Jesse Jackson’s unapologetic progressivism was rebellion at its core

Civil rights icon, who died Tuesday, shifted Black politics and leftist coalition-building from the sidecar of the Democratic party to the driver's seat

By the early 1980s, the Democratic party was facing a crossroads. The 1980 landslide election of Ronald Reagan, who clenched the presidency with a whopping 489 electoral college votes against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, swiftly pulled the Democratic party to the right in the political and cultural wave of the Reagan Revolution".

For those Democratic constituents left behind, however, a challenge was mounting, mostly within US industrial cities whose economies were ransacked by Reagan's trickle-down" economics. Record tax cuts for the wealthy had come at the expense of a contracted social safety net, thus exacerbating inequality and collapsing much of the working class into the poor. Grassroots resistance campaigns spawned across the country in response to this dire urban crisis that had disproportionately devastated African Americans, and between 1982 and 1984 they had registered 2 million new Black voters - the largest gain in registered Black voters since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.