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which, twenty years later, would be adopted by an Illinois senator named Barack Obama. His Rainbow Coalition brought together Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, poor whites, feminists, and LGBTQ activists around a common vision: racial justice, labor rights, and economic democracy as inseparable struggles. But behind the electoral momentum lay tensions that no amount of charisma could dispel for long.”
Jackson also thought about the struggle on a global scale: trips to Cuba and Syria, opposition to South African apartheid, solidarity with African struggles. For him, the African-American cause was part of a global framework— which worried Cold War Washington.
Flashmag! Issue 170 March 2026
Jackson comforts 15-year-old Cameron Sterling at the funeral of Sterling’ s father, Alton, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in July 2016. Sterling was shot and killed by one of two police officers who confronted him outside a convenience store. Cell phone video showed Sterling pinned to the ground by the officers before he was shot; police said Sterling was reaching for a gun. No charges were brought against the officers involved. This outome spurred Black Lives Matter protests across the nation. Ben Depp / Redux
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Pan-Africanism: the unfinished journey
At heart, Jackson was part of a pan-Africanist tradition close to Kwame Nkrumah and W. E. B. Du Bois: the liberation of African Americans was linked to that of Africa and the diaspora. His coalition sought to build bridges, not only between races in the United States, but across the Atlantic. However, a section of black conservatism— embodied by figures such as Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell— favored individual enterprise and personal responsibility over progressive coalitions and internationalism. In their view, Jackson’ s rhetoric risked trapping black Americans in a position of victimization. The debate revealed a lasting divide. Jackson’ s pan-African dream remained powerful in rhetoric but found little institutional foothold. Between global ambition and American political realities, the rainbow remained a promise rather than a power. Black Britons, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans from Lagos to Nairobi saw Black Americans becoming increasingly detached from global Black consciousness, absorbed in a very American debate on national civil rights whose moral logic rarely extended beyond the borders of the United States. The pan-African dream that Jackson carried in his speech never found sufficient institutional support to develop.