3rd Party in ’96 Is Hot Topic as Rainbow Meets : Politics: The Rev. Jesse Jackson tells the national coalition that it ‘must develop independent ballot access’ in states and localities.

While opposition to the Republican congressional agenda dominated the National Rainbow Coalition meeting here over the weekend, growing disappointment with the Democratic Party under President Clinton produced intensified talk of a third party for the 1996 election.

At times comparing the work that blacks and other minorities have done for Democrats to slavery and sharecropping, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the organization: “We delivered. Then they ignored us. We do not intend to be ignored, taken for granted, pushed off and exploited any longer.”

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Without committing himself to a third-party presidential bid, Jackson said Saturday that the organization “must develop independent ballot access” in states and localities.

He suggested as a model the New York system, in which such organizations as Right to Life and the Liberal Party can run their own candidates or endorse Democratic or Republican candidates.

Jackson said repeatedly last week that there is a parallel between the abandonment of pro-black programs at the end of Reconstruction and the contemporary policy initiatives of the Republican Party.

At a church gathering to boost dwindling support for a march from House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Georgia office to the grave of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson and prominent members of the black clergy voiced their anger over what they see as Republican efforts to turn concern over out-of-wedlock births and families without fathers into minority issues.

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Gingrich “puts down our families, children with no daddies,” Jackson said, then pointed out that Gingrich’s parents divorced when he was an infant, and that as an adult, Gingrich divorced his first wife. “His daddy’s name is not Gingrich. . . . He should understand. He’s not staying with his first wife. He should understand.”

Gingrich responded to Jackson’s march by saying that Jackson was “stuck in the tactics of the ‘60s.”

While Jackson has not embraced the concept of a third party, a nine-person coalition panel on multi-party politics included only one defender of the Democratic Party: Don Sweitzer, former political director of the Democratic National Committee.

Gwen Patton, who ran for Senate in Alabama, argued that “the natural extension of the National Rainbow Coalition is to have the National Rainbow Party.”