Journalist Abby Phillip on Jesse Jackson, the Democratic Party, and building trust in media

Jackson as the “ultimate self-made man”

He was the ultimate self-made man. He was born to a teenage mother in Greenville, South Carolina. He didn’t know who his biological father was until he was 8 years old…he comes from that kind of gritty, simple upbringing and he has a couple of things that make him really stand out.

He’s tall, he’s handsome, and at some point, over the course of his adolescence, he learns through the church and through other means, through the football field—he was a star quarterback—how to lead. He learns how to speak. He learns how to drive other people to action, and he becomes this extraordinary charismatic figure at a very young age. This is somebody who otherwise could have just become a statistic, frankly, and he took this very simple upbringing and he forced his way into history.  

On Jackson’s relationship with Martin Luther King

When he went to work for Dr. King, he was the youngest person in that orbit…he was probably  23-24 years old. Dr. King would have these rallies, public speaking events, and here’s young Jesse Jackson saying, “I want to be on the program.” He was  in his mid 20s wanting to be right there next to Dr. King on the speaking agenda. I think Dr. King respected the leadership instincts that he had, the charisma that he had, but at several moments they had confrontations where Dr. King essentially had to say to him, “you are too impetuous. You don't understand how to really take the mantle of leadership, how difficult this is.”

Jesse Jackson wanted Dr. King to basically be the father he never had, and Dr. King was sort of like, “I’m not old enough to be your father.... Hold your horses a little bit. This isn’t all just glory. This isn’t all just soaring speeches. There are challenges.” There are real risks that he understood, physical risks to his safety. 

On race in American politics  

[Jackson] used to say “if you turn the lights down in the factory, we’re all the same color in the dark.” ...Using race as a way to divide people up and appealing to people based on their racial characteristics is an easy way to help them forget that the real thing that controls their fate is where they lie in the class strata in a society.

It’s a tool that is used by politicians all over the world, frankly. It’s something that is easy to do because of human nature. We tend to believe that we have more in common with people who physically look like us than people who have other characteristics that are similar.  

In this country, even going back to the days of slavery, when there were poor whites who didn't own slaves, but were living in a slavery caste system, the reason that the slavery caste system was able to survive is because those poor whites were led to believe by everything around them that even in their poverty, they were better than the Black slave just by virtue of the way of what they looked like. And that poisonous ideology is still with us.

It’s still fundamentally what undergirds our politics today. And it’s still the thing that most needs to change if we’re going to really have a politics that is post-racial or that goes beyond race. We need to have a politics in which politicians no longer appeal to people on that basis. And we’re not there yet. We’re just not.

On Phillip’s reflection on the Democratic Party and Black voters  

There has to be internal accountability in the Democratic Party. This is what Jesse Jackson was doing. Because it’s easy to say, compared to the other party, they’re doing this better than that side. But is the representation truly representative or is it performative?

Black voters are in a particularly interesting place right now where decades and decades of work by Reverend Jackson and others have meant that there are very prominent Black people at all levels of the Democratic party. So now Black folks are the party. And so is there still a desire and appetite to challenge the party from within when you are the party?

What’s so hard about this moment is that  it feels like Black power has arrived, but there’s more work to be done, right?  

On building trust in media  

People are looking for more authenticity, more transparency in the news. They want the information that they’re receiving to feel less polished in some ways and more true to life.

When you think about the sources of information that younger people are consuming, they’re a lot more gritty. They’re a lot less [of] the studios and the lights—that doesn’t resonate with people anymore. And in some ways it’s for good reason. I think because sometimes it feels like it can mask the truth. And I also think it feels inaccessible.

One of the reasons it feels inaccessible is because I think people increasingly don’t understand how we do the work that we do. It has gotten opaque over the years. We talk about sources and about “off the record,” just the jargon of journalism can sometimes get in the way of understanding. We need to do a better job of explaining to people how this works. Why we let certain people be anonymous and why we don’t. How we got to the answer to this question, how we got this piece of information. I think we need to let people in a little bit more on the process and be more transparent about what we know and what we don’t know about when we fall short. That transparency is what the audience has been asking for. 

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Photographs by Mike DeStefano