When Jesse Jackson died last week at the age of 84, I was reminded of a column I wrote about him 41 years ago in Ft. Collins, Colorado, my first year as a columnist. Jackson had run for president the year before and would do so again in 1988. The following column ran on March 8, 1985:
I attended Jesse Jackson’s speech a week ago on the Colorado State University campus. As a speaker, few can match his brand of fire. His delivery started slow, almost halting, then built gradually, like most great orators, to a passionate intensity, his tonality and musical cadence conveying a strong sense of moral authority. It made me wonder how he sounds when he isn’t recovering from pneumonia.
Jackson spoke to the largely white crowd about the need for greater racial and ethnic diversity at Colorado State. The university should recruit Blacks and other minority members, he said, to enhance their students’ development. Otherwise, they will be incomplete, culturally deprived.
“The world,” he pointed out, “is yellow, black, brown, poor, and doesn’t speak English.” If students are unable to cope with people of color, they will not be able to compete in the real world.
“Any politics of isolation,” he warned, “threatens national security.”
Jesse roused the crowd repeatedly to resounding ovations. From my seat in the rafters of the athletic center, I had a clear view. Some 6,000 people rising in unison to applaud vigorously again and again is heady stuff.
Jackson labored on the periphery of the political scene for some time. In Chicago, he started a multiracial organization called Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), which turned into the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, promoting pragmatic progress — achieving equality through increased economic opportunity and educational accomplishment for the poor and oppressed. He traveled the public-school circuit preaching self-esteem, leading students with his famous chant: “I am … somebody!” A subversive message — in the best possible sense.
During college in the 1970s, a few of us headed down to the Loop to attend a PUSH convention. At one point I found myself in a ballroom surrounded by a sea of Black faces. As a white suburban kid, this was a completely new experience, which produced two insights: “This is what it’s like to be a Black person in a largely white culture” and “Every white person needs to experience this.”
A lot of white people in Chicago, however, don’t trust Jesse Jackson. They think he’s just another slick self-promoter with a big ego. He was also a thorn in the side of the white power structure because he never stopped PUSHing for Black equality.
After Harold Washington’s upset of the Democratic machine to become Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983, Jesse entered the 1984 Democratic presidential primary race to challenge that bastion of whiteness. He made things interesting. He also made believers out of a lot of people (Black and white) who had scoffed at his nerve.
Jesse has never been a typical politician (i.e. interested mostly in power). Neither is he strictly a prophet shouting from the wilderness. He has become adept at playing both inside and outside the system and doesn’t stay too long in either space. He speaks the language of capitalism, but also seeks to empower the disenfranchised. He is not Martin Luther King Jr., nor is he Adam Clayton Powell Jr. though he reminds some of one or the other, or both.
If he becomes a card-carrying member of the political mainstream, I fear he’ll lose his unique voice, which on this day reaches a full-throated roar at Moby Gym (so named because it resembles a great white whale) as he lands his speech with his latest chant, which applies to everyone:
“Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive!”
I doubt that Jesse Jackson will ever become president. Instead (borrowing a biblical motif so often applied by oppressed minorities), he is preparing the way for one who is to come, someone who is not even on the scene, perhaps not even born yet.
The one who will become our first Black president.
Turns out he only had 23 more years to wait. Happily, Jesse was present on Nov. 4, 2008, shedding his share of tears during Barack Obama’s victory celebration in Grant Park.
His own dreams may not have come to fruition, but according to Clayborne Carson, Stanford University professor of history and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, who was quoted in the New York Times Feb. 17 obituary, “In his best imagination, he saw himself as someone who could bring the country together, appeal to working-class whites as well as poor Blacks, unite them around economic change. But that’s been a dream in American politics for as long as there has been American politics. When that dream has to confront reality, it’s a hard bridge to cross.”
Nonetheless, Jesse Jackson managed to keep hope alive, paved the way for our first Black president, and raised the consciousness of one sheltered white suburban kid.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one.
