The party of Andrew Jackson has spent a decade running from him. It should keep the two things he got right.

I was 14 the first time I raised my hand to volunteer. I was short for my age. I had a bad stutter. The campaign was Jesse Jackson’s, in 1988. They made me a precinct captain anyway.

Thirty years later, I was my state’s Democratic nominee for governor.

So I have been active in this party most of my life. Long enough to love it. Long enough to fight it from the inside. Long enough to know it is named for a man whose plantation I will visit this Juneteenth.

Last week I wrote that I am going down to the Hermitage to help celebrate Black music. It was Andrew Jackson’s plantation, outside Nashville. More than 300 men, women and children were enslaved there. The ground is sacred and it is stained. The man who made it was a proponent, and often an active participant, in nearly every vicious form of racism of his day.

For that reason the party he founded has spent the last decade distancing itself from him. Dinners renamed. I get it. As a former head of the NAACP, I will say it plainly: most of Andrew Jackson’s legacy troubles me deeply.

And yet.

His is the third most-visited presidential plantation in America. Presidents made the trip. In less than fully honest years, they came to pay homage — to the man who founded a party to fight for working people.

He was wrong about almost everything that matters.

And yet, again.

He was right about two things.

Working people deserve a party that will fight for them. And they deserve a party with the courage to take on the financial powers that strip-mine families and would wreck the American dream itself.

Those two convictions are the only true spine this party has ever had. They carried it through Franklin Roosevelt. They carried it through Lyndon Johnson. Both men had real sins. Roosevelt put Japanese American families behind barbed wire. Johnson sank us into Vietnam. And on those two things — the worker, and the powers arrayed against the worker — they held the line. The country was stronger for it.

Jesse Jackson spent his life on a single idea. That working people of every color belong in one coalition. He called it the Rainbow Coalition, and the name was the argument.

That is Andrew’s principle, finished. Andrew fought for the working man and drew the circle around white men only. Jesse drew it around all of us. One Jackson started the fight. The other widened it to everyone Andrew left out.

They came for Jesse in 1984, and again in 1988. They came for Bernie Sanders in 2016, and again in 2020. Each time the offense was the same: a candidate who would not choose between fighting for working people and fighting the powers that prey on them. Like a lot of Democratic economic populists since Johnson’s day, I bear a few of those scars myself. It is never what happens to one candidate that matters. It is the pattern.

The pattern is a class of corporate consultants who hijacked the party of the working man and rented it back to the highest bidder. They poll-tested the conviction out of it. They taught it to fear its own base and court its own predators. They called this strategy. It was a sellout, and it lost.

We climbed the mountain on race — the work of generations, against fierce resistance, much of it our own. I gave my life to it. But somewhere on the way up, we let go of the ground we started from. Fighting for working people, and standing against the powers that prey on them, was not a plank. It was the cornerstone. Pull the cornerstone, and one day the house comes down. Rip the spine from a body, and it does not wait that long.

So where did the party lose its way? It strayed from the only two things the two Jacksons ever agreed on. That the American worker deserves a champion. That the greediest interests in this country deserve a foe.

That is the reconciliation I am after. Not of the men. The two Jacksons will never sit easy together, and they should not. It is the principles. Keep the two they shared. Finish the work the first one would not.

I will stand on that ground this Juneteenth. Sacred and stained. Named for a man I cannot celebrate, in a party I have not given up on.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.