More Than a Symbolic Office? Jesse Jackson and the Lost Opportunity of the D.C. Shadow Senator Position

This paper explores the lost opportunity of Jesse Jackson’s term as Shadow Senator for the District of Columbia (1991-6).  By 1990, a committed group of local and national activists had scored a number of victories in the fight for DC self-determination, securing home rule, them pushing a DC statehood amendment through Congress.  They hoped to capitalize on those successes and make a final push for statehood by creating the position of shadow Senator in 1990.  The position, they believed, would become a powerful bully pulpit and a standing reminder that the residents of the nation’s capitol were denied representation in the Congress of the United States.  Simultaneously, in 1990 Jesse Jackson found himself at the height of his political powers following his remarkable showing in the 1988 Democratic primary and, conversely, adrift, snubbed by the Democratic Party establishment and unsure of how to carry on his human rights campaign through the electoral process.  When Jackson declared his candidacy for the Shadow Senator position, both he and statehood activists seemed poised to score the victories they both needed to carry on their respective struggles. Statehood activists embraced a national figure willing to speak out for their cause, and Jackson gained a local political office that both meshed with his activist style and was sufficiently undemanding as to allow him to continue his national human rights activism.  Yet things do not work out as expected.  With Congressional opposition to the Shadow Senator position, inflamed by a politics of race rooted in the city’s majority black status, the aftermath of the Marion Barry arrest, and Jackson’s political persona, Jackson found himself marginalized in the Senate before he even won the election.  By the mid-1990s, the excitement and possibility that had accompanied his decision to run for Shadow Senator had ebbed, and with it the possibilities of the office.