The late civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s legacy is far-reaching, but in rural Maine he is remembered for a fiery 1987 speech rallying striking mill workers in Jay.
Jackson, who died early on Tuesday at age 84, visited the mill town to support employees of International Paper in an unusual visit to the state. His robust critique of the Reagan administration and corporate power drew support from the strikers, who helped propel him to a surprise second-place finish in Maine’s 1988 Democratic presidential caucus.
International Paper, which operated a mill in the Franklin County town until 2006, caused uproar in Jay when it asked for wage concessions from its workers despite strong profits in 1987. The resulting strike lasted 16 months and ended in defeat for workers.
Speaking before the almost entirely white crowd near the start of the strike, Jackson blasted those who had been brought in to replace the striking employees.
“A scab has no moral foundation,” he said in a video archived by University of Southern Maine. “What the scab must understand about the weakness of scabism: You take somebody’s $10-an-hour job for $8, there’s a $6 crowd waiting for you.”
Speaking for roughly 45 minutes, he slammed the Reagan administration for degrading union power, and tried to build solidarity between Jay and workers elsewhere.
“I was pretty impressed that he came all the way to Maine to speak to us,” said Linda Deane, who was one of the hundreds of striking mill workers who attended the speech. She said it was unusual to see the civil rights leader in the town, which she recalls having only two Black residents. “He just spoke to the people … It was just a great speech.”
He wrapped his speech, only a few months before Maine’s Democratic caucus, by asking Mainers to give him a chance. Many, chanting “Jesse in, Reagan out,” appeared ready to do so.
Jackson won more than a quarter of the vote in Maine’s crowded caucus that year, after receiving only a handful of votes during his previous run in 1984. A Jackson campaign staff member at the time called the 1988 result “incredible,” as he won a majority of votes in Portland and Bangor. He was narrowly defeated by then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who eventually became the party’s nominee before losing the general election to George H.W. Bush.
Voters in northern Maine’s mill towns have shifted to the political right in recent years as paper and wood product manufacturing shrunk and left the region in decline. International Paper sold Jay’s mill in 2006, and it finally closed in 2023. With jobs scarce, Jackson’s brand of union populism has given way to Trumpism; the town voted by a two-to-one margin to re-elect Barack Obama for president in 2012, but has swung for Donald Trump by narrow but increasing margins in the past three presidential races.
While Deane was a rank-and-file member of the striking union when Jackson came to town, she became an organizer as the strike continued. Today, she works as president of the Western Maine Labor Council, where she recently sat on a panel alongside U.S. Senate hopeful Graham Platner in Jay. She says she wishes more people had heeded Jackson’s advice in the ’80s.
“Maybe we wouldn’t be in the positions we’re in today if we had started working harder back then,” she said, referring to the decline in union power since the Reagan years. “Whether you’re in a labor union or not, working people need to get their rights back to be able to survive.”
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.