There’s a whole litany of black socialist, communist, and progressive candidates for the presidency. Two of the most famous of these were the campaigns of Eldridge Cleaver and Jesse Jackson.

Eldridge Cleaver was a Black Power activist, who then became Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, the Peace and Freedom Party, a relatively new party that grew out of the New Left and Anti-war movements, ran Eldridge Cleaver as a candidate for president. Cleaver managed to get some 37,000 votes nationwide, even as he was excluded from the ballot in some states due to the fact that he would not be old enough to assume the office of the presidency if he won. Cleaver fled the country that same year, due to a criminal case against him for the shooting of two police officers in the aftermath of the assassination of MLK.

Jesse Jackson also came out of the protest movements of the 1960s, albeit with a slightly less radical bent. Jackson was a part of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and two years later became the national director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket, which was focused on bettering the economic conditions of black communities throughout America. Jackson ended up founding his own organization in 1971, called PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) which continued to do similar activism. In 1984 and 1988, he ran insurgent progressive campaigns for the democratic nomination. The first time around, he won 3.3 million votes, and the second time he won 6.9 million votes. Jackson has continued to push progressive politics until today, although I don’t want to break the 20 year rule by discussing that in too much detail.

There have been many other black candidates for POTUS, and a good number for VPOTUS as well, including James W Ford on the Communist Party ticket in 1932, 1936, and 1940, but these are the two that are probably the most “prominent.”