The Rainbow Challenge

A new edition honoring Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition with an introduction by author Sheila D. Collins

First published in 1986, Sheila Collins’s pathbreaking, first-hand study of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition remains a crucial document on the future of multiracial politics and ultimately of democracy in the United States. Collins, a field organizer and national officer during the Jackson campaign, examined the movement in detail, drawing on her own experiences and observations, as well as interviews with people around the country who have worked in the Rainbow Coalition. She pays particular attention to the class and ideological struggles within it—struggles not only between party Democrats and grassroots activists, but between alternative visions of black nationalism and multiracial politics. In a new preface, Collins reflects on the lessons and inspiration of her experience forty years later and on the continued challenge to keep Jackson’s vision alive.