Joint Center Updates
The Record We Kept: America’s Black Think Tank and the Campaigns That Changed American Politics
For more than five decades, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies has served as America’s Black think tank. Founded in 1970, when the number of Black elected officials in the United States stood at roughly 1,500, while today there are over 10,000 Black elected officials.
FOCUS magazine, the Joint Center’s public voice began in 1972. FOCUS brought the tools of serious political analysis to bear on questions of Black political power, and it did so consistently, month after month, year after year, for a readership that ranged from elected officials and policymakers to scholars and engaged citizens across the country. Its companion publication, the Political TrendLetter, tracked elections, legislation, and shifts in the political landscape.
Together, they produced a real-time institutional record of one of the most consequential political journeys in modern American history — the presidential campaigns of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr.
What follows are the actual pages of FOCUS and the Political TrendLetter as they appeared during the years of Jackson’s campaigns — from 1983 to 1988 — supplemented by the Joint Center’s coverage of the political transformations those campaigns set in motion.
The Joint Center brought something distinct to this coverage. It maintained the most comprehensive database on Black elected officials in the country. It conducted its own national opinion polls of African Americans — dedicated surveys with the methodological rigor to reveal the real texture of Black political opinion. Its president, Eddie N. Williams, and experts — Dr. Linda F. Williams, Thomas E. Cavanagh, Dr. David Bositis, and Milton Morris, among others — were scholars and policy professionals who had spent years, in some cases decades, studying the mechanics of Black political participation. They understood delegate selection rules. They understood the dynamics of Black voter registration because they had been tracking those numbers since the institution’s founding. When FOCUS reported on Jackson’s support among Black voters, or on the dynamics of Black delegate selection, or on the shifting contours of the Rainbow Coalition, it was drawing on proprietary research that existed nowhere else.
These pages tell the story of the Jackson’s historic 84 and 88 campaigns story in data tables and delegate counts, in the careful prose of analysts who understood that the difference between 15 percent and 17.7 percent of convention delegates was not a rounding error but a measure of political power. They tell it in the distance traveled — from a speculative 1983 analysis to the architecture of Black political power that Jackson, the Joint Center, and partners across the movement helped build.
As we all reflect on the life and legacy of Rev. Jackson we hope these documents help give clarity to the important milestones Jackson’s presidential campaign advances us to.
The article excerpts that follow are drawn from FOCUS and the FOCUS Political TrendLetter, published by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, spanning April 1983 through the Special Election Issue of 2008.Â
We reprint selected articles and excerpts as originally published, with a new introduction. Each section is listed below.Â
To see our FOCUS Magazine archive, click here.
