'One of us': Arab American activists reflect on civil rights icon Jesse Jackson

For most Americans, Jesse Jackson was a trailblazing leader who helped pave the way for Black civil rights. But for many Arabs, he was a rare public figure who was determined to speak up for their largely overlooked and maligned community.

Jackson, a Baptist minister from South Carolina who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, ran twice for US president in 1984 and 1988, both times highlighting Palestinian human rights in his campaigns, a potentially self-cancelling move that likely cost him support but in the long run opened the doors for Arab Americans to take on more public roles in US politics.

"In 1983, we were having dinner, and he leaned over and said, ' I'm running for president, and I want you to join the team," James Zogby, president of the Washington, DC-based Arab American Institute, himself the son of a Lebanese immigrant, tells The New Arab.

Zogby recalls Jackson, by then a well-known civil rights activist, telling him, "You'll do more for your community in a few months than you’ve done in the last few years. All of a sudden, a guy was going around the country doing something."

Though he didn't win the Democratic primary, Jackson's 1984 run led to a stronger campaign four years later, allowing him to highlight different communities, including Arab Americans.

"By '88, we'd done enough groundwork. We ended up with 80 delegates. The previous record was four Arab American delegates for a convention. We had the right to have a minority plank," recalls Zogby, referring to candidates speaking about different communities.

He recalls Jackson being pressured to remove him from his position on the campaign because Jackson feared his presence would be fodder for Republican campaign ads. Instead, he had Zogby give a speech at the convention, in which he said, referring to Palestinian human rights, "We're doing this to end the deadly silence."

At the event, Arab delegates held banners calling for Palestinian statehood.

Jackson also lost his second attempt to win the Democratic primary, garnering around 21 per cent of the vote in 1988, up by about three points from 1984, no small feat for an outsider candidate operating under strict party rules. Though it could be argued that Jackson's presidential runs were largely symbolic given his long-shot chances, he nevertheless raised issues that had long been taboo and gave voice to communities that had long been sidelined.

Before his 1980s presidential runs, Jackson had already been involved in Palestinian human rights advocacy. In the 1970s, he travelled to the occupied West Bank and visited Palestinians in Hebron. He also visited Beirut during Lebanon's civil war, where he met with then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and called on Israel to stop its bombings.

Then, in 1994, Jackson was invited by Palestinians to give a speech in Jerusalem. Though Israeli leaders discouraged him from giving the speech, he did so under tight security. As Zogby recalls, Israeli soldiers tried to reach out and shake his hand or touch him as he walked by, a testament to his powerful presence, even for those not necessarily sharing his political leanings.

In 2024, when Jackson was in his early eighties and struggling with Parkinson's disease, his Rainbow PUSH Coalition held a meeting in Chicago. He took the microphone for five minutes and urged people to remember the children of Gaza.

"It wasn't the old Jesse Jackson, but people were really moved," Zogby recalls.

In Chicago, Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the Arab American Action Network and himself a Palestinian American, praised Jackson for his solidarity with Palestinians.

In a public statement, he noted that Jackson had brought a debate on Palestinian rights to the Democratic Convention for the first time, called for a free and independent Palestinian state and opposed US wars on Iraq and other countries.

"Even though he was born in South Carolina and the Black Belt South, he was a tried-and-true Chicagoan—one of us—who opened the doors to Rainbow PUSH for Arabs and Palestinians in Chicagoland," reads AAAN's statement, noting that they would continue building on his civil rights work.

"Under his leadership, Black, Latino, Asian, Arab, and so many other communities worked together for racial and economic justice, and he never shied away from solid and principled solidarity with our Arab and Palestinian communities."