PRESIDENT OF BLACK AMERICA

America They denied Jesse Jackson the Rotunda, and then they tried to call it “procedure.”

That’s how soft power works when it wants to feel like nothing at all: a quiet refusal, dressed in tradition, wrapped in the language of “how things are done.”

But everyone who has studied race and democracy recognizes the shape of the move. It’s a boundary ritual—an announcement about ownership.

Jesse Jackson, for decades, functioned as something America refuses to formally name: a President of Black America. Not a title on paper. A job in the bloodstream. A role that emerges when a people are forced to negotiate citizenship in a country that keeps rewriting the terms. He spoke for the excluded, organized the disrespected, negotiated for the dispossessed, and insisted—again and again—that the country’s moral ledger had to balance.

So when his family asked for the nation’s most visible room of remembrance—the U.S. Capitol Rotunda—to recognize that kind of civic leadership, and Speaker Mike Johnson said no, it was not a neutral act. It was a message: You can build this country, and still be treated like a guest in its halls.

Critical Race Theory gives language to what many already feel: “whiteness” functions like property—like a set of default privileges, including control over public space, public meaning, and public honor. The Rotunda is not just architecture; it’s narrative real estate. Who gets placed there becomes “America.” Who gets rejected becomes “special interest,” “outside agitator,” “too political,” “not the right fit.” That isn’t only about Jesse. That’s about the boundaries of belonging.

And here is the part that should keep us wide awake: the “lie in honor” tradition sits in precedent and political consent, not a clean, enforceable rule. When power is discretionary, power is personal. When standards are foggy, standards get weaponized.

This denial is also happening inside a broader season of institutional capture—when government tools and private power start moving like one organism. The Brennan Center has reported on federal attempts to sweep up sensitive state voter data and pressure states over voter-list control—an approach that raises deep concerns about election administration and privacy. That’s the authoritarian rhythm: centralize the data, narrow the electorate, punish dissent, and keep the spectacle loud enough that the theft feels like theater.

If you want a one-sentence summary of the danger: they don’t need to cancel elections to control outcomes; they can gatekeep who gets to participate.

Now place the Rotunda denial back in that frame. Authoritarian projects always wage war on memory. They don’t only arrest bodies. They also discipline symbols. They turn national rituals into loyalty tests. They teach the public to stop expecting moral leadership to be honored—so the public stops expecting moral leadership at all.

Civil rights leaders are already sounding alarms that the racial progress Jesse spent his life fighting for is under threat. When the country refuses to honor that fight in the most visible way it can, it feeds the same story: the movement is over, the demands are rude, the elders are inconvenient.

But Jesse’s people have never waited for permission to grieve in full color.

In Chicago, his memorials will move with the strength of community—lying in state at Rainbow PUSH Coalition headquarters, and ceremonies that return him to the places that shaped him. The nation can deny a room; it can’t deny a lineage.

So here’s the controversial truth that still fits in plain speech: America keeps asking Black people to save it while refusing to honor Black leadership when it does. That contradiction is not an accident. It is design.

And design can be redesigned.

We honor Jesse by doing what he did: building coalition power, protecting the vote, naming the lie, and refusing the shrinking of the “we.” A President of Black America doesn’t need a Rotunda to be real. But America needs to decide whether it can be real without him.