Jesse Jackson: Speech to the Democratic National Convention
(1992) Primary Source Document Between the Civil War and the
Great Depression, the overwhelming majority of African American
voters cast their ballots for the Republican Party. As the party
of President Abraham Lincoln, signer of the Emancipation
Proclamation, Republicans naturally appealed to black voters. In
1936, however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first
Democrat to win a majority of the black vote. Democrats have
maintained the allegiance of African American voters in every
election since then. Indeed, by the 1990s, Democrats routinely
received 90 percent of the black vote in presidential elections.
Bill Clinton aggressively courted African American voters when
he ran for president on the Democratic Party ticket in 1992. In
particular, Clinton struck an alliance with the Reverend Jesse
Jackson, the most influential black Democrat in the country.
Jackson first came to national prominence in the 1960s when he
worked as an aide to ci