Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984, the second Black candidate to do so after Shirley Chisholm in the 1970s. Jackson called for reparations. The Democrats considered him a nuisance and worried that his policy proposals were too left-leaning, the Atlantic reported. He ran again in 1988.
Jackson talked about how reparations become an issue in his presidential campaign.
“We are the foundation of American society—not the bottom, the foundation,” Jackson said in a June, 2019 interview with Adam Harris at The Atlantic. “When the Declaration of Independence came, we had been enslaved for 157 years. We made cotton king. We are due a different kind of recognition … We were enslaved while building the strongest economy in the world … The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away. It’s buried right now, but as each generation becomes much more serious, it will be grappled with.”
