Jesse Jackson, who passed away on Tuesday (February 17) at the age of 84, was one of the most courageous and prophetic figures in late 20th-century American politics. Born Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, during the height of the Jim Crow era and raised initially by his grandmother until age 13, when his stepfather Charles Jackson adopted him and gave him his surname, Jackson grew up amid the humiliations and deprivations of segregated Southern life – walking miles past white schools to attend underfunded Black ones, facing daily racism, and internalising the sting of being teased as a child for his illegitimacy and absent biological father.Yet these early hardships forged resilience: at racially segregated Sterling High School, he excelled as an honour student, class president, and star athlete in football, basketball, and baseball, earning scholarships that took him first to the University of Illinois and then to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he immersed himself in student activism, including sit-ins and the local Congress of Racial Equality chapter.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.His activism deepened in the 1960s when, as a young college student, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the historic Selma to Montgomery voting rights campaign of 1965, answering King’s call and joining the throngs that confronted state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This direct participation in mass nonviolent protest placed Jackson within King’s inner circle; by 1966, King appointed him to lead Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, an economic justice initiative pressuring businesses to hire and promote Black workers.Jackson was present at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 3, 1968, when King delivered his final “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, and he stood on the balcony the next day when the assassin’s bullet struck. These experiences cemented Jackson’s role as a protégé and inheritor of King’s mantle, even as he navigated controversies in the aftermath.Rainbow coalition, a bold challenge to the status quoHis daring presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, built around the vision of a Rainbow Coalition, embodied a bold challenge to the entrenched structures of racial and economic inequality. Drawing on the legacy of the civil rights movement, Jackson mobilised a multiracial alliance of the marginalised – African Americans, Latinos, working-class whites, women, LGBTQ+ communities, Arab Americans, and others – against the neoliberal drift of both major parties. In a Gramscian sense, Jackson sought to construct a counter-hegemonic bloc, contesting the consensual domination of corporate elites and their ideological grip on American “common sense.”His rhetoric and organising disrupted the narrow parameters of acceptable political discourse, forcing the Democratic Party to confront its own exclusions and hypocrisies. For this audacity alone – from his roots in Greenville’s segregated streets to marching with King in Selma – Jackson deserves profound admiration: he represented an organic intellectual effort to forge a new historical bloc capable of challenging the ruling class’s moral and political leadership.Internationally, these efforts amplified his profile as a critic of empire. In the Global South – Africa, Latin America, the Middle East – he was often admired as a principled champion of the oppressed, linking Black American struggles to colonial and neo-colonial exploitation. His 1979 embrace of Yasser Arafat in Beirut, trips to Cuba (warmly greeted by Fidel Castro), Syria (securing U.S. pilot Robert Goodman’s 1984 release), and 1986 eight-country Africa tour against apartheid earned respect among anti-imperialist movements and leaders, who saw him as a rare American voice for self-determination, human rights, and ending double standards.In pan-African circles, his advocacy boosted frontline states and influenced U.S. shifts like the 1986 Anti-Apartheid Act. Progressive European and labor groups appreciated his anti-militarism and global solidarity calls, though mainstream Western reception often dismissed him as a maverick or fringe figure whose freelance diplomacy ignored realpolitik.Courageous in battle, absorbed by the systemYet, as with any serious historical figure, Jackson’s legacy must be critically appraised – not to diminish his contributions, but to illuminate the structural limitations that constrained his project and, ultimately, facilitated its partial absorption into the very system he sought to transform. A Gramscian lens reveals how the civil rights movement’s radical impulses, once channelled through protest and moral suasion, were gradually co-opted into a new configuration of black politics within the Democratic Party. This process mirrors what Antonio Gramsci described as transformismo: the absorption of oppositional elements into the dominant bloc, neutralising their subversive potential while preserving the underlying hegemony of capital and elite power.Martin Luther King, radicalised, linked race, class and imperialismThe civil rights era, epitomised by Martin Luther King Jr., initially operated outside – or at the edges of – the dominant political order. King’s early victories in the South relied on direct action, moral appeals, and mass mobilisation to expose the contradictions of American democracy. However, by the mid-1960s, King recognised the limits of a Southern-focused strategy. Northern racism, subtler but no less devastating, manifested in de facto segregation, police brutality, housing discrimination, and economic exploitation. King’s shift to Chicago in 1966, his open criticism of northern liberals’ “quasi-liberalism,” and his escalating opposition to the Vietnam War marked a profound radicalisation.He linked racial justice to class struggle and imperialism, declaring in 1967 that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 aimed at a multiracial poor people’s movement demanding an Economic Bill of Rights – full employment, guaranteed income, affordable housing – challenging the very logic of capitalist accumulation. This trajectory threatened to transcend identity-based civil rights toward a broader anti-capitalist critique, potentially forging a counter-hegemonic alliance against the ruling order.King’s mantle passes to JesseKing’s assassination in 1968 interrupted this trajectory, and the subsequent fragmentation of the movement allowed for its institutionalisation. The Voting Rights Act and other reforms integrated African Americans into the electoral system, but at the cost of demobilising mass protest. Black political power increasingly flowed through Democratic Party channels, where corporate influence and elite brokerage constrained radical demands. Enter Jesse Jackson, whose early marches with King and leadership in Operation Breadbasket positioned him to revive elements of King’s later vision: a class-conscious, multiracial populism targeting economic injustice, corporate greed, and militarism.His 1984 and 1988 campaigns registered millions of new voters, won millions of votes, and pressured the Democratic Party toward greater inclusivity. He exposed the party’s reliance on corporate donors and its abandonment of the working class. Yet, these insurgent efforts ultimately reinforced rather than overturned the party’s hegemony. The Democratic establishment responded with concessions – rule changes favouring proportional representation, greater visibility for minority voices – while containing the radical edge. Jackson’s demands were selectively incorporated: symbolic diversity increased, but structural economic redistribution remained off the table. The Rainbow became a metaphor for multicultural inclusion within a neoliberal framework, rather than a vehicle for systemic transformation.Obama – a foundation-hatched black eliteThis co-optation reached its symbolic apex in Jackson’s relationship with Barack Obama. The two figures’ intertwined paths highlight the shift from protest to pragmatic power. Jackson, the fiery outsider who had marched with King, paved the way for Obama’s smoother ascent. Family ties – Santita Jackson sang at the Obamas’ wedding; Jesse Jackson Jr. co-chaired Obama’s 2008 campaign – underscored personal connections. Jackson endorsed Obama early and attended his victory rally in tears. Yet tensions revealed generational and ideological fissures. In 2008, Jackson’s hot-mic remark about wanting to “cut [Obama’s] nuts off” for “talking down to black people” exposed frustration with Obama’s centrist rhetoric on personal responsibility, which echoed neoliberal emphases on individual behaviour over systemic racism.Obama’s presidency represented the culmination of the new black politics: a highly credentialed, charismatic figure who appealed to universalism while advancing identity-conscious policies (support for LGBTQ+ rights, symbolic gestures toward racial justice). However, his administration operated firmly within the hegemonic order – bailing out banks, expanding drone warfare, pursuing modest reforms like the Affordable Care Act without challenging corporate power.The Democratic Party’s embrace of identity politics – framed around race, gender, and sexuality – served to legitimise elite rule by presenting diversity as progress, even as economic inequality widened and working-class disaffection grew. This “new” black politics, rooted in access to elite institutions rather than mass disruption, illustrates transformismo par excellence: radical energies redirected into safe, electoral channels that reinforce rather than contest hegemony.True counter-hegemony requires building autonomous institutions, organic intellectuals, and a cultural war of position that challenges “common sense” beyond electoral cycles. Jackson’s campaigns were heroic skirmishes in that war, but they lacked the depth to dislodge the dominant bloc.Today, as identity politics within the Democratic fold often serves to fragment rather than unify the oppressed, Jackson’s example urges Americans to reclaim the radical kernel of his vision: a multiracial, class-conscious movement that confronts capital and empire head-on. His legacy is not one of triumph or failure, but of persistent contradiction – a reminder that courage without structural rupture risks absorption into the very hegemony it seeks to overthrow.Jackson’s courage – his willingness to protest, to name empire, to build unlikely coalitions, rooted in a childhood of overcoming segregation and stigma – remains inspiring. He forced the Democratic Party to expand its tent, making space for voices once excluded. He was widely admired by progressive movements and forces around the world. Yet his limitations are equally instructive. By remaining tethered to the Democratic Party, he could not fully escape its gravitational pull toward compromise and co-optation. The Rainbow Coalition’s promise of a transformative bloc dissolved into multicultural managerialism, where identity becomes a tool for legitimacy rather than a basis for class solidarity.King’s late shift toward northern critique, anti-war activism, and economic justice points to an alternative path – one Jackson gestured toward but could not fully realise within the confines of party politics.Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and writes the American Imperium column for The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire. He is the author of several books, including Foundations of the American Century, and is currently writing on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.