“Rainbow coalition” refers to a political or social alliance that deliberately brings together people across racial, ethnic, and class lines to pursue shared goals. The phrase has been used in several distinct contexts since the late 1960s, from a specific street-level alliance in Chicago to Jesse Jackson’s national presidential campaigns to South Africa’s post-apartheid identity. Each use carries a somewhat different meaning, but the common thread is the same: diverse groups, often marginalized ones, setting aside differences to build collective power.
The Original Rainbow Coalition in Chicago
The earliest and most concrete use of “rainbow coalition” traces to Chicago in 1969. Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, forged an alliance with the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist organization, and the Young Patriots Organization, a group representing poor white Appalachian migrants living in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. Hampton’s idea was straightforward: poverty and police violence were shared problems that crossed racial boundaries, so the response should cross those boundaries too. The coalition organized around free breakfast programs, community health clinics, and opposition to police brutality.
What made this coalition distinctive was its insistence on class solidarity as the bridge between racial groups that had been historically pitted against each other. Hampton explicitly framed the effort as a multiracial, class-based movement rather than one built around any single racial identity. The Young Patriots, for instance, were southern white migrants who wore Confederate flag patches but found common cause with the Black Panthers over shared experiences of poverty, displacement, and hostile policing. The alliance was short-lived in its original form. Hampton was killed in a police raid in December 1969, and the coalition fractured without his leadership. But the concept he named proved durable.
The original coalition did not encompass every marginalized community, even within Chicago. A study of multiracial coalition-building in this era notes that the original Rainbow Coalition “did not have a group representing Indians,” even though American Indian activists were engaged in parallel movements for social justice during the same period.1The American Indian Quarterly. Why Was the Red in the Rainbow Faded? American Indian Activists and Multiracial Coalition-Building in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign This gap mattered, and it highlights a recurring tension in rainbow coalition politics: who actually gets included in the rainbow, and on whose terms.
Parallel Movements and the Poor People’s Campaign
The Chicago coalition did not emerge in isolation. The late 1960s saw multiple efforts to build cross-racial alliances among poor and working-class Americans. The most prominent was the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Martin Luther King Jr. before his assassination and carried forward by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The campaign brought Black, white, Hispanic, and Native American participants to Washington, D.C., to demand economic justice. It was, as scholars have described it, “a Rainbow Coalition in all but name.”2The American Indian Quarterly. Why Was the Red in the Rainbow Faded? American Indian Activists and Multiracial Coalition-Building in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign Unlike the Chicago coalition, the Poor People’s Campaign did include a significant contingent of American Indian activists, making it broader in its representation.
On college campuses, a parallel strand of coalition-building was taking shape. At San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University), the Third World Liberation Front brought together the Black Student Union, the Latin American Student Organization, the Mexican American Student Confederation, the Asian American Political Alliance, the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, and the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor in a multiracial and multiethnic coalition.3ResearchGate / Taylor & Francis / Wiley Online Library. Rethinking the Asian American Movement Their student strike in 1968–69 led to the creation of the first college-level Ethnic Studies programs. The term “Asian American” itself was partly conceived as a cross-racial coalition-building tool, designed to unite diverse Asian ethnic groups while also fostering solidarity with Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities facing systemic racism.4ResearchGate / Taylor & Francis / Wiley Online Library. Rethinking the Asian American Movement
These movements did not all use the phrase “rainbow coalition,” but they shared its logic: marginalized groups recognizing that their separate struggles had structural roots in common, and that joint action could achieve what isolated efforts could not. The phrase, when it arrived, became a convenient shorthand for this entire tradition of multiracial, class-conscious organizing.
Jesse Jackson and the National Rainbow Coalition
The meaning of “rainbow coalition” shifted significantly in the 1980s when Jesse Jackson adopted the phrase for his 1984 presidential campaign. Jackson, a civil rights leader and Baptist minister, built a coalition that included African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, family farmers, organized labor, feminists, environmentalists, LGBTQ activists, and progressive whites. He ran in the Democratic primaries in both 1984 and 1988, winning several states and millions of votes. In 1986, he formally incorporated the National Rainbow Coalition as a political organization, which later merged with his Operation PUSH to form the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in 1996.
Jackson’s use of the term took the concept from a local, street-level alliance rooted in class struggle and scaled it into mainstream electoral politics. Where Hampton’s coalition was explicitly socialist in orientation and focused on survival programs in poor neighborhoods, Jackson’s was a broad progressive electoral coalition operating within the Democratic Party. The emphasis shifted from class solidarity as the binding force to a vision of multicultural pluralism, where each group retained its identity while contributing to a shared political project. Jackson’s rhetoric was vivid: he described America as a “rainbow” where each color is distinct but together they form something larger and more beautiful.
This transformation was consequential. The Jackson campaigns demonstrated that a multiracial coalition could be a serious force in national politics, not just a local experiment. But critics from the left argued that the move into electoral politics diluted the original concept’s radical edge. Hampton’s coalition was built on shared material conditions, primarily poverty and police violence. Jackson’s coalition was built on shared progressive values, which is a different kind of glue. The two meanings of “rainbow coalition” have coexisted somewhat uneasily ever since: one points toward class-based organizing that crosses racial lines from below, the other toward identity-inclusive electoral politics that seeks representation within existing institutions.
South Africa’s Rainbow Nation
Outside the United States, the most prominent use of rainbow imagery in politics belongs to South Africa. Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the term “Rainbow Nation” during the country’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s. Tutu used it to describe the vision of a multiracial, post-apartheid South Africa, famously declaring: “They tried to make us one colour: purple. We say we are the rainbow people! We are the new people of the new South Africa!”5Verbum et Ecclesia. Storying Ubuntu as a rainbow nation The metaphor was adopted enthusiastically by Nelson Mandela’s government and became central to the national identity South Africa projected to the world after 1994.
The Rainbow Nation concept drew on Ubuntu, a Southern African philosophy emphasizing communal belonging and mutual responsibility. In this framing, South Africa’s extraordinary diversity, with its eleven official languages and deeply entrenched racial categories, was recast not as a problem to be overcome but as a source of national strength. The rainbow metaphor served a specific political function: it acknowledged difference without insisting on assimilation, offering a way for a society shattered by decades of legally mandated racial hierarchy to imagine itself as whole.
Whether the concept has lived up to its promise is another matter. Scholars have questioned whether the Rainbow Nation ideal has become more aspiration than reality. Some South Africans argue that after two decades of democracy, the government has not managed to equalize material and social relationships across racial lines, and the rainbow metaphor functions more as “idealistic symbol of liberation” than as a description of lived experience.6Verbum et Ecclesia. Storying Ubuntu as a rainbow nation Economic inequality in South Africa remains among the highest in the world, and it still tracks closely with race. The critique is not that the ideal is wrong but that invoking the rainbow can paper over structural problems that require more than symbolic unity to solve.
Rainbow Coalitions in Parliamentary Politics
In a completely different context, “rainbow coalition” has been used in European parliamentary systems to describe governing coalitions that span a wide ideological range. The term here has nothing to do with race. Instead, it refers to the political colors associated with different parties: red for social democrats, blue for conservatives, green for environmentalists, and so on. A “rainbow coalition” in this sense is one that includes parties from across the political spectrum, forming an unusually broad government.
Finland provides the clearest example. In 1995, the country formed what was explicitly called a “rainbow coalition” government, bringing together parties from the left, center, and right. Political scientists studying this government found that the coalition’s unusually broad composition was best explained by parties’ strategic calculations: participation in government offered greater opportunities for achieving policy goals, winning future votes, and securing future office than remaining in opposition did.7Scandinavian Political Studies. A Case of a Surplus Majority Government: The Finnish Rainbow Coalition The coalition had more seats than it strictly needed to govern, making it a “surplus majority” government, but the extra size was the price of getting enough parties on board.
This parliamentary usage is worth knowing about because you will encounter it in European political coverage, and it can be confusing if you are only familiar with the American meaning. When a Finnish or Dutch or German commentator refers to a “rainbow coalition,” they almost always mean ideological breadth, not racial diversity. The metaphor is the same, many colors coming together, but the colors refer to political parties, not people.
Why the Phrase Keeps Getting Reused
The enduring appeal of the rainbow coalition concept has a lot to do with the metaphor itself. A rainbow is visually simple and emotionally positive. It implies that diversity creates something more beautiful than uniformity. And it does this without requiring any particular group to give up its identity: each color in a rainbow is distinct, and the whole depends on that distinctness. This makes the metaphor infinitely adaptable. It can serve a radical class-based alliance in 1969 Chicago, a presidential campaign in 1984, a post-apartheid national identity project in 1994, or a parliamentary compromise in Helsinki in 1995.
But the adaptability is also a source of tension. Each time the phrase is reused, it carries echoes of its previous meanings, and those meanings sometimes conflict. Someone invoking “rainbow coalition” in the tradition of Fred Hampton is talking about class struggle and the radical redistribution of power. Someone invoking it in the tradition of Jesse Jackson is talking about inclusive representation within the existing political system. Someone using it in the South African sense is talking about national reconciliation after legalized racial oppression. These are related but genuinely different projects, and using the same phrase for all of them can obscure those differences.
In contemporary American politics, the phrase tends to be used loosely to describe any coalition that crosses racial and ethnic lines. It appears in commentary about Democratic electoral strategy, particularly when discussing whether the party can hold together a coalition of Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and white progressive voters. Research on recent U.S. elections has tracked how these coalitions shift: the 2024 presidential election, for instance, saw significant movement among African American and Latino voters compared to previous cycles.8Полис. Политические исследования. Evolution of US electoral coalitions: the case of three presidential elections Whether any of these shifting coalitions qualifies as a “rainbow coalition” in any meaningful sense depends on which definition of the term you are working with.
Who Gets Left Out of the Rainbow
One of the more interesting threads running through the history of rainbow coalitions is the question of inclusion and its limits. The original Chicago coalition was remarkable for bringing together Black, Puerto Rican, and poor white communities, but it did not include American Indian activists, even though indigenous communities faced many of the same conditions of poverty and state violence. The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign was broader in this regard, but it still struggled with internal hierarchies: some groups felt their concerns were subordinated to the priorities of the campaign’s Black leadership.9The American Indian Quarterly. Why Was the Red in the Rainbow Faded? American Indian Activists and Multiracial Coalition-Building in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign
This pattern recurs. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was criticized for centering African American political concerns while claiming to speak for a broader multiracial base. South Africa’s Rainbow Nation has been challenged for promoting symbolic unity while material conditions for Black South Africans remain sharply unequal. Every rainbow coalition, it seems, has a color that is less visible than the rest. The Asian American movement recognized this dynamic early on, explicitly framing the pan-ethnic identity of “Asian American” not just as an internal solidarity project but as a tool for cross-racial coalition-building with Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities who faced parallel forms of systemic racism.10ResearchGate / Taylor & Francis / Wiley Online Library. Rethinking the Asian American Movement
The practical takeaway is that “rainbow coalition” is always an aspiration more than a description. No coalition in history has perfectly included every marginalized group or given each an equal voice. The phrase works best when it is understood as a direction of travel rather than a destination, an argument that cross-group solidarity is possible and worth pursuing, even when the coalition itself is incomplete. Where the term goes wrong is when it becomes self-congratulatory, when the fact of a coalition’s diversity is treated as proof that its internal power dynamics are fair. The history suggests they rarely are, and the most durable coalitions have been the ones willing to argue about that openly rather than papering over it with a pretty metaphor.