Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 344-364).

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation argues that the use of rainbow imagery to describe efforts to bridge racial divides both inside and outside social justice campaigns became tied to concepts of economic justice in the 1960s but lost its radicalism following the failed presidential bids of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. Conventional narratives analyze these multiracial campaigns —organized by figures as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois in 1911, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party in the civil rights era of the 1960s, and Jesse Jackson in the 1980s —as separate, isolated efforts. My research, however, examines the origins and trajectory of what I term “racial rainbow rhetoric,” —the use of rainbow imagery to describe racial difference in the United States, usually with the aspiration of overcoming these racial divisions – to underscore meaningful conceptual continuities in twentieth-century campaigns for social and economic justice.<i> </i>Although racial rainbow rhetoric did not initially emphasize economic justice activism, throughout the 1960s, activists increasingly used rainbow imagery to build interracial coalitions to attack poverty. This dissertation traces the history of racial rainbow rhetoric from its obscure origins in the early twentieth century to its intersection with the anti-poverty activism of the Poor People’s Campaign and the Black Panther Party to its appropriation by liberal politicians, such as Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. This history of rainbow symbolism in the struggle for racial justice demonstrates the longstanding and continuing damage that state violence and the cooptation of such concepts by indifferent, liberal politicians had on the implementation of genuine economic and social justice.</p>