“Old wine skins must make room for new wine. We must heal and expand. The Rainbow Coalition is making room for Arab Americans. They, too, know the pain and hurt of racial and religious rejection. They must not continue to be made pariahs.” -Jesse Jackson at the 1984 Democratic National Convention
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson died this week, at the age of 84.
Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Arab American Institute co-founder James Zogby, who served as deputy campaign manager and senior advisor to Jackson’s presidential campaigns, about his legacy among Arab Americans and his push for Palestinian rights.
Mondoweiss: You just published a piece on Zeteo in which you discuss Jackson approaching you in 1983 about working on his presidential campaign. He told you it would do a lot for your community.
Did Jackson’s commitment to Arab-Americans primarily stem from his civil rights work, or did he develop a deeper understanding of these issues when he decided to run for President?
Zogby: I had come to Washington in 1978. I was running the Palestine Human Rights Campaign at the time, and actually, the connection was [activist and writer] Jack O’Dell. Jack was very close to Reverend Jackson. He’d been close to King, and Jack became a friend and a mentor.
At one point, Jackson was going to the Middle East, to the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. He was going on a visit. His wife, Jacqueline, had pushed him to do it. She’d been there on a trip and she said, you need to do this.
Jack said, I need to talk to you and we had a long conversation about these issues. I met the Reverend at that point, and then he went off to do the meeting in the West Bank. It was actually quite extraordinary in terms of the reception he got from Palestinians.
After the trip to Israel and Palestine, he got to know the Palestinian community in Chicago, which has the largest Palestinian community in the country, numerically. We had a chapter of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign there, but they had a number of other Palestinian clubs and groups. He got to know them, got to know the grocers and, and so there was a relationship with the community in Chicago,
Then, in 1979, Andrew Young was removed from his post at the UN for meeting with Zuhdi Terzi, the UN representative of the PLO. Reverend Jackson, like other civil rights leaders, was outraged at what happened to Young and outraged that we couldn’t even talk to Palestinian leaders. So he was determined to return to the Middle East. Jack called me and said the Reverend wants to come to your Palestine Human Rights Campaign convention before he leaves for Lebanon to talk policy.
Then, when we started ADC [American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee] in 1980, he came to our events. He asked me to be a deputy campaign manager in 1983. I talked to him about the problem of exclusion. I told him people were returning our donations. [Former Philadelphia Mayor] Wilson Goode had given us money back. [Minnesota Senator and Democratic presidential nominee] Walter Mondale had rejected us.
We’d even had a problem at the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Jewish groups said, ‘If you let the Arabs in, we’re walking. You’ve got to write them out of the National Steering Committee.’ Reverend Jackson, together with Pastor Walter Fauntroy and Joe Lowery from SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]
defended us, and the decision was made to include us.
His relationship with the Arab community was built on two things.
One, his growing sense of global engagement. Like many young Black leaders at the time, he saw himself as a global individual. He didn’t go full tilt into cultural nationalism, but he did see himself as a citizen of the world, of having African roots. He didn’t see Arabs as a problem. He had a fraternal relationship with us from the beginning It was partly based on policy, and it was partly based on this anger he had over exclusion.
Two, it was good politics.
If people don’t remember what put him over the top in the 1988 campaign, it wasn’t Super Tuesday. It was that he won Michigan. He called Arabs his secret weapon because he was out there getting support from the community, and no one else was.
We were a fundraising community. One of the largest fundraisers he did in ’88 was at Woodley Hall in Brooklyn, where we raised more money than we had anywhere else.
So, it was both levels. There was a political component, and there was an ideological component.
Can you talk more about how he resonated with Arab voters who had previously been disenfranchised from the political process?
There are two ways of looking at that.
One, there was an established community here that was well into its 3rd, in some cases its 4th, generation. They divided like the rest of the country between Republicans and Democrats, for economic and cultural reasons. There were bankers and real estate people, and they drifted toward the politics of people in the same area.
But then, during another immigration wave in the 1960s, the number of immigrants from Lebanon and Palestine grew significantly. They came over in large numbers, and so you developed these very large communities in places like Brooklyn, Cleveland, and San Francisco. They were not attached to either party.
They saw someone who courted them, who mentioned them by name, who talked about understanding what was happening in Lebanon and justice for Palestinians. These issues were being ignored, and Jackson brought them to the Democratic side of the table, but they weren’t going to flip and vote for Dukakis; they weren’t going to flip and vote for Mondale. They didn’t.
One of the reasons we started the Arab American Institute was the opportunity to register voters and mobilize the community, stemming from the Jackson campaign.
Right after we started the institute in ’85, I got a call from a woman in Dearborn who had been at our founding event.
She said, “You’ve got to come out here.” I asked why. She said that the guy running for mayor sent a tabloid to everyone’s home, and on the cover of the tabloid was a New York Daily News-sized headline: “What about the Arab problem?”
The campaign literature was all about these immigrants coming that don’t speak our language. They were polluting our values, and they were threatening our good way of life.
So, we resolved to go to Dearborn and start voter registration projects, since there were about 17,000 Arab immigrants there at the time. As a result of the Israeli occupation, some Lebanese villages had emptied out and come to Michigan. They had preexisting family ties here.
We had large populations, but only 700 or so people were registered to vote, so we did a lot of work to increase those numbers.
Ish Ahmed, who recently passed away, was part of the access group there, and they housed our staff people. We put people on the ground doing voter registration. You had to do it in person back then, and we dramatically increased the numbers.
By the time you got into the mid-90s, there were 9,000 plus registered voters in Dearborn, and that mayor I just mentioned came to an event we did, gave me the key to the city, and referred to his “dear brothers and sisters in the Arab community.” He knew how to count.
That was a lesson we learned from the Reverend’s campaign. Having votes can make a difference.
Candidates are regularly smeared for criticizing Israel nowadays, but things were obviously even worse during the 80s. Can you talk about some of the attacks on Jackson and his campaign?
A couple of weeks after he brought me on board, “progressive Jewish groups” came to meet with him. Some of the same groups that tried to keep us out of the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington.
When Jackson brought me in, these groups told him he had to get rid of me. They said I’d hurt him with Jewish voters. He didn’t even think about it, he ushered them out.
I was at the office. I knew the meeting was going on. I said, Look, I don’t want this. I don’t want to be a headache for you, but I also just don’t need this constant thing hanging over my head. I’m just gonna step aside, go back to working full-time at ADC.
He said, Do not quit. If you quit, you give them what they want. What they’re most afraid of is that you stick around and fight. That lesson stayed with me.
But the backlash was real, and they fished for anything that they could make an issue out of. Farrakhan. The “Hymietown” thing. If you understood the background of the story, you knew it was much different than the media made it out to be.
He realized it was a mistake. He apologized. He gave such a powerful speech at a synagogue, apologizing that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room when he finished. He was forgiven, but there were groups that had an interest in keeping the thing alive and making it into an indelible mark that would never, never be erased.
In all the reports about his passing, that story stays there, but it was unfair. It didn’t reflect who he was. It was exploited and exaggerated. There was an effort to destroy him.
After he’d given the speech, on that same trip, we’d had a debate in Manchester. [California Senator and presidential candidate] Alan Cranston decided to drop out. Cranston came over to see him and said, “Reverend. I’m gonna drop out. I want to endorse you as the last progressive left in the race.”
I don’t know why Cranston saw himself as a progressive, but anyway, he did.
So, the Reverend said, Thank you, Alan. I appreciate that.
Then Cranston said, But first you gotta promise me you’ll go to Israel. Go to the Wailing Wall. Jackson said, I did that already.
Cranston said, Yeah, but that was before you met with Arafat, which cast a pall over the whole thing. It meant the visit to Israel wasn’t real anymore.
Reverend said, “Alan, unlike you, I have to respond to both my Jewish constituents and my Arab constituents.”
At the Democratic convention in 1988, when we were going to mention Palestinian rights, I was going to give the speech, Madeleine Albright told me, “If you even say the ‘P word,’ all hell will break loose. You’ll destroy the Democratic Party.”
I told them not to play “chicken little” with us. It stayed in.
Jackson got me a slot on the Democratic National Committee, but after the convention, the pressure was on me to step aside so that I wouldn’t be a target. People thought the Republicans would attack Dukakis for having a pro-PLO Arab on the DNC. So we found a woman, an Arab-American woman, who’s just great, to take my place, but then the New York Times ad targeted her.
The reason I stepped aside is that Ron Brown, who was the incoming chair, had told me, This will be the better thing to do, and I’ll make it up to you. I trusted Ron. He was always fair and honest, and he did. He appointed me back to the DNC after and came to our conventions.
Nobody from the party had ever met with us or recognized our Arab-American Democratic clubs, so that was a breakthrough with Ron. He delivered on his commitment.
You say you were warned about bring up Palestine. We certainly didn’t see the issue broached by many prominent candidates after that. Do you think the Democratic establishment re-calibrated in response to Jackson and were more readily able to stomp out any pro-Palestine sentiment.
A couple things happened, that we have to factor in.
One was, Oslo. It changed the dynamic in a very serious way. I don’t mean just between the Israelis and Palestinians. It changed it here too. Clinton invited Arab-Americans to the White House well over a dozen times.
During the Clinton era, the number of Arab-Americans who were brought in to play a role, to have conversations, to be taken seriously, To be brought into delegations that went to the West Bank and Gaza with the imprimatur of the administration was really significant.
Oslo turned out to be a disaster, partly because the peace team that Clinton had assembled was so goddamn awful, but in terms of the community, there was a sense that it wasn’t an adversarial relationship. It subdued some of the vitriol.
I remember shortly after Gore appointed me chair, one of the co-chairs of Builders for Peace, one of the Jewish groups came to him and said, you got to get rid of Zogby because I had written an Op-Ed called, “The Brutal Israeli Occupation.” You can’t say stuff like that. Gore told him basically to go away.
Oslo fell apart. Clearly after the Clinton years, not only did it fall apart, but we had 9/11 and then you had the Iraq War, and so the focus changed in a different direction and it wasn’t until 2016 when Bernie, who had never been out front on this issue, embraced it. It was good politics and good policy, and a coalition got reassembled, but the pieces had already been there, had always been there. They had just been distracted by war and by fighting against some of the insidious policies of the Bush administration at home, but the elements of the progressive movement were there.
Jesse used to say, they were like stones laying around waiting for somebody to build.
I think many of us were lulled to sleep during the Obama period. There was a sense that the great speeches were more than just great speeches. Turned out they weren’t. There was no follow through.
The movement against the war, the defense of the rights of Muslims and immigrants, a lot of oxygen went into those. Then you had Trump, Biden, October 7th and the aftermath reignited those very same elements that had come together around Jackson.
The taboo was shattered already dealing with the issue, and today it’s gone in the reverse direction. They used to call it the third rail you couldn’t touch. Now it’s the third rail you gotta touch. If you don’t talk about it, there’s a whole lot of votes to lose.
Michael Arria
Michael Arria is Mondoweiss’ U.S. correspondents. Follow him on X at @michaelarria.
