Jesse Opened a Rainbow Path Forward, Now We Must Build And Walk A New Road

By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Newsweekly, Feb 20, 2026

Rev. Jesse Jackson, the formidable leader of both the civil rights movement and the U.S. left, has passed on. All those familiar with his health situation were not caught unaware, but we were saddened nonetheless.

Jesse, or ‘The Rev’ to close workers and friends, left deep impressions on all of us and the entire country. Tributes to his impact on our time are appearing everywhere. Jesse was ‘a force of nature’, insisting on giving us agency with ‘I am somebody!’ chanted by millions. And by insisting on our agency, he kept hope alive.

I won’t attempt to sum up, in this short space, Jesse’s profound impact on the country and the world. Others will do that far better than I. Instead, I will just tell my personal stories.

I can’t recall the first time I met Jesse. But, like many longtime Chicago activists, our paths crossed dozens of times on common projects in our local peace and justice movements and in Chicago’s elections. From time to time, on a Saturday or Sunday, I would also make my way to his South Side church, Operation PUSH, just to hear a sermon and listen to the choir and the music. I was always uplifted.

Rev. Jackson once invited me to PUSH to receive an award, along with 10 others, who had a hand in registering a large number of new registered voters—in my case, 20,000—and I found out I was the sole white guy up front. All the others had faced greater difficulties. It was humbling.

But I got to know Jesse in a few unique ways. In my early years as an instructor and grad student in philosophy at the University of Nebraska, I had hooked up with a number of left-wing farmers, especially Merle Hansen of the North American Farm Alliance. Merle and I stayed in contact over the years, and when Jesse was building his ‘rainbow,’ Merle suggested we work together to get Jesse out to farmers, and we did.

I’ll never forget one evening in Western Iowa where Merle, Jesse, and I went into a barn with some 50 farmers eager to hear Jesse. They weren’t disappointed. As a Minister of the Gospel, Jesse knew exactly how to speak to this group, and when he was done, it was a standing ovation without a dry eye in the barn.

‘When farmers get radical,’ Merle explained to me, ‘they go one way or the other, not too many in the middle. Some will go with the right and the anti-Semites. And some will go with Jesse and the Rainbow.’ As a result of the effort, we put the ‘green’ stripe in the rainbow flag.

A few months later, I got another call from Merle. ‘How would you like to be a delegate to the Farmers and Ranchers Congress in St Louis? Jesse will be there, and about 10,000 delegates. My Chicago comrade, Ivan Handler, and I were on the road in a flash, up for a powerful experience for both of us. I also gathered material for a pamphlet I was working on, ‘Blood on the Plow,’ plus we got to hear a great concert with Willie Nelson, and I made my way to shake Willie’s hand, too!

We then headed to the crowded hotel bar, where I ended up standing between Merle and Jesse. How was that for a peak experience, meeting Willie and hanging with Jesse that same night!

I had another somewhat amusing experience. My group at the time, the League of Revolutionary Struggle, was heavily engaged in Jesse’s campaign. Jesse built his Black base and won over Chicago Latinos, but the LRS brought in many of the other nationalities—Filipino-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. My LRS local leader in Chicago was holding a campaign meeting with Jesse’s key Puerto Rican ally, Luis Gutierrez, at her house. She told me to write up a ‘talking points’ memo on how Jesse would win the national election. ‘Are you kidding?’ I asked. ‘I doubt even Jesse thinks that.’ No, she said, ‘that’s the line. Get to work. I need it it a few hours’ So I turned to all my research files and clippings, and stretched out the most optimistic (and some unlikely) string of wins along the way that ended with Jesse in the White House.

It got over, sort of, in her packed living room. Luis asked me later, laughing, ‘Davidson, remind me to call you when I have a tough argument to spin!, I laughed in return. But in a way, the memo had served a purpose that evening. The talking points challenged us to think outside the box at times and that the future was always open.

Another point worth noting: My friend Ivan, mentioned above, was an early computer guy, and with a small assist from me, he went to work organizing the best use of networked portable computers at the convention site for Jesse. It was a big deal then, even if today it’s all easily done in a Signal room on Smartphones. But then? Even Newsweek reported that Jackson had the best computer networks of anyone else running.

My antiwar ‘co-conspirator’ and close friend, Marilyn Katz (peace be upon her), was also close to Jesse, and a ‘force of nature’ in her own right. She had him help us in many ways in building the anti-Iraq war movement in Chicago, including getting Obama involved. Rev. Jackson was very helpful in working with us to get the Chicago City Council to vote twice against the war, both before it started and after it was underway.

Some on the left were critical of Jesse for pulling his part of the Rainbow back into Operation Push locally, forgoing a lasting national organization. I’m not among them. Jesse always told us, ‘My job is to shake the cherries from the trees. Your job is to gather up the harvest.’

But we were weak in doing so. We overemphasized our role as ‘building a movement,’ rather than building base organizations within movements, a subtle but important difference. As a result, when the campaigns and the voting ended, it all evaporated. We had a small number of new LRS recruits, but nothing like what we might have had with a better approach on our part, not Jesse’s part. Keep this in mind in the upcoming ‘No Kings’ and other events going forward.

Rev. Jesse Jackson will be missed. He had a large impact on the left of our country, and his insistence on our agency from below made waves that are still moving outward, in ever-wider circles, now in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Peace be upon him as well. Keep hope alive!