In a major American city, the mayor closes 50 public schools in impoverished minority neighborhoods and tries to destroy the teachers’ union. Parents conduct a month-long hunger strike to keep their last neighborhood school open. The mayor closes many public health clinics and installs red light cameras to increase fines.
This same mayor recently won reelection after a tough battle with a Latino challenger who identifies with Elizabeth Warren and was supported by national progressive groups such as Move On. Bernie Sanders even came to town to campaign for him.
You might think that the mayor is a rightwing Republican. You would be wrong. It’s Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel who is a nationally prominent Democrat. He was White House chief of staff for President Obama and senior adviser to President Clinton. He is a former U.S. congressman who was the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2005 to 2007 and as the chair of the House Democratic caucus from 2007 to 2009.
During the mayoral campaign, an unarmed black teenager was killed by a Chicago cop. The police claimed he was menacing the officer. Recently, independent media has forced the release of a police dashcam and autopsy report which reveal that the killing was totally unjustified. The cop has been charged with murder. The Emanuel administration has been accused of being involved in a cover-up.
This shouldn’t be too surprising since the relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party has always been rocky. It was the party of the South during the slaveholding days and the era of Jim Crow segregation. The civil rights movement would shake up the party and it would struggle with becoming a multi-racial party. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said the Democrats would lose the South for a generation. It’s been longer than that. Meanwhile, President Nixon would transform the Republican Party when he created his “Southern Strategy” and mobilized the racial resentments of many whites in both the South and the North.
In her new book Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid examines the history of race relations in this country while tracing the political shifts in the Democratic Party through the relation ship between the Clintons and Obama. She writes, “The fundamental question that the Democratic Party has faced over the last 50 years is what to do with Johnson’s legacy, whether to run away from it, which the party by and large did, really spearheaded by Bill Clinton, who really shifted the party to the right, as a corrective to what I think a lot of party leaders saw as the electoral consequences of embracing so much social change.”
Hillary Clinton has been confronted with the legacy of her husband’s presidency. Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, says she told Hillary, “You ran one of the most racist presidential campaigns against what is now the first black president in this country, in 2008. You were an adamant supporter of policies that led to hyper-incarceration. Now, your campaign speeches are all about saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ending mass incarceration. But you helped facilitate it.”
Reid’s account of Bill Clinton’s relationship with civil rights leader Jesse Jackson is fascinating. Jackson was the first serious black candidate for president. He ran in 1984 and 1988 with a multi-issue progressive platform. He advocated interracial coalition building and pushed a class politics that would allow blacks, whites and Latinos to get together on the basis of shared economic interests. It was called the “Rainbow Coalition.” He was opposed by the Democratic Party establishment and the black political leadership. He praised two white leaders who “crossed the color line” to support him: Bernie Sanders and Jim Hightower.
In 1988, Jackson got 8 million votes and won Democratic primaries and caucuses in 11 states by appealing to blacks and working class whites. He registered millions upon millions of new voters, many of them African American. He had a big impact. Reid says “the party had to decide what to do with him.” Bill Clinton would “rebuke” him. He would marginalize, humiliate but also cajole and be-friend Jackson. The “Rainbow Coalition” would disappear.
The Bernie Sanders campaign presents us with another opportunity to build a “Rainbow Coalition.” Those of us supporting Sanders need to use our work for the campaign to build local, multi-racial coalitions that advocate for transformative change for the long term.
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
