by Joy-Ann Reid
By 1991, that lesson was top of mind for Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, as he set his eye on the next presidential election.
Clinton and Jackson had become acquainted in 1982, when Clinton invited Jackson to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. The ceremony was followed by a small gathering at the Governor’s Mansion with Jackson, Alexis Herman, Ernest G. Greene (five years Clinton’s senior and a member of the Little Rock Nine, and a former assistant labor secretary in the Carter administration), and a handful of staff. As the evening stretched into the wee hours, participants began to peel away, leaving Jackson and Clinton to push on until nearly 4 A.M., discussing politics and “generally doing what both of them do: talk,” as one aide put it. In the end, Hillary Clinton had to declare an end to the all-nighter. Jackson later recalled with a smile, “Hillary put me out of the governor’s mansion.”
Despite the cordiality of that night, Clinton and Jackson were rivals. Clinton’s 1988 convention moment had been a disaster; his overly long speech drew applause at the phrase “in conclusion.” Clinton also found Jackson’s unabashed liberalism starkly at odds with his and the “New Democrats’ ” formula for winning back white working-class voters in the South, the West, and the “culturally southern” voters in places like Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and Illinois.
Clinton led the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which had a long game to launch a viable presidential candidate by 1996. But Clinton had no patience for the long game. He, like other charter members, including Al Gore and Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt, saw the DLC as a centrist vehicle they could ride to the White House.
The DLC had frequently invited Jackson to its annual conventions, but he always used the moment to criticize Democrats for talking about “opportunity, responsibility, and community” while essentially preaching Reaganomics, complete with conservative buzzwords like “equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.”
When Clinton assumed the chairmanship of the DLC in 1990, the invitations to Jackson stopped.
The group’s May 1991 convention in Cleveland was attended by a diverse group of political stars, including the city’s young black mayor, Michael White; Congressmen Mike Espy of Mississippi and Bill Gray of Pennsylvania; the Democratic National Committee’s first-ever black chairman, Ron Brown; and Virginia’s newly elected first black governor, Douglas Wilder. The pointed message was that Jackson wasn’t the only black leader who mattered. In addition, Clinton had his own relationships with black leaders, including Vernon Jordan, whom Clinton had known since 1973; Kansas City mayor Emanuel Cleaver, a Methodist minister bound for the House of Representatives; Carter-appointed Florida district judge Alcee Hastings; former King aide Andrew Young; and John Lewis, the former SNCC leader elected to Congress in 1986.
The Cleveland summit would demonstrate that the party could take a new base into the next national election. Not only was Jackson conspicuously excluded, but so was George McGovern, a pointed rebuke that irritated liberal Democrats like Mario Cuomo, who saw no need to make the party “new.”
Jackson organized a counter-rally on the Sunday night before the convention, but the protest was to no avail. Clinton was a bona fide hit in Cleveland, and his message for remaking the party so it could appeal to every region, class, and walk of life and could compete with Republicans for the American heartland was a balm to his stricken party. This New Democratic Party proclaimed its opposition to “quotas and special interests”—a barely concealed euphemism for African Americans and unions—and supported welfare reform and school choice.
In a June 1991 Associated Press interview, Clinton called out Cuomo and Jackson by name over their criticism of his and the New Democrats’ vows to remake the party, and for Jackson’s ridicule of the DLC as the “Democratic Leisure Class,” saying, “I like Mario, but once again, he and Jesse are criticizing me without being specific about what they disagree with.” He went on to say, “we’re getting beat . . . and what’s their explanation for why the middle class folks didn’t vote for us in ’88 when we had a clear shot? People aren’t buyin’ what we’re sellin’.”
The forces pushing Jackson to the margins weren’t coming just from within the Democratic Party.
A new vein of civil unrest had opened in the Northeast, and it ran right through the heart of New York City—America’s blue metropolis—filling the nightly news and the minds of white suburbanites with visions of the “urban nightmare” from which centrist Democrats were working so hard to disentangle the party.
The unrest touched off a new civil rights movement led by a onetime protégé of Jackson: Al Sharpton, who’d risen from boy preacher—at just nine years old he had already delivered sermons in Brooklyn churches and toured with Mahalia Jackson at the time of the March on Washington—to a road manager for soul legend James Brown to a growing national force in his own right.
Unlike Jackson and other traditional civil rights leaders, Sharpton had no roots in the South. He and his mother were forced to leave their middle-class home in Hollis, Queens, after becoming destitute in the wake of the family’s abandonment by his father, who in 1963 ran off with Sharpton’s eighteen-year-old half sister. The family moved to the rough projects of Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood.
In 1969, Jackson appointed Sharpton as youth director of Operation Breadbasket, and two years later, when Jackson split from the SCLC, King confidant Bayard Rustin gave Sharpton the cash to start his own organization, the National Action Network. By the early 1990s, Sharpton was carving a path separate from his onetime mentor, and more confrontational.
He became a staple in the New York City media after the shooting of four black men on a subway train by a white passenger, Bernard Goetz, three days before Christmas in 1984. Sharpton led mass marches denouncing the city’s response to a wave of young black men chased down and killed by white mobs in New York’s ethnically polarized neighborhoods: twenty-three-year-old Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986; sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1989; as well as the sensational trial and imprisonment of five black and Hispanic teenagers in the brutal rape of a white jogger in Central Park that same year; the men were found innocent decades later.
Heavy-set and frequently clad in a jogging suit in the style of the rap group Run-D.M.C., with long sideburns and pressed hair that hung down to his shoulders like his surrogate father, James Brown, Sharpton cut a strikingly different figure from Jackson. He led marches through racially segregated neighborhoods, and battled city leaders with brash abandon. He would be dogged for years by a 1987 controversy over an alleged attack on a black teenage girl, Tawana Brawley, who accused six white men of raping her and covering her in excrement—an allegation later proven false—and survived a 1991 stabbing during a Bensonhurst march, to emerge as the most visible civil rights leader in an increasingly volatile city. Sharpton kept up a drumbeat of protests over racial profiling, police brutality, and the ongoing discrimination he called “not just a southern specialty.”
The post–civil rights era had given way to the “no justice, no peace movement,” in which activists took to the streets in 1960s-style marches but declined to adopt the neatly pressed Sunday garments or the pose of Gandhian nonviolence characterized by King’s movement. In the Sharpton era, the threat of civil unrest churned beneath the surface of every protest, and civic (or corporate) leaders had little choice but to respond. Sharpton was the movement’s primary organizational figure. Hip-hop artists like Public Enemy provided its soundtrack. And filmmaker Spike Lee provided the cinematic play-by-play for what felt, to some, like a racially apocalyptic America.
Angry protests, even riots, fueled by ethnic mistrust and decades of tension between communities of color and police, were erupting around the country: in Miami in 1989 following the police-involved shooting deaths of two unarmed black men; in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 after a black child was struck and
killed by a car in an Orthodox Jewish motorcade; and in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992 following the acquittal of four officers who brutally beat black motorist Rodney King—a mauling caught on videotape.
Even on college campuses, questions of race pervaded the discourse, from national debates over the merit of ethnic studies, to protests over the dearth of tenured black faculty. Questions roiled even staid Harvard University, where weeks of sit-ins brought a wave of black intellectual elites to the African American studies department, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah, William Julius Wilson, and Cornel West. At Harvard Law School, a young Columbia University graduate, Barack Obama, who had achieved a crackle of national notoriety as the first black president of the law review, attended a 1991 campus rally in support of Professor Derrick Bell, who had vowed not to return to the classroom until more diverse faculty were hired.
Jesse Jackson struggled to figure out where he, a civil rights leader from a different generation of activists—indeed, from what increasingly felt like a bygone era—fit in.
BILL CLINTON FORMALLY ANNOUNCED HIS CANDIDACY FOR PRESIDENT in October 1991, just a few months after his triumph in Cleveland. He dove into the primaries the next year, confident that he could bring the “Reagan Democrats” home by neutralizing the triumvirate of wedge issues—race, crime, and quotas—that had so advantaged the GOP.
The field of Democratic candidates was unimpressive, according to the Clinton team. Jackson was on the sidelines, saddled by lingering campaign debts, meaning that Clinton’s only competitor for black votes in the primaries was Governor Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the first African American governor of any state since Reconstruction. He had the potential to do to Clinton with black voters what Jackson had done to Dukakis and Gore. In addition Wilder was a business-focused, bread-and-butter moderate, who could make a serious play for white voters. “He had a preexisting history, and was very well liked in the African American community,” one senior member of the 1992 Clinton campaign said.
With African Americans making up 20 to 25 percent of the primary electorate, and 30 percent or better in states like South Carolina, having a serious black challenger in the race would have been problematic for Clinton. But after declaring his candidacy for president in September 1991, Wilder withdrew before the start of the primaries, citing Virginia’s fiscal woes and his need to focus on his job as governor.
“Once Wilder got out, Bill Clinton had an open field,” the senior Clinton campaign staffer said.
Clinton recruited former members of Jackson’s team, including Alexis Herman, Lavonia Perryman, and Minyon Moore. This prompted Jackson, referring to Moore’s and Perryman’s history with Operation PUSH, to crack, “we raise ’em up and you guys steal ’em.”
With a clear path to the teeming black vote in the South, which was so important to the southern-packed schedule on Super Tuesday, Clinton worked to distinguish himself as the champion of the middle class, which involved sending a clear message to the white suburbs. For that Clinton would enlist Jackson’s help, if not his consent.
In January 1992, with the Iowa caucuses looming, Clinton dramatically flew home to Arkansas to sign the death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally damaged black man sentenced to die by an all-white jury in the 1981 shooting deaths of two men, including a police officer Rector had known for much of his life. The execution became a botched, torturous affair in which Rector seemed to believe that the executioners struggling to find a vein in his swollen arm were doctors who had come to help him. Afterward the prison chaplain resigned.
Jackson had publicly pleaded with Clinton to spare Rector’s life, even urging top aides and supporters to send telegrams asking the governor to grant Rector an eleventh-hour reprieve. Instead Clinton made sure the execution went forward. The next day he went as planned to the Rainbow Coalition’s presidential candidate forum in Washington, D.C.
As attendees streamed into the Omni Shoreham hotel for two days of panels featuring New York congressman Charlie Rangel, African American scholar Ron Walters, political scientist David Bositis, New York mayor David Dinkins, and others, Clinton strode into the room with full knowledge that the air was thick with the knowledge of Rector’s death.
One by one, the Democratic candidates—California governor Jerry Brown, Iowa senator Tom Harkin, Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, and former presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy—made their pitches for African American support. When Clinton’s turn came, he fielded sharp questions, and calmly explained his views on the death penalty, coolly pointing out that he and Jesse Jackson disagreed on some things. But Clinton also emphasized where he agreed with Jackson: so-called motor voter laws to ease access to the polls, D.C. statehood, and the establishment of rural development banks like ones in his home state that could help lift black farmers out of poverty. But on the death penalty, he wasn’t backing down.
“This was Bill Clinton, politically, at his absolute most brilliant,” said one attendee. “It was like he was stabbing a knife right in the chest of the Republican Party. He was gonna go before Jesse Jackson’s group and talk about why he executed Ricky Ray Rector. The next day, throughout the country, everybody was gonna know that Jesse Jackson and his friends were begging Bill Clinton not to execute Rector, and Bill Clinton just pulled the switch.”
Clinton pulled this off with dexterity and charm, receiving warm applause as he left the stage. But he had sent a sharp message to white suburban voters that he was as tough on crime as any Republican, and he wasn’t afraid to say so in front of America’s most prominent civil rights leader. In one fluid motion, Clinton had inoculated himself against the deadliest weapon George H. W. Bush had wielded against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
As Bositis would later recall, after the conference, for all the attacks on Clinton’s morality, his marriage, or his Vietnam service, “Republicans couldn’t say a word about crime. Bill Clinton took crime as an issue away from them. And that time wasn’t far removed from the crack epidemic. He took crime, and he took anti-black politics as a wedge issue away from the Republicans.”
Clinton was sailing to the nomination, narrowly losing in New Hampshire but rebounding in the southern states, then Michigan and Illinois, and by late spring, across the Rust Belt and even in Jerry Brown’s home state of California. But he still had more to deal with when it came to Jesse Jackson, who by late spring was pressing hard—and publicly—to be Clinton’s running mate.
“Vice Prez Or Else!” blared a May 2 headline in the New York Daily News, which quoted Jackson warning the Democrats on behalf of black voters, in language reminiscent of his fiery stump speech in Gary in 1972, “We are ready for any opportunity to serve, but we are ready if we are ignored or rejected. . . . If I am rejected this time, I am prepared to react!”
The Clinton campaign reacted by ignoring Jackson.
Jackson’s remarks were condemned for what many saw as a repeat of his 1988 attempts to bully the Dukakis campaign. “For all his brilliance, he hasn’t figured out that it’s not done that way—that to seek greatness is to fall short of it,” wrote Philadelphia Inquirer columnist William Raspberry in May 1992. “Indeed it may be Jackson’s tragic flaw that there is no overall cause that takes precedence over his personal prospects.”
A month later, when Clinton was the presumptive nominee, he accepted Jackson’s invitation to speak at another Rainbow Coalition conference in Washington, D.C., on June 13. Jackson had also invited twenty-eight-year-old Harlem rapper and activist Lisa Williamson, known as Sister Souljah. The onetime legislative intern in Washington was a veteran of the campus anti-apartheid movement at Rutgers University in the 1980s, and she now toured as a public speaker and poet, promoting a March rap album featuring cameos by Public Enemy leader Chuck D and N.W.A. (“Niggaz With Attitude”) rapper Ice Cube. It had produced two controversial singles: “The Hate That Hate Produced” and “The Final Solution: Slavery’s Back in Effect,” which imagined a fictional vi
ce president David Duke who reinstitutes slavery. Her music videos were banned from MTV but spun in heavy rotation on local music video shows in New York City.
One month before the conference, on May 13, the Washington Post had published an interview with Souljah in which she was asked if the violence during the Los Angeles riots, which raged from April 29 to May 4, after the Rodney King verdict, was wise.
“If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” she replied. “In other words, white people, this government, and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, or above and beyond dying, when they would kill their own kind? . . . If my house burns down, your house burns down. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. That’s what they believe. And I see why.”
The uproar over the interview brought Jackson to New York, where he met with Williamson in hopes he could convince her to use her influence with young rap music fans differently. Beyond the invitation to the D.C. conference, Jackson hoped to get the young woman involved in future Rainbow Coalition activities in New York, and parenthetically, to gain a foothold for himself in the world of youth-centric direct action that Rev. Sharpton was making his signature. Williamson was added to a panel at the conference that included David Bositis, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, and Georgia state representative “Able” Mable Thomas, set for the day before Clinton’s arrival. Jackson hoped that the older intellectuals would influence Williamson to soften her approach, ahead of her “coming-out party” the following day at the Washington event.
