What I loved about Jesse Jackson was his appeal to the Democratic Party to embrace his coalition of “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.”
Isn’t it ironic that Trump later demagogued so many of Hilary’s “deplorables” — the same desperate, damned, disinherited, disrespected, and despised people? He cynically seduced so many of them into embracing his lies and voting for him. “What have you got to lose?” Trump asked them. What if the Democratic Party had listened to Jackson and embraced those disinherited, disrespected, and desperate fellow Americans — the poor and disenfranchised that Jesse Jackson was talking about? What if the Democrats had adopted Jackson’s words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, teach the illiterate, provide jobs for the jobless.”
Jackson concluded with Emma Lazarus’s lines that Trump now wants to erase from the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, give me your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free.”
To read the full text of Jackson’s speech, click here.
To read Jonathan Wolfe’s NYTimes article ‘The Jesse Jackson Speech That Helped Redefine the Democratic Party’s Base” click here.
Sal Umana 