The many
obituaries and career assessments of Jesse Jackson since the
announcement of his death earlier this week have understandably focused on his impact
as the most important African-American leader between Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. and Barack Obama.
But more
broadly, he may have been the most radical major party candidate in American
history since William Jennings Bryan. His concerns touched on not just the
problems faced by this nation’s working class but those abroad.
Over the
last decade, in writing (with Rob Polner) a biography of Paul O’Dwyer, An Irish Passion for Justice, I became fascinated with why this
Irish-born New York radical lawyer, politician, and activist supported Jackson’s insurgent Presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.
Particularly
since 1969, with the start of the sectarian “Troubles” that convulsed
Northern Ireland, O’Dwyer had sought Democratic politicians aiming for national
office who would aggressively press Great Britain for a negotiated settlement
to the conflict.
Rather
than George McGovern, an antiwar liberal who might have normally won his
endorsement, he ended up supporting Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 Presidential
primaries because, unlike the Senator from South Dakota, she took an
unequivocal stance favoring Irish unification.
Additionally,
in the U.S. at large as well as in New York State, O’Dwyer had long felt uncomfortable
with the party’s lack of Black leadership. With Jackson’s ringing oratory on
behalf of a “Rainbow Coalition” of white and Black voters motivated by economic
unrest in the Reagan era, O’Dwyer saw a charismatic candidate who could break
through.
To an
extent not always understood by many who focus on particular countries, the
struggle for civil rights has taken inspiration from around the world. Henry
David Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience profoundly shaped Mahatma Gandhi’s
strategy of passive resistance to British rule in India, which in turn
influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the segregated American South.
In the late 1960s, civil-rights marches staged by Ulster Catholics drew on the non-violent protests of African-Americans under the leadership of Dr. King.
And, as civil rights activism moved to a different spot on the globe in the
Seventies and Eighties—South Africa—many Ulster nationalists and their American
supporters glimpsed another, economic model with potential for exerting
pressure on a recalcitrant regime: the Sullivan Principles.
In 1977, as a tool against apartheid, the Rev. Louis Sullivan of Philadelphia conceived non-discrimination guidelines that companies investing in South Africa should follow to ensure fair employment.
Seven years later, the Irish National Caucus fashioned a similar cudgel against the “the systematic practice and endemic
nature of anti-Catholic discrimination” in Protestant-dominated Northern
Ireland since partition in 1921, naming the MacBride Principles after Sean MacBride, a Nobel Peace
Prize laureate and co-founder of Amnesty International.
These
nondiscrimination and corporate codes appealed to O’Dwyer. Peter King, a
conservative Long Island Republican who made common cause with the progressive
Democrat on Ulster, remembered about his ally, in an interview with Rob and myself for our
biography:
“Paul was
really a lawyer at heart, and saw things through the vision of a lawyer. Even
though he was in politics, and ran for office a number of times, he had that
legal direction— how can this be done, how can the law be changed, how can we
put certain protections in. Even in the frenzy of a political or nationalist
moment, he was at his core a lawyer.”
Jackson,
along with another 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Paul Simon,
responded to a questionnaire from the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish
Affairs, with the response above on the MacBride Principles.
A few
weeks later, just before the Democratic Presidential primary in New York,
O’Dwyer introduced Jackson to Irish politicians and lawyers at a fundraiser,
extolling the candidate’s interracial vote-getting potential.
Though the
party’s eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, had endorsed this corporate code of
conduct as governor of Massachusetts, he did not discuss it much on the
campaign trail after securing the nomination.
In any
case, his failure at the polls that autumn meant that it would take another
four years before O’Dwyer found, in Bill Clinton, a candidate willing to
endorse the MacBride Principles and appoint a special envoy to facilitate the
peace process in Northern Ireland.
With
Jackson’s passing—and access to his papers and the recollections of friends and
family members—the time is ripe for historians and biographers to investigate
and weigh the legacy of this complicated but critically important American
progressive. His advocacy on behalf of Northern Ireland should be a part of
such research.
(The
portrait of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson that accompanies this post was
taken during the 1980s by Jesse Jackson for President, Inc.)
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