Reverend Jesse Jackson passed away on Feb. 17, 2026, after living with progressive supranuclear palsy for over a decade. Tributes have been pouring in to honor this civil rights leader and two-time presidential candidate. These accolades tout his lifetime and legacy of advancing justice and equality.
However, most people likely know less about Jackson’s impact on the subfield of Black politics within political science. Indeed, Jackson transformed American politics, with his campaigns having a profound impact on the transition from protest to politics and influencing subsequent studies of Black opinion and behavior. And Jackson’s relationship with political scientists would fundamentally change how scholars study political behavior and public opinion among Black Americans.
Shaping what scholars understand about Black political emotions
Politicians often use emotional cues and identity-based appeals to mobilize voters. Emotions are effective tools for stimulating political interest, political efficacy, and political engagement. Research in political psychology has demonstrated that emotions such as hope, anger, anxiety, pride, and shame structure voter attention, information processing, and participation. For example, scholars can trace the role of emotions and, specifically, the role of hope in energizing African American voters, to Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign and the ubiquitous “Keep Hope Alive” message four years later.
In 1988, Jackson spoke at the Democratic Party convention about the importance of persistence in American politics. Jackson offered hope and visibility:
You must not surrender. You may or may not get there, but just know that you’re qualified and you hold on and hold out. We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. On tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive.
Political scientist Davin Phoenix has extensively examined the role of hope as a mobilizing emotion. He finds that repeated emotional messages, and the pattern of speech used for delivery, mobilize African Americans, helping to keep Black participation afloat in racially fraught political climates.
Black political scientists were influential in both of Jackson’s campaigns
Howard University political scientist Ronald Walters was the chief architect of Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, serving as the deputy campaign manager in that campaign and continuing in that role in 1988. In Black Presidential Politics in America, Walters writes, “The case for organizing Black political resources does not rest entirely upon logic, but it was patently evident in the 1984 campaign of Rev. Jesse Jackson for the Democratic nomination for president, the campaign created a considerable opportunity to bridge the gap between philosophy and strategy.” Jackson also gave the eulogy at Walters’ funeral in 2010, demonstrating the strong connections between academia and civil rights activism.
Several political scientists have also studied Jackson’s campaigns as a launching point for Black presidential politics. Political scientist Dianne Pinderhughes reviewed Adolph Reed’s book, The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics, noting its severe limitations in the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal of the discipline. In the review she writes:
It is an explosive book destined to provoke debate and disagreement on Jackson himself, the appropriateness of a challenge for the presidency by a minister, the reality of possible class differences among Blacks and their support for Jackson, the significance of Black concerns for the Democratic party, and the role and legitimacy of non-elected individuals and institutions.
Pinderhughes’ career has been influential in the field of Black politics. Her scholarship examined Black Chicago, and the political interest groups – religious, professional, and civil rights – that supported Jackson, demonstrating the legitimacy of his bid for the presidency.
Jackson’s life and activism also fueled other areas of academic inquiry relevant to Black political research. Throughout his life, Jackson focused on populist messages of ending racial inequality, and uniting poor Black people, Latinos, whites, and Asian Americans by their shared economic interests. Columbia University political scientist Fred Harris notes that it was nearly impossible for a race-conscious politician from the Civil Rights Movement to enter electoral politics before Jackson. He argued that Jackson’s campaigns demonstrated that Black voters could support universalistic and race-conscious social policies – and that these policies were not always politically exclusive goals. Harris’s work also notes the importance of religion in Black politics, as typified by Rev. Jackson. The study of racial coalitions draws on Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, an anti-racist, socialist, multiracial organization that forged alliances in 1984 between the Young Lords and the White Patriots in Chicago.
The 1984 and 1988 National Black Election Study series
The empirical study of Black politics also has roots in Jackson’s 1984 campaign. The National Black Election Study (NBES) series was developed by the Program for Research on Black Americans at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, led by James S. Jackson, Patricia Gurin, and Shirley J. Hatchett, three social scientists. Before this series, few studies had empirically examined the perceptions of Black voters. Prior to the study, there was no large-scale study of Black voter attitudes, for instance.
While the 1984 election was important for Black Americans’ formal entry into representational politics, it was also a watershed opportunity for Black political scientists. What we know about Black politics today, collated by Black empiricists, comes from the 1984 National Black Election Study fielded alongside Jackson’s historic run for the presidency. We only know the full empirical and political implications of Jackson’s campaign because social scientists conducted surveys to examine Black public opinion and political engagement at scale. In addition, these surveys operationalized and measured widely utilized concepts such as common fate and linked fate.
The NBES, in turn, has helped launch numerous publications on Black politics. In 1993, in From Protest to Politics, political scientist Katherine Tate drew heavily on the 1984 and 1988 NBES to demonstrate how Black Americans were mobilized electorally. She develops the theory of common fate and shows how this process manifested across several elections in which Black voters – across regions, income, age, and gender – voted. These were longstanding questions that had long remained unanswered at scale because large time-series studies of political behavior and public opinion lacked a substantial number of Black respondents. Without Jackson’s campaign, there likely would not have been a systematic study of Black voter preferences. In contrast, the General Social Survey and other studies had long tracked these preferences among white Americans.
As a panel, the 1984 and 1988 NBES allowed examination of how voter attitudes shifted. Tate’s 1991 article, “Black political participation in the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections,” finds that Jackson supporters were more likely to vote in the 1984 presidential election. This analysis suggests that Jackson’s campaign mobilized Black voters, and that Black opposition to the incumbent GOP candidate Ronald Reagan, was also linked to Black voter turnout in 1984.
Jackson’s legacy on Black scholarship
In 1972, Jackson appeared on an episode of Sesame Street to affirm the identity of Black children, poor children, immigrant children, and all children. “I am somebody,” was a simple but powerful call-and-response chant meant to uplift children. Jackson, through the use of educational empowerment, sought to change the narrative – not just about the children on Sesame Street, but also by influencing and in partnership with Black politics scholars.
Jackson’s charisma, enthusiasm, emotional appeals, identity-based appeals, and strategy have all proved to be important areas of study that have helped build the discipline of Black politics as we know it today.
Nadia E. Brown is a professor of government and the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Sisters in the Statehouse (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-author of Sister Style (Oxford University Press, 2021) with Danielle Lemi.
Christine M. Slaughter is an assistant professor of political science at Boston University and a 2025-2026 Allen Lab Research Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Renovation.
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