 Hey, hello, everyone. My name is Ann Lin, and I teach here at the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy. I'm really delighted to welcome you today to the opening event in today's commemoration of Reverend Jesse Jackson's 50 years of civil rights leadership. When we first started planning this conference last winter, America was in the midst of the presidential primary season. As the steering committee members met and talked about the possibility of this panel, one of the people said, you know, this will be really interesting depending on who wins the election. So I don't know that we expected to make it quite this interesting. But if you think about it, Jesse Jackson's two presidential campaigns in 1984 and then again in 1988 have much to teach us today in 2016. Jesse Jackson put together a progressive left coalition that, let us not forget, won the great state of Michigan in the Democratic primary caucuses. He showed that white voters could support an African-American presidential candidate, a fact which Barack Obama later confirmed in 20 years later. Jesse Jackson's campaign helped to shape the Democratic Party. But it's also worthwhile to remember, especially in 2016, that Jesse Jackson ran for president without ever having held another political office, that his faith and that his insistence on the importance of black capitalism allowed him to find common cause with black Republicans, and that his understanding of social justice always reached beyond the US to Africa and to the Arab world. We are lucky today to have a really amazing panel to help us think about what these lessons and what the legacy of Jesse Jackson's campaigns for president were. So the full bios are in your programs. So I would just briefly say here that Jerry Austin, a political consultant and strategist, was a national campaign manager for Jesse Jackson in 1988. Andrew Gillespie, who teaches at Emory University, is a director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. Leo Wright-Rigur, who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. And I will say that she is also speaking again tonight at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library here on North Campus. She'll be speaking about her research on black Republicans. And then finally, I want to introduce Lester Spence. Lester is from Johns Hopkins University. And we are really proud to point out that he's a University of Michigan BA, MA, and PhD. Each of our presenters is going to speak for about 10 minutes. We'll then give them a chance to start a conversation by responding to each other. You can join their conversation by going to the microphone, which is over here. After they have a couple of minutes to respond, we'll ask people who want to ask questions to come up. And we'll take three or four questions in a group and then ask the panelists to respond to that group of questions. So we can sort of continue that conversation, allow them to put ideas together across questions, et cetera. At the end of the session, we're going to close with a short video of Reverend Jackson himself talking about his presidential campaigns. Two housekeeping notes. We will have boxed lunches available for anybody who RSVP'd to this presentation. They will be coming around 11 o'clock, feel free to sort of trickle back, grab a lunch, bring it back. You can eat in this room. You're very welcome to eat in this room. You're welcome to hang out in this room after the presentation and eat. But at 12 noon, we have our second panel, which will be student activists from across different generations at the University of Michigan. That's going to be held on this floor, but in the Rackham Amphitheater. And you cannot bring food into that room. So grab your lunch at some point, enjoy it, and finish it before you go over to the second panel. So without further ado, let me welcome Jerry Austin. Looking around this room, I see a lot of members of my generation extra. And for those of you in generation extra, my remarks are going to be nostalgic and historic. For those of you who are not in generation extra, this will be some new information and new adventure. I want to say hello to Reverend Jackson, who just walked in through the room. Reverend Jackson gives me added pressure, because I never know whether I'm going to say something he likes or doesn't like. But anyway, let me get to sort of my premise of all this, because I'm going to take you back a number of years. A lot of you weren't alive in 1984 and 1988. How many people here know or have heard of a gentleman by the name of David Dinkins? No Jesse Jackson in 1988. No David Dinkins, mayor in 89. How many have you heard of a gentleman by the name of Paul Wellstone? No Jesse Jackson in 88. No Paul Wellstone, senator from Minnesota, 1990. How many have heard of Carol Mosley-Bron, first African-American woman ever elected to the US Senate? No Jesse Jackson in 88. No Carol Mosley-Bron in 1992. And no Jesse Jackson in 88. And no Barack Obama in 2008. So let me take you back to 1984. It was an election that I was not involved in, but I was a voyeur and very much interested, because the person who ran Reverend Jackson's campaign in 84 was a friend of mine named Arnold Pinkney, who also was from Cleveland, Ohio, where I was from. It was a campaign that was not viewed as a real campaign. It was sort of a protest movement. Didn't have a lot of money. Didn't have a lot of organization. Most of the state directors were African-American ministers. I think the only media that was done was maybe $10,000 of radio in Los Angeles. So long came 1987 before 1988. And Reverend Jackson decided that he would take a look at running again. And what he did was he wanted to put together people who were not with him in 1984. People who were African-American leaders at the time, elected officials who had supported somebody else. And one of the most prominent ones was then Speaker of the House in California, Willie Brown, who had supported Senator Alan Cranston, a fellow California in 1984. Also Congressman Bill Gray from Philadelphia, Congressman Mickey Leland from Texas, both supporting Walter Mondale. And there were a number of others. And so when he went to Willie Brown, Willie Brown said, I will become chairman of your campaign if you find somebody that really knows how to run a campaign. And he said to Willie Brown, we'll go find you somebody. And that led Speaker Brown to me, but I was not the first choice. I was not the second choice. I was not the 15th choice. And when they called me and threw a friend of mine in California, asked me if I was interested. I said, no, I wasn't interested because the 1984 campaign wasn't a real campaign. And they said, well, would you come out to California and meet with Speaker Brown? I said, sure. So I went to California, and those of you who know Willie Brown, he's a fastidious dresser. And when I came to his office and I waited for him, I came out in a white pinstripe suit with green pinstripes and beautiful green tie and white and patent leather green shoes. And he said, come on, let's go to lunch. And we went outside. He said, well, take my car. And his car was parked in front of a fire hydrant. And he said, this is my space. And I got in the car and I looked at it and I said, this is a beautiful car. He said, you know, it's a Cadillac Allante, which is the first year and maybe the only year that Cadillac made sports cars. And I said, beautiful car. And he said, yeah, it's a state car. I said, how can you have a state car that's a sports car? He said, in California, all legislators get state cars. It's an American car. I'm driving an Allante. We went and we met and we talked for several hours and he said, would you meet with Assemblywoman Maxine Waters before she became a Congresswoman in Los Angeles? I did that. The next, I went to Chicago and I met with a bunch of supporters in Chicago and Willie Brown said, we'd like you to take this position. And I said, well, that's great. This is one thing missing. What's that? I said, I haven't met Reverend Jackson yet. I said, I think that'd be a good idea. And I said, it'd be a good idea. So I went to New York and I don't know if he remembers this, we met briefly in a hotel lobby and he said, come on, we get in the car and we've got to go down to Wall Street. I'm speaking to a bunch of McDonald's executives. And I got in the front of the car and he was sitting in the back of the car in between two women who were both economists and talking about economic issues. And I had not known Reverend Jackson other than what I'd seen on TV like most of us and went to this meeting at the McDonald's. And I was blown away by A, how smart he was and B, how he had these McDonald's people in the palm of his hands. We went back and we talked and I basically took the job, moved to Chicago. And in the first press conference we had announcing my appointment as campaign manager and Willie Brown's appointment as a campaign chair, the reporter for the New York Times asked Reverend Jackson, isn't it true that you hired Jerry Austin because he's Jewish and you've had a problem with Jews since 1984. And I interrupted and said, let me answer that question. And my response was that if I would have known being a Jew was going to get me business, I would have put it on my resume a long time ago. We began the campaign and I want to tell you a couple of stories which really epitomizes what that campaign was all about. It was about winning the nomination but it was about a lot more. Jesse Jackson went places over his career that nobody else ever went to. You know, whether it was a fire in Kerry North Carolina or there were mine workers here or there were people protesting this year, he was there many times in any publicity. So the first event that I went to him with was an AFL-CIO convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And part of that event was a meeting at a high school with, it was called Book of T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And here are all these high school kids, integrated high school. And he asked for the basketball team to stand up. It was basketball season. And he picked out a young man and he asked the young man, how often does he practice basketball? Answer every day. How many hours a day? About two or three hours with the team. What else? Well, I spend an hour or so working my own skills. How many hours a day do you study? You know, it's like a pause. An hour. Do you study with headphones on this in the music? Well, yes. Do you study talking to your girlfriend? Well, yes. And then he went through a talk about how important education was and that paid the most attention to the education part of your life as a school part of your life because a little known fact that he was a great athlete when he was in a high school and was offered a contract by the San Francisco Giants to Pitch and wound up at the University of Illinois on a football scholarship. We then went to an event in Minneapolis speaking at a Humphrey Day dinner. He was one of the main speakers. And what was amazing about that was not just the fact that the speech but as I was sitting there in the audience, I watched as people came out of the back the people that worked in the kitchen, the waitresses and waiters and stood there and watching him speak. And it obviously occurred to me that this was a historic moment for them to see somebody who was much more like them than anybody else, speaking about what was important to them and that he possibly was gonna be a presidential nominee but he was running for president of the United States. We, in order to put together a campaign, we had to basically have a campaign strategy. And my strategy was, and I'm a sports nut, my strategy was based on the Indianapolis 500 motor speedway race. And if you know anything about that, there are 33 cars in that race and what normally happens is that the car that's in first place never wins. It's always a car that basically survives and that was the whole premise of the campaign that we had to do well enough in the early states, Iowa and New Hampshire to basically survive and get to the states where we could do a lot better. One of the things we had as an advantage was because we ran in 1984, we were able to compare results from 1988 to 1984. For instance, in Iowa in 1984, I believe he got 1% of the vote in 1988, 10% of the vote, huge, huge increase, we called it a victory. In 1984, he got 4% in New Hampshire, 1988, 8%. Again, a huge victory. One of the other things we had to do was to show the press that we were a real campaign and the press is easy, very easy to basically show evidence of and press them with a real campaign. What are they looking for? They're looking for a campaign that sort of runs on schedule. They're looking for a campaign that has a TV spot on the air in Iowa even though we had no chance of winning Iowa. And what I decided to do was to put Reverend Jackson on TV. We went to Des Moines studio and recorded a spot. And I realized after several takes that Jesse Jackson's forte was not speaking to a camera for 28 seconds. This forte was speaking to thousands of people for 28 minutes. And so that spot never went on the air. I went back to Chicago, I had already bought the time and I was thinking, what am I gonna do? And on my desk, I don't know why I hadn't seen this before, was a tape. I put the tape in and the tape was of two farmers at a rally in Iowa talking about why Jesse Jackson was the candidate for president. Two white farmers who probably were six, four and six, six huge guys talking about Jesse Jackson why he was the guy for president. I went to an edit suite, I added it, never did any voiceover, never had anything other than the logo at the end and put this on the air in Iowa. And it became the campaign spot that ran all over the country and in places where there weren't farmers including Puerto Rico where one of the people in Puerto Rico got us some free time on TV. I sent the tape there and paid the FedEx charge and we won Puerto Rico for $15. But what happened was that this campaign became a little bit different than most campaigns. We didn't target states, we targeted congressional districts. Because one of the things that Reverend Jackson accomplished in 84, which has not been given enough credit was prior to 1984, if you won a congressional district running for president you got all of the delegates. After 1984 he petitioned the DNC and they changed that to proportional which meant that you got a proportion of those votes in those congressional districts based upon the votes you got. If not for that Barack Obama would not have won in 2008 because Hillary Clinton won more states and if that would have prevailed she would have been the nominee because it was going to take all. That was really very important. So we targeted somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 congressional districts all over the country. Also we need to have a plane because that means that you're a real campaign when you have a plane. And I won't bore you with the story about how I got a plane but what happened was that we had to be able to afford this plane by having installment payments because they wanted $320,000 a month for a plane that the 707 had 100 passengers. And in order to do that we had to raise money. The difference between 1988 and the days of Reverend Jackson running around the South and Civil Rights Movement was they would pass the hat to raise money to get gas to put in the car, get to the next county. We were raising money to put it into the tank of the plane to get to the next state. And we were able to do that for two reasons. One, that in 1988 we became the recipient of matching funds. Remember when you actually gave money and it got matched, we'd give up to $250 in cash, it was matched. And so we had that money coming in. Plus anybody who rode the plane and those were press people and secret service contingent, we can charge them 125% of a first class ticket. So we were able to accomplish that and therefore had to have the commensurate staff people to basically process all that. In addition, we started to get, you know, contributions, small contributions. And the most important part of the contributions was to get it recorded, turn it around, file it at the Federal Elections Commission and start to get the matching funds. We wound up having 24 hour operation with being able to do that. Jesse Jackson outraised Mike Dukakis from the last four months of the campaign. Dukakis who won the nomination, his strategy was to be the last white man standing. He felt that if it was he against Reverend Jackson that he would get the majority of those votes in a two way race. Our strategy was to be, you know, one of three or four candidates because if we got 37 and 38% of the vote, we would win most congressional districts that we sort of, and that worked up until New York. And when New York came about, which Reverend Jackson won the city 50 to 37, and the coalition he put together winning New York one year later elected David Dinkins, the first African American mayor in New York. We won 50, 37 in New York but lost the state and Al Gore dropped out of the race. And with that, we had two people in the race. And so we were getting 37 or 38% every week but Mike Dukakis was getting 62 or 63. And we were able to continue in that race with the opportunity to actually win the nomination, fading because we had enough money to do it. And as Reverend Jackson said to me, the campaign may be over but the crusade continues. And that crusade obviously has continued to this day. Barack Obama won in 2008. And if you remember who he beat in 2008, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton. And why did he beat Hillary Clinton in 2008? He beat Hillary Clinton because he was new, he was fresh, he was articulate, he was smart, and he put together an incredible campaign. We are a country, just a comment about what happened last Tuesday. We are a country, if you excuse four years of George H.W. Bush that had Richard Nixon as president who resigned, followed by Jimmy Carter who wanted a more gentle and friendly America, followed by Ronald Reagan who wanted to basically change America, almost to make America great again, followed by Bill Clinton, a neo-liberal, followed by George H.W. Bush, a neo-conservative, followed by Barack Obama, followed by Donald Trump. I mean, this country is not schizophrenic, I don't know what it is. And so if you look at history, it shouldn't be a big surprise that Donald Trump won, although it still was a big surprise. Let me end by making a couple of comments here that are important. The Jackson campaign in 1988 was a coalition of lots of different groups that were led to, in later years, the election of David Dinkins. And for those of you who don't know, I don't remember Paul Wellstone, Paul Wellstone was our Minnesota coordinator in 1988. And he helped put together one of the largest rallies in the history of politics, which was on the Minnesota, Wisconsin border, where it was basically a farm rally, it was a huge, huge rally. Early 1990, I called Paul up, because I'm keeping in contact with folks, and I said, what's going on? He said, I'm running for the Senate. And I said, well, what district? He said, no, you more, I'm the US Senate. I said, the US Senate. I said, I want to help. And Paul Wellstone, five foot six, former wrestler, beat a two time Republican incumbent, named Rudy Boschowitz, in Minnesota. There's an ingredient in politics that's very important. It's also an ingredient in life. It's called luck. Sometimes a good luck, sometimes a bad luck. In Minnesota, Paul Wellstone was running against Rudy Boschowitz, only time in history, Minnesota, the two Jews were running against each other in a state that had a 1% Jewish population. Four days before the election, both papers had Boschowitz ahead by eight points. He had $7 million, Wellstone had 700,000. And for some stupid reason, bad luck for Boschowitz, good luck for Wellstone, Boschowitz wrote a letter to Jews in Minnesota, 1% population, stating that Paul Wellstone was not a real Jew because he was married to a Gentile. All hell broke loose. It became a dominant story. Boschowitz's own rabbi wrote a letter and had a press conference. And what happened on election days, Paul Wellstone won by a point and a half. Just historic that Paul Wellstone, a Yubot Humphrey type of, young Yubot Humphrey type of liberal was going to the U.S. Senate. Two years later, a woman named Carol Mosley Braun, who was Cook County Recorder, was asked to challenge Alan Dixon, a two-term Democratic incumbent congressman, I'm sorry, Senator from Illinois, who never lost a race. Why was she asked to challenge him? Because he had voted for Clarence Thomas, confirmed terrorist Clarence Thomas. He had voted against Judge Bork. Now, it's hard to explain how you can vote against Judge Bork and for Clarence Thomas. Well, the reason he did that was he made a deal with the Republicans that if he voted for Clarence Thomas, they would have a very weak candidate against him for reelection. Well, Carol took on the challenge, never expecting to win. And again, you know, rock prevailed because a third person entered the race and that person's campaign consultant was some guy I never heard of named David Axelrod. And what happened was the two white guys with a lot of money dominated the media. Carol Mosley Braun just stood there, I was her consultant. And we did one TV spot the Thursday before the election that cost $1,012, which basically said that Alan Dixon thought he owned the seat, Hal Hallfield wanted to buy the seat, Carol Mosley Braun wanted to earn the seat. It went on the air, we had about $300,000 of media in Chicago and lo and behold the election night, Carol Mosley Braun knocks off democratic, two-term democratic incumbent named Alan Dixon. The point of all this is that with those races and Reverend Jackson's race in 88 gave hope to folks who didn't think that they ever had a chance to run for office or could win against great odds. And that led years later to Barack Obama. I mean, not only did he win in 2008, but he won reelection in 2012. And as we look forward to, and I don't use the word forward in an affectionate way to a Trump administration, it really means that we need to be shaken up and wakened up again. I've done a lot of witnessing of elections in foreign countries in the Philippines and Chile and other places. What I've always seen is an incredible passion for politics and passion for people who get involved in voting because they've been in countries the way that voting was either suppressed or never happened. We're in a country where 51 million people, 51 million people who are eligible to register to vote have not registered to vote, did not participate. So we're electing a president, a minority of people of the country could vote electing a president. Forget about the people who voted on Tuesday and either didn't vote for president or didn't vote at all because they stayed home. So in times like this, it's opportunity to basically come back together and say, the fight's not over, the fight continues. And it's important that we move forward. Thank you. Good morning, thank you for coming. I want to thank Anne for the invitation and it's an honor to present to you and to Reverend Jackson as well. I'm going to talk about leveraged politics and put it into context using Jesse Jackson's candidacies for president in 1984 and 1988. And hopefully by the end we'll be able to talk about some applications to this most recent election cycle. So I come at this from an academic standpoint and I'm grounding my understanding of leveraged politics in Ron Walters work, Black Presidential Politics in America. And of course, Ron Walters was a key advisor to Reverend Jackson in his 1988 campaign and it provides a nice entry point into understanding leveraged politics. As Professor Walters explained it, in an era when an African-American was probably not going to be elected president, he still argued that it was important for blacks to run for president because there was something to be gained from running for president even if one didn't necessarily win the office. He argued and Jackson's candidacy in 1988 in particular shows that you can run for president and create opportunities to change partisan politics as a result of one's candidacy. And this helps to address certain issues that were raised about a decade later by our colleague Paul Thrimer at Princeton where he talks about the notion of democratic electoral capture. For those who aren't familiar with that concept, we understand in African-American politics that the reason why African-Americans go overwhelmingly democratic doesn't necessarily have to do with them believing lock stock and barrel with the Democratic Party platform but that there's a recognition that there are perceptual differences between the parties particularly on issues with respect to race. And ideologically speaking, though the Democratic Party's platform is not completely congruent with the interests of blacks, it is closer to the interests of blacks than the Republican Party. And so even though many African-Americans ideologically speaking are to the left of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is more closer, is closer to their interests than the Republican Party. And it explains the overwhelming Democratic Party identification and voting behavior but it also creates this tension. And it also creates the problem that the Democratic Party could look at African-American voters as a base vote and thus use that as an excuse to not campaign in African-American communities or not to address issues because they don't have to worry about losing those votes. So Jesse Jackson's campaign becomes a laboratory to develop and test this notion of leverage. So in 1984, of course, he runs for president. It's on a wave of black dissatisfaction with the Reagan administration. There's a recession during the first half of the first term. There are cuts in aid to federal cities and the development of the block grant program which really hurts cities where African-Americans live. And Jackson's candidacy does spur excitement. Our late colleague Michael Preston notes that there's a five-fold increase in the number of black registrants in Chicago, for instance, compared to whites. And we see in the 1984 race that Reverend Jackson was able to consolidate African-American support not in the way that he'll do in 1988 but it helps to set up that 88 campaign nicely. We know from work from Catherine Tate that the Jackson Coalition in 1984 included younger college-educated affluent blacks while there was some opposition from older blacks and while he didn't necessarily consolidate the support of black elected officials and civil rights leaders, he makes an important impact in running in 1988. He wins three primaries that year. Overall, it's about 77% of the African-American vote which translates into 18% of the overall delegates or 8%, excuse me, of the overall delegates. With that percentage of delegates, that's not necessarily going to get the same type of leverage that we're going to see in 1988. So in 1988, with the foregrounding of the Rainbow Coalition, Jackson consolidates his support amongst African-American voters, winning five primaries, 92% of the African-American vote, 29% of the overall vote and 27% of delegates. And from this, he is actually able to leverage certain concessions from the Democratic Party. The notable ones that we talk about in political science often are delegate allocation, and proportional representation. We talk about the notion of adding an anti-apartheid plank to the Democratic Party platform and using leverage to ensure that Ron Brown is selected as the Democratic National Committee Chair. And there's even this discussion in 1988 about anemic black turnout in the general election, hurting Michael Dukakis, thus sending a message to the Democratic Party about ignoring African-American voters. We know that Reverend Jackson isn't the only person who has attempted to use leverage candidacies, but the success of his 1988 campaign shows the importance of making sure that you're able to consolidate a critical mass of voters in your constituency group, and that you have a strong showing in elections. And so where we have seen other presidential candidates try to mount leverage candidacies, they haven't been as successful because they haven't been able to be successful in winning the black vote or also in winning a large number of primaries. And we can sort of juxtapose as an example, both Al Sharpton and Carol Mosley-Bron's 2004 candidacies for president. So the lessons of leverage are that there are multiple ways to win. There is winning the election outright, but then there is also winning by making a point and by having a long-term impact on the structure of one's particular party. But in order for blacks to have that kind of leverage, you have to have some skin in the game. You have to run to win. And so the takeaway is that a strong losing performance actually can help shape a party's agenda in lasting ways. And I'll echo Jerry's point about the delegate allocation changes that Reverend Jackson ushered, helping Barack Obama win the candidacy in 2008. I think there are applications to this election. I think the most obvious connection to the 1988 campaign would be Bernie Sanders' campaign, this election cycle. If we look at the similarities between the two of them, there are many. They were both insurgent candidates. They both ended up in second place in their party's primaries and they both withheld their endorsements of the eventual Democratic nominee until they received the platform concessions that they knew they were going to get. And in some instances, they were actually arguing for similar types of platform concessions. So the notion about how delegates are allocated was an issue that came up during Reverend Jackson's candidacies and of course is an issue that came up in 2016 and it's an issue that's still being discussed and debated today. If we look at the notion of who is going to be the DNC chair, Ron Brown becomes the DNC chair as a result of Reverend Jackson's candidacies and now there's a strong push to put Keith Ellison in as a progressive and as a Sanders ally at the helm of the DNC. And of course this year, we have seen the movement of marijuana decriminalization and a $15 minimum wage becoming part of the Democratic party platform and those are directly attributed to Sanders' campaign. Now there are some limits in terms of what you can do with candidacies and so I would argue and I'm sure Leah's going to touch on this in a minute that Republicans could also take some lessons from Reverend Jackson about how to run a leverage candidacy and I think their failure to do so in some instances may explain some of the party dynamics that we've witnessed over the past year and a half. I would argue that never Trumpers had the opportunity to mount a leverage campaign, maybe not by running an insurgent candidacy but by withholding their own votes. They could have consolidated around the candidacy of Evan McMullen. They could have winnowed the field and decided which of their candidates was actually going to be the one that they would field against Donald Trump and they could have withheld votes from Donald Trump in the general election to teach the party a lesson and to have a hand in reshaping what the party would look like in the future but they chose not to and so by choosing not to exercise any leverage over Republican party politics they find themselves in a pretty precarious and vulnerable position at least in the short term. Now there were a number of factors that could potentially explain this. One, the never Trump camp was never particularly unified and they had different interests that they never seemed to be able to reconcile and Donald Trump was able to reach out to individual never Trumpers and co-opt his opposition. So for instance, his Ted of Ted with Ted Cruz whatever was promised was also a way to reach out to evangelical voters and to promise Supreme Court nominations as a result being able to minimize opposition that was coming from some evangelical camps about Trump's candidacy, his vulgarity, et cetera. And then also if we look at Paul Ryan's decisions his equivocation on whether he would support Trump versus not supporting Trump every time Trump said something that was racist or completely sexist said that they were interested in short term power but that they didn't recognize that sometimes you win by losing. So I think one of the big lessons that you can learn from a leveraged candidacy is something that's actually really ironic that sometimes you have to be willing to lose in order to win. That the focus isn't necessarily in the immediate future or the next election but that there may be long-term goals to be gained by running a protest candidacy or by consolidating a vote against a particular candidate or against voting in a particular election. As I end, I do wanna go back to Sanders and talk about some of the ways that I would caution the Sanders camp about interpreting the election results. So I'm gonna show a couple of slides. And so this is my back of the envelope scatterplotting that I did this morning using Michigan as an example. So there definitely is an argument that Sanders might have been a better candidate than Hillary Clinton and that she might have been able to get white working class voters. We're gonna be studying that for a long period of time. There are survey questions that we have yet to examine that will actually help us gain some leverage on this issue. But let's just look at the vote now. So if we look at the percentage of the primary vote that Sanders got in this state versus Hillary Clinton, what we'll see is that there really isn't much of a correlation there at all. So just looking from a bivariate standpoint. And we know that in general, Clinton's performance relative to Obama's performance is that the county level is correlated but of course Clinton just gets fewer votes and she gets a smaller percentage of the votes than Michigan does and this is why even though it hasn't been officially projected yet we will predict that Michigan votes read this time around. I'm going to skip these but I want to look at, no actually I do wanna go to these. One of the other things that I wanna talk about is this notion that Sanders voters might have actually been willing to vote for Clinton as opposed to voting for Trump. Here's where I don't wanna, because we still have to examine some things a little bit more. I want to look at this idea and kind of question it. So Michigan has an open primary system where Democrats and Republicans are free to vote in each other's primaries if they choose. So it's not a question of hard party registration. If we look at these voters and I'm gonna go back to this one. We can actually see how many votes in absolute terms Bernie Sanders got versus the number of votes that Donald Trump got. And in most instances, Donald Trump actually won more votes in counties than Bernie Sanders did. So even though Sanders is gonna win the Democratic primary, more people turned out to vote for Donald Trump. And in some instances, turned out to vote for Donald Trump when he ended up in second or third place in particular counties. So if I take the outliers out, so those are the big counties like Wayne and Washtenaw. And we look at the smaller counties where the margin in terms of the absolute number of votes per candidate is going to be less than 1,000 votes. What we'll see is that there are more votes above the line, above the x-axis than there are below the x-axis. And what that means is that those are the counties where Donald Trump in absolute numbers had more people turning out for him in the spring than turned out for Bernie Sanders. So that still addresses this problem of what does the Democratic party stand for? And in particular, what does that multiracial coalition look like? Are whites going to be a part of that multiracial coalition? So to conclude, I want to reaffirm the impact that Jesse Jackson had on our national politics. I think he teaches us that there are multiple ways to win. Of course, you can win if you outright win elections and you win primaries, but you can also win concessions from your party that can have a lasting structural impact on the party and can have an impact on what parties stand for and the issues that they take up. So if you're going to have leverage, I think we need to realize that some people aim to have leverage and don't succeed. So they're just a couple of things that you have to be clear about. And in particular, candidates and their bases have to be clear about what their goals are and they have to be consistent in the execution, even if in the short term, it doesn't look like it's going to be fruitful. So with that, I will close and I look forward to the rest of the panel. All right, so thank you to everyone for having me here and for inviting me to this symposium. It is a pleasure and a real honor to be here today and to actually be speaking in front of Reverend Jackson. I have to say that actually it was Reverend Jackson who gave me the idea for my first book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican, not because he is a Republican because he is not, but instead because actually while I was here doing some research at the Ford Library, I came across a document featuring Reverend Jackson that I really couldn't make heads or tails of, that ended up becoming really the meat of my book and much of my research. Now recently I've been wrestling somewhat unsuccessfully with the notion of democracy and black political power. I think it's particularly urgent that we think about this in this particular historical moment that we're in right now. Over the summer, a colleague forwarded me a note from Reverend Jackson entitled, Democrats don't get a blank check from black voters. Within it he concluded that Democrats are going to have to work to earn black votes again, not simply inherit them. Now I was intrigued because one, this is not necessarily a new idea either in black political thought or within Reverend Jackson's political thought. But I think it's one from at least from a historical lens that we've both focused on and haven't really devoted too much attention to. Now as a historian, again, I'm really intrigued by this idea of what can history help us think, help us focus on within the present, within power and within democracy. And to quote, I think, to quote Reverend Jackson here, shunning both the Republican and the Democratic parties or not having actual true democracy for black voters, thinking about how devastating that can actually be to the broader political process. I think we saw that play out a little bit in the 2016 election, which I think I know I'm happy to talk about and I'm sure all of the panelists are happy to talk about as well. So I just wanna start off my remarks or really focus my remarks around a quick story. This is also the story that really launched my book as well. And it's rooted in a meeting that happens in January 1978. We see Republicans from across the nation traveling to Washington D for a special meeting of the Republican National Committee. Now upon their arrival, a few delegates are visibly shocked to see Reverend Jackson standing behind the main podium. Minutes after the session was called to order, Reverend Jackson dazzled his audience with nearly an hour of political gospel rock enticing the delegates with the notion of an influx of millions of black voters for the Republican Party and future political elections. Now I just wanna read a quote here from the speech, black people need the Republican Party to compete for us so that we have real alternatives for meeting our needs. I'm not just speaking theoretically when I say blacks will vote for the Republicans who appeal to their vested interests and engage in reciprocity. And just a quick note, this is actually true. We see this on a state and local level even to this day, particularly amongst candidates who Republican candidates who are strong on issues of civil rights and managed to divorce themselves from the overarching identity of the Republican Party as we understand it today. Now just another quote, I think that is important to consider here from that speech, African Americans must pursue a strategy that prohibits one party from taking us for granted and another party from writing us off. The only protection we have against political genocide is to remain necessary. Now it's this kind of rhetoric that I really wanna explore in my remarks and it's also one that resonates amongst the Republican delegates in this meeting, this 1978 meeting. It brings the leaders to their remark leaders to their feet and by all accounts, Reverend Jackson received a five minute standing ovation. I think just kind of to summarize the remark, to summarize the moment, RNC Chair Bill Brock would later remark, I really, really wish we had Republicans who could talk like that. Now I don't think this moment is necessarily as shocking as it feels right now. It feels surprising because of the context of Donald Trump, but it also feels surprising because of the context of the modern Republican party, the way in which we understand it and the way in which we understand black partisanship and kind of black voting behavior. But in that moment, 1978, this kind of behavior, these kinds of attitudes were well within the context of black political decision making and behavior. The idea of using black folks as Ander just reminded us as a bludgeon to shift the balance of power for African-Americans, to force the parties to compete for their votes. And in the way we see the part, in much the same manner that we see parties compete for the votes of white swing voters, white suburban voters, white rural voters. Now part of this is really wrestling or grappling with the power of the black vote. As Reverend Jackson stated in that same speech, that same 1978 speech, hands that pick cotton in 1966 did pick the president in 1976 and could very well be the difference in 1980. I think this is very much a sentiment that remains true even through the present day. Part of what gives African-Americans or what gives black voters their power is the fact that they vote as a block. At the same time, this is also what I think Ander mentioned, and I won't necessarily revisit, but this is also kind of the root of this captured constituency model, where one party takes you for granted and the other party ignores you or is actively hostile to your interests. Now there are moments of payoff in this kind of approach. In their notes, in their private notes, Republican officials explicitly observe that they model many of their initiatives, many of their programs, after several of Reverend Jackson's programs. One initiative, for example, is modeled after Jackson's Excel program. Later, it's amended, this is interesting and I think we can maybe get into this in the Q and A. Conservatives amend it and expand the program, but not in the way that we would actually think. It becomes the basis of the Republican party's educational tax credit program and voucher program. Now this is again, not to suggest that Reverend Jackson is a conservative or even a Republican. We know that to not be the case whatsoever, that he holds liberal and progressive ideas. But instead, this is a reaction and a response to negotiating the confines of captured constituency status and the Democratic party's turn or shift in the mid 1970s to de-emphasizing racial and identity politics. Now to give you a very specific example, ensure African Americans who had overwhelmingly helped elect Jimmy Carter in 1976 found themselves frustrated and stymied by the administration almost immediately entering into the first few years of the White House. The National Urban League, for example, pointed out that black unemployment sat at 14% in the mid 1970s, among black teenagers and young adults, the number sat at 40%. There was much anger over failure for promised job opportunities to materialize. We also see that Urban League, the NAACP, and several other organizations argue that Jimmy Carter's approach to inflation would destroy the gains of the black middle class. There's also considerable anger about Carter cutting federal funding to historically black colleges and universities. At one point, Reverend Jackson expresses the following sentiment by accusing the administration of gutting domestic social programs and describing Carter's approach, the White House's approach, as an all out assault on labor blacks, women, and the poor and calling on African Americans to fight back politically through protests to force negotiations with the president. So disenchantment and disillusionment is so high in the 1970s that I think a number of people actually consider both the third party movement and independent political thrust, but also consider the merits of two party competition and casting votes for the Republican Party. They lament that the Democratic Party can and does assume that blacks have no place else to go. But again, this is a hard, nearly impossible prospect. It's exactly the reason why both, we see that Reverend Jackson meets with the RNC in 1978. He's trying to influence and tip the balance of power in the direction of a black agenda. It is an attempt, I think, really to maximize this idea of freedom of choice and to exert broader political leverage. There's a real threat, right, or to really capitalize on the threat that black votes could decide a national election and therefore both parties should be working to pursue those black voters and satisfy the needs of black voters. Now for the sake of time, I'm gonna wrap up my remarks and I'm happy to, again, talk about a lot of these points in the Q&A, but I just wanna go through a couple of pointers that I think are important for us to consider as we move forward. We have to think about the notion of what it means to be a captured constituency where one party takes you for granted and the other ignores your existence or is actively hostile to your presence. I think particularly in this moment, it is more urgent than ever to consider access to power and forcing political parties to work for votes. It also is in the best interest of political parties, right? If we take them at face value, not taking into account things like voter depression or voter suppression, but it is to the advantage, given the changing demographics of the nation, at least on the presidential level, to work for the votes of these same groups. So what are the mutually beneficial areas that black voters in the two-party system can come to in order to benefit African-Americans? We also have to consider the drawbacks of balance of power theory. And what are those drawbacks? Is it realistic to believe that black voters will support Republican candidates? If the 2016 returns are any indication, no, it is not realistic. For those of you who do not know, right now the exit polling is suggesting that about 8% of African-American voters that voted supported Donald Trump at the presidential level. This actually has a gender divide, only 4% of black women supported Donald Trump, 13% of black men supported Donald Trump. And there is interesting questions that we can talk about there too in terms of this gender divide. But even as it's not realistic, maybe it's something that we should be thinking about at least when it comes to third-party movements where young black people have expressed considerable enthusiasm. It's also an area where we should be thinking about the impact of non-voting or low voter turnout. And what we see, at least in 2016, we're still getting returns back, but it actually looks like African-Americans not showing up in particular places could have made a difference in specific swing states. Michigan, for one, has been pointed out as one of those areas. Now, the other point, other takeaway that I want us to think about is that black Republicans have been trying to leverage their power and black voter power for decades, since at least the 1930s. And they've never quite been able to do it. The exceptions might be the early years of the Nixon administration and maybe the early years of the George W. Bush administration, at least prior to Hurricane Katrina. But they certainly weren't able to leverage it in 2016. It's also incredibly hard to take that risk, the risk of, and I think under the language you mentioned, was having some skin in the game. So this idea of African-Americans being willing to pull the lever for a candidate that they feel is abhorrent, right, is horrible, is brutal, is cruel, where they see no kind of commonalities. Instead, what we end up seeing more often than not is that African-Americans either reject the GOP or the ones that work within the GOP makes severe concessions to the administration in the hopes of advancing their agenda. And they rarely advance their agenda. Again, there are certain areas where they have managed to advance an agenda, but all too often they find that their agenda is subordinated, tossed out, and that the ideas that really walk hand in hand with whatever the party mainstream are, the ones that are celebrated. We're actually seeing this now. I think there are a number of people who are talking about taking positions within the Trump administration who are doing so in the hopes of pushing through an agenda, not quite optimistic about them actually being able to push through an agenda given the nature of our president-elect. Historically, this also rarely works because not enough people are willing to take that risk. So not enough people are willing to speak out, but not enough people are actually willing to engage in order to give a kind of real political power to these marginalized groups. And then my last point that I just wanna make is that even as we move forward and as we think about power and as we think about the function of power and as we think about pushing for agendas, I still think that it's worth thinking about the balance of power theory and two-party competition theory even as we understand it to be flawed. It's worth revisiting, at least within our political imagination, the ways in which we can challenge the boundaries of American democracy and the limitations of American democracy. What those challenges are, I think remain to be seen, but it is worth considering and thinking about historical examples including that of Reverend Jackson as we think about a way forward. So thank you. So when they asked me to come and speak at this panel, I jumped every chance I get to come home. I take it. I consider this yard mine and I mean that in a literal sense. I attended undergrad here from 87 to 91. I was here working on grad school from 91 to 2000 and I came here in 87. I remember talking to my mom fall of 87 given the racist encounters that I would have. I was like, mom, I don't think I want to be here anymore and probably exhibiting a type of brilliance that was really subtle. She said, oh wow, well you know what? Just come back home and you can stay at home and go to Wayne State. When she said that, I was like, okay, I'll stick around. But I fought here. I fought consistently to make this space better for black people, feeling if I fought and made this space better for black people would be better for everybody. In 87 we came and we had to deal with a dean, Dean Steiner, who in a public meeting of department chairs actually set out loud. He didn't want Michigan to be a place where blacks and other minorities were naturally flocked to because he kind of attached in that moment statements of quality, statements of quality and race. So for to be a school that was welcome to black folk and other folk like them, meant Michigan was an equality institution. Several, what, more than, almost three decades later, no more than, yeah, almost three decades later, the dean is actually a friend of mine. We started as professors at Washington University in St. Louis and both the dean and the president is challenging this moment is. I actually argue that diversity is what makes Michigan great, right? So I've got all that in my mind. My son is here as a first year student. I hadn't seen him since he came on the yard. My parents lived 35 minutes away. I've got friends in the audience. I've got people who taught me here when I was a kid. So I've got all that in my mind when they asked me to do this panel, right? On top of that, I have in my mind the fact that I'm here in large part due to Reverend Jackson's actions. And I mean that in a couple of different ways. In one part, like I said, I'm part of a wave of there's a black band one from 1968, 69, first black action movement. BAM 2 is 76 to 77. BAM 3 is 86 to 87, right? I'm here as a direct result of BAM 2, which created the comprehensive studies program. I helped to create that. And then indirectly as a result of BAM 3, which called for more undergrads and in more black folk and graduate students. Reverend Jackson was deeply involved in BAM 3, right? So when people take over the university, they reach out to Reverend Jackson and he actually agrees and he helps to broker a deal between activists and administrators, right? On top of that, tomorrow's Founder's Day, Jesse Jackson and I are members of the same fraternity. Make a side five. Along with my dad and Professor Chaffers, there are at least four of us in the room, recognize. So I'm thinking of all that stuff when they holler at me, right? But I'm like, you know I'm a critic of Jackson, right? I was like, you know I'm actually a critic, right? They're like, yeah, we actually want somebody who can give a critical voice. I was like, you sure? They're like, yeah. I'm like, okay. So Reverend, you can haze me afterwards. It's all good, but this is the deal. What I wanna do is complicate. What we see in everybody who's spoken up to date is a conception of black politics that's pretty uniform, right? You've got black people on one hand and then you've got the white power structure on the other. You've got the black vote and then you've got the white power structure, right? And that's real, right? To the extent black politics has maybe a twofold problem. One of those problems is the reality of racism, of past racism, of current racism, embedded in structures and embedded in institutional and individual practices and attitudes, right? But then there's a second dynamic that black folk also have to deal with and that black attitudes, black political preferences, black desires, black interests are actually more complicated. That at the very least they're bifurcated. Maybe, for example, we can agree that public schools are in places like Detroit function how they function as a result of institutional racism, right? You probably have group agreement on that. Maybe we have group agreement that in general black politics should have kind of aggressive agenda. But when you actually boil that down, you find a lot of differences, right? A lot of differences, right? But in part because of Jim Crow era, because of racism, those differences get smushed, right? So one of the challenges, so when I talk about how the differences get smushed is relation to Jim Crow. What happens as a result of Jim Crow is we create a political culture in black communities where we can't really rely on the vote because we're not able to vote, right? And because the blacks chosen to manage black life, particularly in the South, were chosen by white elites, right? And they couldn't really be trusted, right? So that dynamic of the lack of being able to vote on the one hand, the lack of being able to trust the blacks that white elites chose on the other. And then thirdly, the lack of spaces where black people could actually kind of debate and figure out the way to go based on argument. All that stuff is kind of smushed. In its place, what we have developed is the authoritative black leader, right? That black leader is often male, that black leader is often charismatic, that black leader often comes from the church and in many cases, at least in that Jim Crow period, particularly as a civil rights movement started, actually ran churches, right? So Martin Luther King, Jr. stands out, right? As a result of that dynamic, no, so there's a question about how that dynamic relates to today, right? Because we can actually, we've got to vote. Now we actually have a significant rise in black elected officials since 1970 or so. How does that dynamic end up generating problems today? What we end up doing, and Jesse Jackson is probably the most powerful example of this, is we've got a dynamic where on the one hand, we've got black political officials who are fighting for constituencies, but they're resource poor because the places, they places the cities that they run, the district they represent are themselves resource poor and can't get grounds from the state, right? We've got that. And then we've got this black leadership strain on the other hand that largely uses protest in charismatic speech in order to generate resources. Now the thing is, is that, once that dynamic takes hold and is forced to compete against that political, against that explicit vote dynamic, that one can argue that that elite charismatic dynamic kind of wins out, right? Once it wins out, what do we have? We have a couple of consequences. And what I'll do is, in the sake of time, is, I'm not gonna show this image yet, what I'll do is I'll actually bring this forward, I'll bring this forward to talk a little bit about Obama, a little bit about Black Lives Matters, and then back to Jackson, and then maybe I'll show you this image, right? What does, how does this appear itself in Black Lives Matter, right? So with Black Lives Matter, we have a protest activity design or a set of protests designed to call attention to the police, to hold police accountable, and then to hold the cities in which the police act accountable, right? But there are actually no mechanisms to hold Black Lives Matter activists themselves accountable, right? There are Black Lives Matter organizations are not vote based, they're largely based on youth charismatic leaders, whether it's somebody like DeRay McKesson and Baltimore who formerly isn't connected to any Black Lives Matter organizations, or similar individuals in other spaces that don't actually routinely engage with Black publics in order to figure out what the proper mode of dealing with the police are. So here's one way to think about it. There are neighborhoods in Baltimore where not only is the police a significant threat, but criminals, but violent crime is also a significant threat. And because we're talking about hyper segregation, we're talking about crime committed by other Black youth. Now, how do those individuals wanna deal with the issue? Some of those individuals actually do want the police held accountable. Now, what that means, we don't know, but some of them actually want the police to function how they function. So while we could talk about the Black vote, while we could talk about the Black community on police and other issues, there's this bifurcation, there's this attitudinal difference that protest activity doesn't actually get to, right? And then that if you've got a charismatic leader who embodies the all Black hopes and desires, you've got this troubling tendency of Black leaders, Black charismatic leaders, making themselves coterminous with Black people, right? So how does that play out? Let me actually be more explicit. What I want is what Black people want. Whatever my desires and interests are is what Black people's desires and interests are. Black hopes and dreams end up getting embodied in the individual instead of being played out in democratic space. And that reduces, that significantly demobilizes Black populations except in very specific instances. When you've got charismatic leaders that want to mobilize them for stuff that may actually benefit them directly and then that may trickle down, right? Now that brings me back to Obama. I actually write like a newsletter like every Sunday. And what I did, this is what, when we talk about red state, blue state divides, what we're really looking at is a red county, blue county divide. The blue counties are counties that actually turn for Clinton. The red counties are counties that actually turn for Trump. What you notice is that there's a whole bunch of red and not a lot of blue. It's actually kind of scary when you think about it. I try not to think about it that much. I use Photoshop. What I did was I actually peeled off the red and the blue. This is the red nation. It actually looks like a nation, doesn't it? That is, you can drive from the southwest corner almost all the way to the east without touching anything in between. I know, I try not to think about this. This is the blue. There is no nation that looks like this. You've got some nations, you've got some states like around the Caribbean, I think, that are comprised of violence, but you don't have anything that looks like this. This actually is not, this is only a nation in the virtual sense, right? Now what could have generated a map that had more blue in this? Obama runs for election in 2008. There's so many people who want to give money to him. There's so many people who want to donate campaign time, who want to organize people to vote and have never done it, but they create a separate organization called Organizing for America. The purpose of organizing for America was ostensibly to get him elected to office, but it was more generally to create a 50 state strategy where we could, where the Democratic Party could compete in all these different spaces and then run people for office in all these different spaces and then would indirectly actually create competition within Democratic spaces where people who had never run for office who had progressive politics could actually challenge Democratic incumbents, right? This Organizing for America actually helped put Obama in office. What happened after he was elected? He killed it. An organization with an email list of approximately 13 million names and an organization that had approximately 10,000 people who indicated they'd be interested in running for office, he kills it. Why does he kill it? There are a number of different reasons, but I'd argue that another fundamental consequence of charismatic authority politics, the types of politics that Jackson is the fundamental representative of is a focus away from institutional development, particularly institutional development that builds people's capacity to govern themselves as opposed to concentrating it in a singular individual. Right? So what we have going forward is kind of a question, right? How do we generate the institutional capacity to empower black people and other people like them to govern themselves? Charismatic authority may be involved in that, but we have to actually move towards a space where to the extent charismatic authority exists, it exists alongside traditional objective practices of determining what routes people should take that aren't based on claims of racial authenticity, but rather based on kind of a rational discussion of interests and a lot of mundane labor. So with that said, I said again at the beginning, I am where I am because of the work of people like Reverend Jackson, but if we are going to move to develop a nation, we have to move beyond that to a very different model. On that note, thank you. Rue. It's from the audience as possible, but let me just ask first if there's anything that people on the panel would like to respond to. Well, I just have one question for Lester. How do you interpret the morphing of organizing for America into organizing for action? Oh, sorry. So she asked me, so after organizing for America, it becomes organizing for action, and she asked me how I interpret the transition from organizing for America to organizing for action. I actually interpret that as kind of a two-stage move. The first thing I interpret it, at first is kind of a straightforward co-optation move. We take all that energy from organizing for America and see if we work with it, but given that the Democratic Party itself actually does not want, it neither has the interest of really becoming kind of a grassroots-run organization, but also it doesn't necessarily have the bureaucratic expertise in managing an organization like that and it ends up killing it. And one important thing I didn't mention, after this organization is killed, the Tea Party actually generates, right? The Tea Party actually generates. So the moment Obama moves into a bipartisan, incremental approach with charismatic authority tied to black people is the moment that the conservatives generate this counterinsurgency. Because organizing for America doesn't exist to give to create a counter-narrative, the Tea Party ends up winning out in all those red areas and then spreading out into areas that formerly went blue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the organized for America was not started before Obama got elected, was not started after his first, was started after he won one re-election. And the benefit David Plough was his campaign manager in N08, basically started that and it was basically to keep the Obama kind of movement going as opposed to that it was something that was started before and that he ended. Not taking anything away from OFA wound up not being, wound up being much to do about nothing. I end up having opportunity at Johns Hopkins to hear a speech by Terry McAuliffe and because Hopkins doesn't have that many black people, they asked me like to serve, to go to lunch with him and with a number of other people. And I asked him explicitly about this. He actually agreed with my timeline and he said that the Democratic Party killed it, although he couldn't give me a reason why. So let me invite people up to ask questions and there is a microphone right over here at the window here and the door here in front and if you'd come up that would be great. Thank you so much for the service. Thank you for this wonderful day, young man. Thank you so much for the service and thank you for this wonderful day. Young man, thank you for the honor of the Jesse Jackson campaign whom I consider transformed the Democratic Party. He forced the Democratic Party to share organizing funds in the diverse America. Also, under Jesse Jackson, our motto was when we win, you win. And we took a body of people into very important seats that too transformed America and created an opportunity for a freshman, a young senator out of Illinois to come forward. Under the new America under Obama, we have lost over 900 seats. That was not true with the party that Jesse Jackson attempted to transform and I felt eager to come because I felt as fortunate as you, Mr. Austin, and all of the other people who joined our team. We were instrumental in creating African American and very diverse governors around this country. So I wanted to, I came in on your conversation and I wanted to hear your response to that because to push your presentation, I didn't get the significance of what we were attempting to do. But I wanted it, you might, since you said you are fortunate to be here because of that little crack that was created, but I wanted you to discuss the things that we transformed as opposed to some of the things that we did not accomplish, which was also left for the next generation because every generation has a responsibility for the next generation. The Odie Lugano neighbor and I was an activist in Berkeley when, for Campéne against Apartheid, when I remember that Jesse Jackson came to Concorde, it was a military base where arms were being shipped to Latin America to support the contra-movements and again the resistance of the country for a democratic government. But what I remember of Jesse Jackson at that time, it was a rainbow coalition. And nobody spoke about the rainbow coalition, but it was this idea of bringing all the leftist group and the ecological group together and it was to create a forum. And I think that was, I wish that Clinton or some of the progressive would recreate this kind of progressive forum that would bring us together because it's a lot of us in the grassroot, but we are all isolated in our different silos. So we don't see anymore this kind of trying to bring a large coalition of groups together and it's pretty needed, thank you. First I just, is this working? Yeah, yeah, it was working. Thank you for your comments. I mean I think as people try to figure out what happened in 2016, I think people are going to think about the chasms between different types of left-leaning groups. That was part of the problem during the primary is that what we think about as progressive today is doesn't seem to be inclusive of African-Americans in particular. And so that divide, and it's been a longstanding divide between racial progressives and then people who are progressive on other movements, whether it's peace, the environment and other types of issues. So I think what the Democrats will be doing going forward is trying to forge a strategy to make sure that we can figure out a way for all of these groups to come together and for one group to feel slighted. And I think using the rainbow coalition model as one particular case to study is a great place to start. I live in a state of Ohio, which has always been thought of as a battleground state in presidential election. And we go Tuesday, Ohio not only went for Donald Trump but it went for Donald Trump by eight points. A state that Barack Obama won in 19, I'm sorry, in 2008 by almost eight points and re-elected in 2012 by about four points. Why? If you look at an area like the Youngstown, Ohio area, which is a very blue collar working class area, Donald Trump came there and talked to unemployed steelworkers and said he would open up the steel plants. You're not gonna open up the steel plants. But he gave him hope. He went down to coal country where coal mines been closed for years and told them he's opened up the coal mines. He then opened up the coal mines. We gave him hope. My point is that there's a reason why Donald Trump is president-elect and a lot of us during the campaign and folks like me have been around a long time and have some history of winning in Ohio and never once were consulted by the campaign of Hillary Clinton. We thought about, I'll use this, update myself, there's an old song by a British singer called Dusty Springfield. It was called A Wishing in a Hopin. And we were wishing in a Hopin that what we were seeing was not happening. At Otto's Donald Trump signs that we saw were people who were in a minority. We didn't see a lot of Hillary Clinton signs. And I saw in my neighborhood signs for Donald Trump in places where I never saw signs before. And the reason was that Democrats have failed in terms of the working class folks of this country. And Donald Trump was right in many respects in terms of they have not had a wage increase commensurate with everybody else. We had a banking crisis when Obama took office. Anybody remember anybody going to jail from Wall Street? You remember banks being fined millions and millions of dollars but nobody going to jail. Meanwhile, somebody selling a five-hour banks going to prison for two years. In addition, the vote on Tuesday was a repudiation not just of Hillary Clinton, but of Bill Clinton. Because when Bill Clinton was president, he gave us NAFTA, not a Republican, he gave us NAFTA. Barack Obama wants to give us TPP. Well, working class people view their jobs going overseas because of NAFTA. And this was the first chance they had to vote on Bill Clinton. He didn't run for election in 2000. Hillary Clinton was not the nominee in 2008, but Bill Clinton was on the ballot in 2016 in addition. So when we look back in this election and we see Donald Trump for all his vulgarity and outrageousness, which he was and is, he also said some things that struck home. And when he talked about, you know, that he looked in the camera and I remember this because to me it was an important moment. And he said, what do you got to lose? What do you got to lose? You know what you got from the Democrats? Are you really, he didn't say you're really better off now than you were four or eight or 12 years ago. But we saw something happen on Tuesday, which was not so much about who voted, but who didn't vote, who didn't think it was a difference. And so we take that going forward. And you know, in times like this, this is a time to basically, you know, say, well, it was me and all that, but then, you know, say, wait a second, you know, we got to fight here and we've got a chance because of how many Democrats there are in the Senate and how many Republicans there are who don't have Trump supporters to stop a lot of the things that he wants to do. But if we sit back and watch it and moan, it's not going to happen. You know, this is a time to move forward and we need to find candidates for office who are new, new blood. We don't need any old blood. You know, I have nothing against Congressman Ellison, but we don't need a person at the DNC who's an elected official. We've been through that. Congressman Ellison wants to resign and take on his position as one thing. We need some new blood. And I point out to you, somebody who, I don't even know this gentleman other than what I saw on TV, this gentleman ran for the US Senate in Missouri, a state that Trump won easily. His name is Jason Kander. He was the Secretary of State and he came within three points of beating an incumbent Republican with a very, very, very memorable ad. He's an Afghan veteran who basically assembled the rifle blindfolded and that was his spot. I mean, I'm talking about people, we gotta look at people who didn't win, but people who are a new generation. One of the things that Jesse Jackson bequeathed to us, not just in 88, but forever, is new people getting involved. It's all about involvement. This isn't a time to go stick your head in the sand. Maybe I can ask Lester and Leah, if you'll hold your comments for a second and let more people participate, that'd be great. I'm Kristiana, I'm from the School of Social Security in my master's. Having read your work, I really appreciate being in front of you all right now. And you have your thoughts, I think my generation would be a historical sometimes, so I appreciate the content that you've been able to provide today. My question basically just stems on kind of what we do now, where we've been, what we thought this could become and how we can do it to be better. Here, being on the University of Michigan campus, having gone here for undergrad, having been your CSP, I know a lot of good things, so, you know, I'm here, but it's time to do some work and we are starting now, but just wanting to get your thoughts on that, and we greatly appreciate it. I want to just importantly thank the panel for clarifying, I think, a number of aspects of the relationship between our current situation and the end of the 1980s period and my public performance and the post-Jackson campaign very much so. I wonder, I'm particularly struck by the idea that the 08 Obama campaign and Sanders campaign this year are different, reflect different aspects of the Jackson campaign, particularly the 88 campaign, both of which are partial perhaps, even though the Obama campaign was successful, it was partial in the aspects of which it picks up the 88 model, and so, and Sanders campaign, obviously, particularly in ability to connect to communities of color, right, it's very much a partial aspect of that of the 88 campaign, and so, but I also wanted to reflect back, of course, that partly what Reverend Jackson brought and what all of us were excited about was, of course, that social movement history, that non-electoral factor in all of the motivation, and so, it's always picking up on the last question to think about, as well as, and I forgot that the other thing that he brought that only either one of those campaigns yet, I mean, certainly Obama never did, and I'm saying this has to be yet, was this commitment to a new leadership at every level of his life's world process, right, and so, that relationship between thinking down-bound, which is a terrible term, but also thinking social movement, how those two pieces can be connected going forward and perhaps look to the 80s and 90s as a model for it. I'm Alan Haber. I was an organizer for the Students for Democratic Society, still for Democratic Society, still in SCS. I think the question that I haven't really heard and addressed, and I think is really real, the politics in America is broken, and as America has in its elite full spectrum dominance of the world, this is a war culture and a war government that we are in, and none of the campaigns have really dealt with that fundamental question. Now we're seeing the Dakota sovereign peoples coming together to defend their land. We've never in America, we settlers, whether we came here, voluntarily or otherwise, we settlers have never made peace with this country, with the native people, or with the indigenous people around the world. There's a fundamental lack in our politics and until that somehow is healed, and I think the Dakota pipeline has made me an occasion to begin to think not just about solidarity, but actually about peacemaking in the United States, and that's what has been lacking. Bernie Sanders wasn't able to go there, he dealt very well about income and equality, that is that as we break the rest of the world, we have a distributed justice league within our own privileged society here, and I think that's what politics needs. I don't remember exactly how you dealt with this, Jesse, but still, the problem has not been dealt with. This is a war culture we are in, and we need to be fine. What is the peace culture? What is the transformation actually? And that's where the alignment of all the people come together, because except for the elites, the military-industrial complex, no one really benefits in their heart and their full living from this war situation. So I think that's where I think the party has to go. All the parties have to go. The Democratic Party seems so linked in with the financing and the profits of this war system that I don't know that it is our mechanism for the future. I want to say a few seconds in that because I know we're almost out of time. I kind of want to tap all the, try and lump all the questions. Actually, I'm just going to say what I'm going to say. I think one of the things that we have to think about going forward, one, I think if we do a lot of thinking, we also shouldn't be rush necessarily to kind of assess and say, this is exactly what went wrong, this is what went wrong, this is what went wrong. I mean, it really is going to take some time to dig out and part of that is looking at the fractures and looking at the fragility of the Democratic coalitions that predate what we're seeing right now, predate the 90s, predate the 80s, predate the 70s. I mean, this goes back pretty far. One thing I want to be very careful about doing is that any kind of movement going forward and particular looking at working class and looking at poor voters has to be very careful about unpacking the racial dynamics of that. All too often in fact what we're seeing, I think in a lot of these discussions, is that working class has become proxy for white working class. We have to think about why is it that black, Latino, Asian working class and poor voters did not vote for Donald Trump, right? In fact, we can look at, I think we can look at the white working class vote and say that it's split in interesting ways that doesn't necessarily translate into this idea that every single member of the white working class went for Donald Trump, that's categorically not true. So I do want to make sure that we're very, very careful in that regard, particularly as we think about coalition building. The one other thing that I think that hasn't necessarily come up in this conversation is the gender dynamics and thinking about that, but also thinking about as we begin to unpack the whiteness and its relationship to Donald Trump, thinking about white women and their role in electing Donald Trump. Because as we think about coalitions and as we think about minority communities coming together to become a political bloc, this is something I think that the Clinton campaign had counted on and really let them down in a number. I don't know what the proper terminology is, but white women overwhelmingly went for Donald Trump as well. I think that using Obama as an example, one of the things, one of the biggest problems of Obama that we had in Obama presidency was we actually had no critique of him within black spaces. In fact, people who critiqued Obama within black spaces were routinely condemned. You give the example of Cornell West and Travis Smiley. I don't wanna do that. So I am not going, yes, I am here because of Jackson. I can point to that in a number of ways, but what we have to do is create spaces in black communities where we can actually engage and critique with our elders, that we have to do that. We can't proceed forward without that. As far as the comment about the Matthew Countryman's comment, I think what we have interestingly enough is a dynamic where Obama peeled the charismatic elements of the Jackson campaign without fully embracing the progressive elements. And the progressive elements would include the arguments both for peace and the general inequality dynamic that Jackson brought to the table, but also really a careful attention to people running for office down ballot. So I think that progressive dynamic, Sanders picked up that progressive dynamic without also dealing with the down ballot stuff. I think Sanders has more of a possibility going forward to do that than Obama does, which also suggests that there is this problem with charismatic authority, particularly as it ends up connecting to the neoliberal turn that we have to be lyrical. So I'm gonna piggyback on that. I would not characterize Barack Obama's 2008 campaign as a leveraged candidacy. And so I'm thinking about this in a counterfactual term. What if Obama had lost? Would he have gone to the DNC and made demands that would have structurally changed the party? I don't see any evidence that that was his plan going into it. I think he was gonna run to win. And I do work on black politicians of generation X, and I know he's a little bit older than that, but I'm gonna put him in that generation because he emerged at the same time. There are certain types of black politicians who lose elections so that they can use that as a stepping point for a future election. And so what I think he was doing in 2008 was that if he lost that election, he would have just used that as grounds to kind of be next in line or the heir apparent for a future nomination. I don't think he was thinking about leverage in that way. And so I'm not doing this in the same way, but I would like in his candidacy more to Shirley Chisholm's candidacy in 1972, where you just wanna run to sort of say that you can and to sort of make it more possible for people to do this in the future. Perhaps even yourself. I think Lester has added to the already eloquent comments about the things that we overlook and the histories that we refuse to acknowledge in this country, but I do wanna address the question about what to do in the future. And I wanna go back to Ron Walters because I think it's really important to go back to Ron Walters. Walters also advocated what he called an inside-outside strategy. I don't see that actually being effectively deployed right now, but hopefully we will learn from this. So for all those people who didn't vote because they thought that Trump was six of one and Clinton was half a dozen of the other, and now you kinda realize that, no, Jeff Sessions could be your attorney general, like that's a contrast there. That we see those differences and so it's not protests or voting, extra electoral politics and then being a political insider, it's both in and everybody has to work together. So you can't assume that just because somebody's an elected official who has said the right things and is from the right group that they're always gonna automatically do that without outside pressure. They either need to be held accountable or they need some type of affirmation from the outside that says that this is what they need to be doing so that they can go to their colleagues and say, look, there are all these people out on the street who are clamoring for this. So hopefully the lesson that we learn from this is that our political engagement has to be multi-level, that you have to engage state, local and national politics and that it also needs to use all of the arrows in the quiver, which means that sometimes that is involved in voting and running for office. Sometimes that is meeting with politicians and lobbying. Sometimes that's being out in the street and it's gonna be all in. It's not going to be just one thing over another. One just short political historical perspective. In 1988, Reverend Jackson had three elected white politicians support him, three. Bernie Sanders, who was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Laurie Hancock, who was the mayor of Berkeley, California. And Jim Hightower, who was the commissioner of agriculture in the state of Texas. 20 years later, Barack Obama had Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Claremont Casco, et cetera. And that's important to know what happened over those 20 years. I really want to thank everybody in the audience for participating in this discussion. Our panelists for starting us off. And this is not the end. We have a panel at 12, which is going to be feature University of Michigan activists across multiple generations of students. I hope you'll go to that 12 o'clock in the amphitheater. And before that, if you'll pick up your lunch, have something to eat before you step in. Thank you so much. I would like to make a comment. She's making a comment. Yeah, good morning. Good morning. Let me express my thanks to the rest of the union for allowing this event to happen today. It's so exciting to me to hear me reiterate this and look back down from heaven when y'all discussing me. I wish I knew you as we talked to each other. I'm still in the first person and know why we did what we did and even my analysis today. If they declare the other, we're going to declare them and they're going to have a different conversation. What you want? You only have two million plus votes to lead and grow in. And the markers, it has to matter. Just if we choose the lead group of focus here is one person, one vote. So the academic class has to be big in. She won the election and she lost by the measure of a suppressed black vote. And most analysts, as I listened to watch television, have all kind of top down analysis here of why she lost. No one's in the measure to suppress black votes. It's like a hundred, a hundred. This was holding the angle of the hunger. You see one thing, the hundred, see there's another. Neocondrolitorial wins the morning. See, it's five of the intervention by the federal government that didn't vote the person in North Carolina. That is the county, the state's channel is bragging about how he suppressed the black vote for 8.5% down and increased the white vote to 2.5. Just to understand. Anybody who marched, or applicates marching on Selma, is dismissive of that, is like missing the point. She wanted to save. I spoke to four or five colleges in North Carolina, but they took precincts off the campuses. Since 19, since 2013, they moved 806 to precincts. And so most college campuses in that state took the precincts off. She went to North Carolina and won to Salem. Six thousand students. Camped three miles, precinct six miles out of the road and the like. That's the point where we get in struggle and fight. The suppressed black vote in Florida in 2000, the Supreme Court in Maine stopped the count on state's rights. 27,000 black votes in Nevada kind of not counted. Go one, the question really is kind of why did the Democrats fight the views of the black vote that was their winner in 2000? In 2016, that's a shit. Some argue the case of fraud. We don't argue the case of suppression. I'm going to put this down next to you. If we were fighting this vigorously for the suppressed black vote, as these argue for the non inclusive of the fraud vote, the general general would be in this race today. Black vote was stolen in Florida, in North Carolina, in Michigan, and in Pennsylvania. Why isn't a state like this a one day vote that's supposed to earn the vote? Right back at the end of one keyhole. If you had two weeks of early vote in Michigan, it was one mission. It could mobilize in mass in Michigan in the way I want in the state. You couldn't organize in mass because you only have one work day to vote. That, in fact, is voter suppression. Now, the question becomes, we just adopt a man who is willing to fight for the protection of the black vote. Civil oppression in the United States for their own interests in 2000 are just from here. When December 19 comes around and the electoral college will vote, you're going to have this gap between two million and three million voters for Hillary. And a few people we don't know determine the winner. That is a serious aristocracy versus democracy in the U.S. identity crisis fight. That's it. So if you went about two billion votes and votes were stolen in the key states, did you really lose? If you won, we wouldn't be discussing this. Am I with the others so far? But if you assume that Joe, good morning, Joe, and the rest of them are correct, they're the hummer, describing how we won and what's wrong with us. If we start thinking something wrong with us, too, if us win by two million votes plus the votes that were stolen, us get pretty good. If we did something wrong and two million votes modulate enough, there's something wrong with us. I don't believe that. That's what desidaxing is. The second piece of it is that this black, block vote claim, we trigger other votes. We're never alone cannot trigger. We were not alone in the abolition struggle, but in fact, John Brown was not black, case in point. Here we go, finalized the 214 this year. I heard that he ran burning then to refer to the 243 years of our democracy. Blacks were here 157 years before the Declaration of Independence. The 246 years, that's a fallacious number. We've got 1619, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence, 157 years of blacks in the dark. And then we finally went from 0 to 3-5. And then we come up in 1965 and watch this. Blacks couldn't vote, since we're the foundation not the bottom. Blacks had the right to win 6-5 for the first time in 8 to 5 years. Why were we conservative on zeroes at the time? Foundation, we'll be able to thank you. 18-year-olds couldn't vote. If Blacks didn't vote, we can vote too. Me too. You couldn't vote on campus. Blacks didn't vote, we can vote on campus. They came after us at 6-5. If we can vote, we can vote by layman, us too. Then by 1988, with proportionality, following the 8 to 4 rules, Hillary was with the winner, right there, following the 8 to 4 rules, not social media, not multiculturalism, and all that, whatever went down with that. We brought one because the rules changed. 8 to 4 rules, Hillary was the winner. We changed the rules, and that's what allows us to be so built up upon being the blacks of the right because the broken home of white girls was to be inherited from God, we got 12 out of them. We couldn't win that, he said, wouldn't it, I'm not making sense at all. In other words, if on the football field, if blacks had to run 12 yards for the first time, if the broken home of white girls had to run 17 yards because they inherited from God, we couldn't win either. Whenever the rules of public goals are clear, we can win. That is a civil rights struggle, not fundamentally, political analysis, some, some, some struggle. We are being robbed of another victory, which was the Tremors Supreme Court. We won this time. That's what's, don't separate white blacks in this democratic situation. Like, again, like some wrong numbers. We're going to have to, a lot of white people are going to the entrance. Not the Cable Dada, but the Lincoln Republic. Those who couldn't go to the Lincoln Republic because, main space proclamation, 13, 14, 15th Amendment, the republic left us in an extreme right wing We went another way, because they went from Jefferson Davis Democrats to the Civil War, the Reagan Republicans. We went from Lincoln Republicans to Kennedy Johnson, King Democrats. We should be based on our defiant interests. Yeah, well, not just charisma. But in the sense that a young black won the election, the mail stock in California last year, it's been six years old. Uh, we, uh, we got about we won Kamala Harris seat in California. One's over in Illinois. And another one in California. Minnesota. Minnesota. And an African American woman in Delaware. These persons are living off the seeds sown in the 88 switching off the direction of the flow of the river. But I would like if I had my relatives, I would like one of them to be all in the viewing room. But, but I mean, why didn't you first tell me, you know, we say that people's houses as opposed to, as opposed to hotels. That's the one part we couldn't afford the other part was smart. You should go to a given neighborhood and, and what we couldn't buy the news that the cameras you send a message house to that. And on the day of the comments, see what we're saying that that camera camera free press coverage, which was a commercial for us. And the day was the day was the first we became here. We are at 400 delegates and they're about right there in 84, the 1200 delegates and 80 a good 12 with 18 million dollars. And we're there because we're not we would got to what delegates in 88. And I guess the most most complimentary thing to me, frankly, you said, I was sitting in the debate in Columbia. There is a debate in Columbia. And I saw you debate hard, Monday on the heart. And I said, you said, this can happen. If I mentioned in part was the so seeds that were retrieving the three million dollars, that was part of my mission. We were seeking to change the flow of the river. We said free Mandela Democrats and Republicans that were crazy. We meant to put Mandela middle of the agenda. It was a gen life. We meant to say, let's talk about these policies as opposed to duck and duck trying to skip around the issue in the village. We meant to say we meant to stop the drug flow. We meant to say every policy. And I'm anxious for talk because this is all influenced in your writing. Let's discuss now what we did. But also I'm looking for some supporters on the impact of this campaign. And the last one was going to be this. Just as Lincoln made the big decision with his power to pardon Justin Davis in that bracket and get out of the nation's interests. And just as Ford made the decision to free Nixon in spite of not even applying for power. I think the Rocks are free here to play on the same basis. And those others who have paid their pedal dues should be free. That's right. That's not a Trump decision, right? If he does not pardon her now, the elements of that pardon will use her as a trophy for their madness. And the three of us were going into four more years of Nixon. Ford closed the case. We're on the bout of books that wanted to play God then they. The other claim to be free of the further humiliation of this and those others, Americans who have paid their pedal dues. They can all be emancipated by Zagith and the Florida today. They could not be revoked. Thank y'all.