A lot has changed since Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984. Although the “Rainbow Coalition” he unified — an array of minority groups, Black and brown people, farmers, poor factory workers, the LGBTQ community, and white progressives — were open to a variety of ideas. And while Jackson did put
There has been progress on reparations in the 34 years since Jackson’s run. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties recently held a hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that will create a committee to study and develop proposals for reparations.
And Jackson has some thoughts about the issue of reparations.
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“Well, first of all, we had been freed without being made equal. There’s historical continuity between Blacks being amassed in prison after 246 years of legal slavery. When there was a contest about it [in ‘Dred Scott v. Sandford’], the Supreme Court ruled that Blacks had no rights. [After emancipation and the Civil War] those who had been slave masters became segregation masters. They took our freedom away from us; they began to lock up Blacks by the thousands to do prison labor, farm labor—the whole range. They just put us back in slavery,” Jackson told The Atlantic.
He continued: “We finally, in 1954, broke the backbone—legally—of that system [with the Supreme Court’s ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ decision], but we were never—there was never repair for damage done. Two hundred and forty-six years of slavery, then legal Jim Crow and [nearly] 5,000 lynchings without a conviction. And even today, discrimination by extension of that system has not completely ended.”
And there, said Jackson, needs to be reparations.
“If you don’t deal with the damage, you can’t provide repair for damage. Slavery was damage. You couldn’t go to school; you couldn’t marry; you couldn’t own property. We were not mobile. We were enslaved while building the strongest economy in the world. The reason why the South wanted to break away in 1861 is because Southerners had become addicted to slavery. They were willing to create a whole new country, selling cotton and tobacco and rice to Britain and France. Lincoln knew if that happened, the nation would dissolve. To save the Union, he had to end slavery. When we were freed, we joined the Union army—Lincoln saved us, we saved Lincoln,” Jackson said.
And due to all that slaves and Black American did to build the country, Jackson, backs the idea of a study of reparations. “Let’s just study it,” the longtime civil rights leader said in a meeting with The Baltimore Sun‘s editorial board.
According to Jackson, the focus of reparations should be to heal not “personal racism” but structural racism.
Jackson told The Sun, “I’m not sure what’s the best way to deal with it…We have people all out of shape, they’re shaped like inequity with all kinds of distortions. We have to change that. That’s the challenge today.”
