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Yet when Andrew Young got up to speak to the San Francisco convention about the platform, he was booed by younger delegates loyal to Jackson. At a black caucus, summoned to calm black delegates' angers, Coretta King was booed when she spoke for Young. "That was yesterday," some delegates called up to her. "What have you done for us today?" Young slipped out the back door. Only when Jackson arrived and made an emotional plea for unity did all those onstage lock arms and sing We Shall Overcome. Jackson rebuked his followers: "When I think about the roads I've walked with Andy, and the leadership of Mrs. King -- her home bombed, her husband assassinated, her children raised by a widow -- she deserves to be heard." Those who talk about a "changed" Jackson in this campaign, less strident and more conciliatory, were not watching that tense moment in the 1984 campaign.
During the 1970s, while other movement leaders went into local politics or burned themselves out, Jackson became the only national black leader. He alone traveled the length of the nation, addressing a new generation in school after school, attacking drugs, calling for academic excellence, preaching self- discipline (a message that had few allies then, with the embarrassing exception of the Black Muslims).
The charge against Jackson in those days was that he was inspiring, he gave good speeches, but he had no follow-through. (The same charge, Garrow reminds us, dogged Dr. King all his days). Yet Operation Breadbasket, that orphaned program, was expanded into Operation PUSH, and that turned into the "rainbow coalition," which became the 1984 campaign and has led on to Jackson's strong showing in the current presidential race. The argument that Jackson is not a builder masks the fact that he has found new ways to build a movement, going beyond the civil rights organizations (which, in their day, departed from older political structures).
Jackson is forming a movement to go beyond civil rights toward economic justice, which means going beyond black and white politics. It is true that the worst domestic crises that afflict America -- unemployment, debt, blighted inner cities, drugs, fatherless children, AIDS -- are especially wounding to black citizens. Jackson speaks for these victims but not exclusively for them. Blacks and whites must participate in the solution to problems they both created. The trick, as Bert Lance puts in it in Southern terms, is to "combine a minority of the majority vote with a majority of the minority vote" -- as happened in the 1986 election of Southern Democratic Senators, following on Jackson's campaign and registration efforts of 1984. Those elections, giving the Democrats control of the Senate, made possible the rejection of Robert Bork. "We did it under the ((Judiciary Committee)) chairmanship of Senator Biden," Jackson says. "We couldn't have done it under the chairmanship of Senator Thurmond."