Yale historian Jonathan Holloway traces Jesse Jackson's rise from Martin Luther King's inner circle to national politics, covering his work founding Operation Breadbasket and Operation PUSH in Chicago, his response to King's assassination, his economic boycotts, and his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. The lecture then widens to the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, with most attention on the latter two. Holloway describes how Carter diversified federal appointments while Reagan's states'-rights rhetoric offered a coded way to discuss race without naming it, part of a broader shift from open race-baiting to indirect racial politics. Delivered as part of Yale's American History: From Emancipation to the Present course, the lecture uses Jackson's career as a lens on the changing cultural and institutional politics of the 1960s through 1980s.