‘He gave me my wings’: Jesse Jackson opened doors for Black women in politics

Leah Daughtry was 6 years old when she first met the Rev. Jesse Jackson at a boycott of a local grocery store that refused to hire Black workers.

Her father was a prominent civil rights activist and church leader long active in politics, and Jackson became a fixture in the Daughtry family’s home and church in Brooklyn. Later, when Daughtry was a student at Dartmouth College, Jackson introduced her to presidential politics when he recruited her to mobilize young voters in New Hampshire.

“It was incredibly empowering, incredibly weighty, but what I learned from that experience was that he trusted me,” Daughtry recalled. “He saw something in me and in all of us that said, ‘I believe you can do it and I’m going to give you the responsibility to help me win.’” 

Part of the civil rights legacy of Jackson, who died Tuesday at 84, is the expansion of Black women’s political power at the voting booth and within Democratic Party politics.

Jackson, who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and led key organizations in the push for civil rights, including the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, also mounted two ultimately unsuccessful presidential bids, in 1984 and 1988. Through those runs, Jackson helped reshape American political power by building a diverse coalition centered on those long excluded from national leadership — including Black voters, women, young people, and the working class. It was a coalition that would become the foundation of modern Democratic Party politics.

As Jackson’s civil rights work evolved from the movement to political power, his campaigns registered millions of new voters — what became known as the Rainbow Coalition — and diverse voter participation would become part of his lifelong work. His campaigns helped to normalize Black women’s leadership beyond the ballot box as organizers, decision-makers and strategists. In the years since his presidential campaigns, Black women have shaped party leadership and helped define the direction of American politics.

“He used to say, ‘Our patch ain’t big enough,’” Daughtry said of Jackson. “Any one community, there aren’t enough of us to make electoral change. We have to build a quilt that has bigger patches, and all of us together means we can get the change we all need. We are much stronger when we are together, and there are more of us — even if they may not come where you come from, or look like what you look like. There is common ground, if you look for it.”

Women were key to the Rainbow Coalition, said Melanie Campbell, who was a student at Clark College (now Clark-Atlanta University) when she volunteered on Jackson’s campaign, registering voters in Georgia.

“He had women around him politically. … He let us understand that we had the power of the vote,” said Campbell, now president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. “I didn’t know I was going to end up working in civil rights. Being able to be around him and other civil rights leaders, men and women … it molded me to be what I am today.”

Donna Brazile was also among the young Black women who got her start in politics working with Jackson. In 1984, at the age of 23, she left a job with Coretta Scott King to work for Jackson, who tapped her Louisiana roots to focus on Southern voters.

She remembered him as someone who saw people as individuals, who never made her feel reduced or like she had to fight to get into rooms.

“He always included us,” said Brazile, who would become the first Black woman to manage a major party presidential campaign in 2000. “He gave me my wings. He understood I could organize and he gave me every opportunity. He rooted me in politics. He let me know that I could manage campaigns. … Practically every skill I learned, I learned standing on his shoulders.” 

Chicago native Minyon Moore was a college student working at Encyclopedia Britannica when she was hired to work at Operation PUSH, the civil rights organization Jackson co-founded in her hometown. In 1988, Moore was tapped to be deputy field director for Jackson’s presidential campaign. 

“Shirley Chisholm said, ‘If you don’t have a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.’ Reverend Jackson said, ‘You have a seat at the table — and it’s a hard chair,’” — a permanent spot, Moore said. He emphasized the importance of preparation and the value of serving other people and taking on any task, no matter how big or small, she added.

Moore’s career in politics includes becoming the first Black woman director of White House political affairs, under President Bill Clinton, and, later, leading the Democratic National Committee and the party’s convention.

Black women elected officials are also part of Jackson’s legacy. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters co-chaired Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns. She was elected to Congress in 1990 and is serving her 18th term in California’s 43rd District. 

In a tribute to Jackson, former Vice President Kamala Harris wrote: “He let us know our voices mattered. He instilled in us that we were somebody. And he widened the path for generations to follow in his footsteps and lead.”

In 1984, Jackson was only the second Black American to run for president as a major political party candidate, following Shirley Chisholm’s trailblazing run in 1972. While neither of them was elected, voters won important gains in political representation through Jackson’s candidacy. He pushed the Democratic Party to change its rules around rewarding delegates to end winner-take-all primaries, creating fairer, proportional representation. 

In 2024 at the Democratic National Convention, where Harris accepted the party’s nomination for the presidency, Jackson appeared on the opening night to thunderous applause from the arena, a testament to his contribution to American politics. It was a full-circle moment for Moore, who said Jackson never stopped mentoring her over the decades. 

“He trusted us to go out and work on behalf of the people,” Moore said. “He always wanted me to know exactly what our White counterparts knew. He felt like the only way to do that was to give us the experience to do it. There was never a place where we weren’t welcome.”

By inviting Black women into national politics, Jackson helped ensure they would help shape its future. His approach holds lessons for the Black women organizers and political strategists who carry his work forward, said Glynda Carr, president of Higher Heights for America.

“His two campaigns were built on this notion of coalition, to elevate the voices of the working poor, the working class, the middle class, and insisting that Black voters and our communities were centered in a national conversation,” said Carr, whose political action committee mobilizes Black women voters to elect Black women to office. “If we’re actually going to rebuild America, what does true coalition-building look like?”