How the Rev. Jesse Jackson helped shape Vermont’s progressive moment

“We are nothing, here in Vermont, if not tenacious.”

So began a letter to the Rev. Jesse Jackson from Ellen David Friedman, then-committee member of the Rainbow Coalition of Vermont, asking him — for the second time — to visit the state for his 1988 presidential campaign.

Jackson eventually agreed, speaking in Montpelier in December 1987, and at the University of Vermont on the eve of the Vermont Democratic primary in February 1988. The visit coincided with an endorsement of Jackson from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who was the mayor of Burlington at the time one of the few white leaders in the country to publicly support him.

Although Jackson won the Democratic caucus that year, he later tied Michael Dukakis for Vermont’s Democratic delegates and lost the national primary by a wide margin. But his failed presidential runs helped lay the groundwork for a political movement that later became the Vermont Progressive Party.

After Jackson’s death was announced Tuesday, some Vermont lawmakers praised him as a civil rights icon. Jackson played a key role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and spent decades advocating for racial justice.

“What his life was dedicated to was making sure that everyone has an equal footing,” said Sen. Joe Major, D-Windsor. “And so he marched with Dr. (Martin Luther) King, and then when Dr. King was assassinated, he took up that mantle of the leader of the civil rights movement.”

Major met Jackson when he ran a health club in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s and described Jackson as surprisingly down-to-earth. He said Jackson helped set the template for Black people such as Major to become politicians.

“It paved the way for people that look like me to become not only a state senator, but (for) the Cory Bookers of the world to become U.S. senators, the Wes Moores of the world to become governors, the Kamala Harris’s of the world to become vice presidents, and the Barack Obamas of the world to become president,” Major said.

Yet Jackson not only served as a civil rights icon, but as a progressive political leader able to attract Democratic support even in the extremely white state of Vermont. It was a contradiction Jackson’s supporters openly admitted at the time of his presidential run.

“What we’re showing the entire country is that the state of Vermont — the whitest state in the nation — is able to look beyond race and vote for the candidate addressing the real issues,” Sanders was quoted as saying after Jackson’s caucus win in 1988.

Karen Glitman served as Jackson’s campaign director in Vermont in 1984. She recalled the Democratic National Convention that year as “an absolute hoot.”

Jackson fondly referred to her as “Sister Glitman,” she said. He also had some memorable advice to share with her from his track record as an orator.

“He said, ‘Sister Glitman, this is how you give a speech. You start low, go slow, you reach high, you take five and you sit down,’” she said.

She said Jackson’s campaign came at a time of shifting political demographics. Vermont did not back a Democratic candidate for president until Bill Clinton in the 1990s, but recent migrants from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s were beginning to shape the state’s races, like Sanders’ successful run for Burlington mayor in 1981.

“It was really the beginning of some of that reaching into that progressive group within the state,” she said. “It was here and obviously has been ascendant since, but he was able to tap into that.”

Jackson specifically tapped environmental groups for support and visited Williamstown, which was undergoing a crisis tied to alleged widespread contamination of its groundwater, she said.

“You think about Jesse Jackson, you know, from Chicago, coming to this rural area in Vermont, and making a connection from class, and from being downtrodden, and from being people who were being taken advantage of by corporations,” Glitman said.

Friedman said Jackson founded the Rainbow Coalition to help create solidarity across racial and ethnic lines for social justice causes. In a statement on Tuesday, Sanders praised the Rainbow Coalition movement as a “revolutionary idea” of a grassroots movement of working-class people.

The coalition “laid the foundation for the modern progressive movement which is continuing to fight for his vision of economic, racial, social and environmental justice,” Sanders said in the statement.

After his failed 1988 run, Jackson asked Rainbow Coalition chapters across the country to disband, and most did — but Vermont’s did not, Friedman said.

“We’d already had so much experience with third-party politics through Bernie, and we liked it,” she said. “We thought it was really interesting, and we wanted to keep doing it.”

The coalition spent several election cycles endorsing Democratic candidates who espoused more progressive values, which they termed “rainbow Democrats,” she said. But the members began seeing the limitations of that system as their candidates fell more along party lines after being elected.

So, she said, the Rainbow Coalition founders joined forces with other progressive-leaning organizations to begin the arduous process of forming a political party in Vermont: The Vermont Progressive Party, which remains one of the few political third parties with elected state representatives to this day.

Friedman sees the legacy of Jackson in modern-day progressive candidates like Chris Tackett, who recently achieved a surprise victory in Fort Worth, Texas. What they have in common, in her view, is that they are unafraid to say that “the last 50 years of neoliberalism has been a period of just deepening precarity for everybody but the billionaires,” she said.

That was a recurring message from Jackson.

“He would say that with tremendous moral, and intellectual, and political integrity and authority, just as Bernie does in his own way, and that is what is painfully and disastrously missing from most U.S. politics,” she said.

Editor’s note: Karen Glitman is the spouse of VtDigger photographer Glenn Russell. This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.