Jesse Jackson Remade the Democratic Party

I last connected with Jesse Jackson at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where former Vice President Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination. By then, Jackson, who died Tuesday at 84, was wheelchair-bound, slowed by Parkinson’s disease. He had also lost much of his ability to communicate, his singular political gift borne out of struggle and Black religious culture. But Jesse, which is what people called him, was still a force, embodying the story of a nation and a party he helped to transform through sheer force of will.

That fire — a contagious passion and electricity — powered his runs for the White House in 1984 and 1988, drawing a patchwork of Americans to see and feel politics in a different way. Forty years after that first run, he was feted in 2024 by the party he remade, in the town he helped shape, by people he empowered to lead.