucuses. Gillespie, her daughter and several friends had joined hundreds of residents in an impromptu march to get out the vote and drum up enthusiasm for a campaign that was already at fever pitch in the projects.

“It was a real nice place to live in most times”, Gillespie recalled. “The buildings were so new, they wouldn’t let us barbecue outside ’cause they said we’d smoke up the bricks.” The place was full of possibilities. Joe Lewis, the Brown Bomber of Detroit, was a Brewster boy. “See over there, that’s where Diana Ross grew up. I used to see her all the time … and on the second floor of that high-rise there, that’s where Mary Wilson lived. And behind, the other Supreme, the one who died, she lived there.” They don’t remember Flo so well.

“Things started to go down after that”. Gillespie recounted. “We lacked police protection. There was a lot of drugs and guns, and the police would come and circle the block, they’d pull over somebody and take their money and drugs and keep on going. They still do it, but they don’t come around that much anymore.”

Detroit went up in flames in the riots of 1967, and there are still broad fields of dirt and rubble where nothing has been rebuilt. The bricks of Brewster grew grimy and the paint peeled, but it wasn’t from the smoke of barbecues. The entry to Diana Ross’s apartment and hundreds of others are boarded up with plywood; the windows of Mary Wilson’s high-rise are broken and the stairwells are littered and foul. They closed Bertha Gillespie’s apartment block and moved her out of the project, but she still works as a housekeeper in one of the buildings, where old people live. Her seven kids are grown; the ‘baby’, she says, is coming out of school this year. She’s thinking about going back to Mississippi. “Things down there ain’t so bad anymore”, she thought…

It is impossible to understand Jesse Jackson’s extraordinary political achievement in Michigan without some sense of the social transformations that have produced the conditions his campaign addresses. When Jackson talks about the dispossessed and the disenfranchised he does not refer only to the poor or the voteless but to people who are radically removed from the nourishing institutions and the enlivening spirit of American society. In Michigan especially that includes whites as well as blacks, and people who are just getting by in the economy as well as those who are suffering on welfare. Hundreds of thousands of white workers have lost their jobs, and the ones who are still working live with a permanent sense of insecurity. A pall of pessimism has settled over the scene.

“We work everyday”, Jackson reminds crowds of the underemployed, who invariably respond with knowing assents. “We are still poor. We pick up your garbage; we work everyday. We drive your cars, we take care of your children, we empty your bedpans, we sweep your apartments; we work everyday. We cook your food, and we don’t have time to cook our own. We change your hospital beds and wipe your fevered brow, and we can’t afford to lie in that bed when we get sick. We work everyday.” By the end of the speech the nods of approval are mixed with tears.

The precipitous decline of ‘the industry’ has ravaged souls as well as cities. It has exacerbated racial and class differences and has called into question all the old strategies for economic development on social Improvement…. Jim Settles, an official of UAW Local 600 in Dearborn, explained that Jackson’s ‘message’ was getting through to workers of all stripes in his union, but it was not merely the promise of paychecks or food stamps. “Jackson does something no one else has done”, Settles said. “He gives people hope.” Richard Gephardt, who was favored for a time by the union’s top brass, scored some emotional points with his Hyundai-bashing, but Jackson won by locating villainy in the system rather than in Asia. Dukakis halfheartedly appealed to white workers on the basis of their ethnicity and certain cultural icons. He endlessly repeated sentimental stories of his parents arrival at Ellis Island, and in the Polish enclave of Hamtramck he told a small and dispirited audience that his wife Kitty, “the love of my life”, is supposed to “look just like Jackie Kennedy”. At which point his sponsors presented him with a sign board with his name spelled out in kielbasa. Not too many of those folks came out to vote for him the next day.

Jackson has known all along that a populist campaign runs on hope and the prospect of power. His jingly chant “I Am Somebody” (heard more frequently four years ago than today) turns out to be the essential statement of the populist ideology. He is more sophisticated now but no less consistent. In Michigan he could be recognized as a great communicator of hope to the victims of transformations that he himself has lived through and triumphed over. The Brewster kids have a new model for success. What Flo don’t know (in The Supremes’ phrase) is that a new level of political possibility has come out of the projects, out of the shuttered factories along the Rouge, out of the dead city and the besieged suburbs. It’s a powerful tide that Jackson is riding now, and it energizes constituencies in ever-widening rings.

From Atlanta 1988 (pre-convention)

Perhaps there were a few moments — between the Michigan caucuses and the Wisconsin primary — when Jackson and his supporters indulged their fondest fantasy of winning the nomination, but they always knew that the dream was impossible. At best, the campaign could organize a force mighty enough to demand a share of power in the general election campaign, in the Democratic Party and in a Democratic Administration. And that best would be very good indeed.

But no matter how successful Jackson is in getting a share of power for himself or his campaign this year, he has demonstrated that an expanded electorate and a coalition of the disempowered is the only likely route for progressive politics in the foreseeable future. Democrats who will not or cannot expand the party to include that half of the population that does not now participate (and that would in great measure support progressive programs), and candidates who offer no plan for the reorganization of power at the base, will be stuck in the center and dependent o the interests of the corporate class that dominates politics. They are obliged to cater to the most regressive ‘swing’ constituencies in the electorate, as Dukakis has been told he must. They make unseemly compromises with racism (however humane the rhetoric) in order to placate the swing voters, who — surprise! — turn out to be white and conservative. Such candidates may win, but they cannot make change. In boom times and in periods of low-intensity social conflict they may deliver modest benefits to the needy and civilized management for the middle class. But they cannot, and will not, attempt the kind of perestroika that progressives glimpsed this year for the first time in almost a half-century of trial and failure.

The search for ‘new ideas’ that occupied Democrats during the 1984 primary season turned up nothing but recycled or repackaged old ideas. This year there are enough new ideas around to choke a horse. There is the idea of conversion from a military to a civilian economy, of realigning US foreign policy with the forces of independence in the Third World, of public control of corporate behavior in the social sphere, of universal health care, of redistribution of wealth and power, of democratizing the processes of politics, of empowering the powerless….

Now the choice is to wither away or fight for the future.