Jesse Jackson Endorses Bernie Sanders

“Everything that Jesse Jackson said is what this campaign is about.”Mr.

Sanders has cast his two presidential campaigns in the lineage of Mr. Jackson’s 1988 presidential bid, telling advisers in 2015 that he hoped to model his 2016 operation after that effort.

Political contemporaries, the two septuagenarian liberal activists are longtime allies: In 1988, Mr. Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vt., was slapped by an “irate citizen” after supporting Mr. Jackson in the state’s caucuses.

Michigan’s caucuses that year marked a high point for Mr. Jackson’s campaign.

He beat Mr. Dukakis in the state by building support among black voters and liberal white caucusgoers — a similar coalition to the one Mr. Sanders hopes to rally when the state votes in its primary on Tuesday.

At a Saturday night town-hall-style event in Flint, Mr. Sanders largely ceded the stage to African-American activists who attacked Mr. Biden’s record on criminal justice and on housing policies that they argue devastated communities of color in places like that predominantly black city.