Jesse Jackson Was Somebody
1941 - 2026
Jesse Jackson died Tuesday at 84. News reports have described him as a “civil right leader, activist, and icon.” However, the very name “Jesse Jackson” already encompasses all those descriptors. “Jesse Jackson” needs no modifier.
Jackson was born on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, my home town where my family has lived for as long as local records bother to show. Jackson’s mother, Helen Burns, was an 18-year-old high school student, and his biological father, Noah Louis Robinson, was her 33-year-old married neighbor. A year later, Burns married Charles Henry Jackson, who adopted Jesse. Other children mocked the circumstances of Jesse’s birth but from an early age, Jesse Jackson refused to let others define him and tell him what he could become. “I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he said. “I had a shovel programmed for my hand.”
Like my own father, Jackson attended a segregated high school in Greenville. He excelled both academically and athletically. He was elected student body president, an early indication of his political ambitions. He briefly attended the University of Illinois on a football scholarship, but it was after he transferred to the historically Black university North Carolina A&T that his activism started in earnest. He participated in local civil-rights protests against segregated libraries, theaters, and restaurants.
While home from college, in the summer of 1960, Jackson joined seven other Black activists in a sit-in at the Greenville Public Library, which was still segregated six years after Brown v. Board of Education. They were arrested for “disorderly conduct.” In retaliation, the Greenville City Council shut down the the main library and the branch Black people used. Mayor J. Kenneth Cass said, “The efforts being made by a few Negroes to use the white library will now deprive all white and Negro citizens of the benefit of a library.” However, public pressure increased, and the libraries were eventually reopened in September to avoid a lawsuit. Mayor Cass grudgingly admitted that the Greenville County Library was no longer whites only. My father turned 12 that summer — the same age as my son — and Jackson had already helped change his life … and mine. I’d later spend most of my childhood in the Greenville County Library, so I remain in the Greenville Eight’s debt.
Jackson graduated in 1964 with B.S. in sociology and attended the Chicago Theological Seminary, which he left in 1966 to serve full-time in the civil rights movement. After returning from the Selma to Montgomery marches, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. entrusted Jackson with key roles in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, Jackson continued his work for the Poor People’s Crusade. Jackson actively promoted a class-based racial reconciliation. “When we change the race problem into a class fight between the haves and the have-nots, then we are going to have a new ball game,” Jackson said.
Jackson often quoted the poem “I Am Somebody” by Rev. William Holmes Borders Sr. During a 1972 appearance on Sesame Street, Jackson leads a call-and-response with a racially diverse group of children: “I may be poor,” Jackson prompts them, “but I am somebody … I am Black, brown or white. I speak a different language, but I must be respected, protected, never rejected. I am God’s child!”
Jackson had a powerful voice, which unfortunately had grown softer with age and finally silent with his death. He was a master orator, and like the best Southern Baptist preachers, there was a musicality and rhythm to his words. You heard it when that voice boomed, “I am Black, beautiful, and proud! … What time is it?” (Watch below.)
Jackson was always optimistic but entering the 1970s, he once exclaimed, “Brothers and sisters! Brothers and sisters, I don’t know what this world is coming to!” Public Enemy sampled those words in 1988 for the song “Rebel Without A Pause” from its classic album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The British group MARRS would repeatedly loop Jackson’s impassioned “brothers and sisters” for the dance track “Pump Up The Volume,” as would the new jack swing group Joe Public in its 1992 song “Live and Learn.”
Jackson founded Operation PUSH (People United To Save Humanity) in 1971 — later changing the name to People United To Serve Humanity. By 1978, Jackson was advocating for an improved relationship between Black voters and the GOP. “Black people need the Republican Party to compete for us so we can have real alternatives,” he said. “The Republican Party needs Black people if it is ever to compete for national office.”
Jackson’s position was likely changed after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. He was a vocal critic of the Reagan administration, and in 1984, he actually ran for president with the goal of denying Reagan a second term. I have a clear memory of his campaign. My parents took me to event he held that year in Cleveland Park. It was more than a political rally. It was a family affair. (A decade later, when I was an intern at The Greenville News, Jackson came to the office for an interview. His presence was such that everyone stopped and watched as he entered the conference room.)
Jackson won the South Carolina caucus and contests in Louisiana and Washington, DC. Walter Mondale — one of the least charismatic and compelling candidates to run for president — was the eventual nominee, and Jackson duly supported him.
“I would rather have Roosevelt in a wheelchair than Reagan on a horse,” Jackson said during his 1984 Democratic National Convention speech. Of course, Democrats would’ve been better off with dead Roosevelt than living Mondale.
Jackson considered all Americans part of his “Rainbow Coalition.” He was the first politician to mention the LGBTQ community in a convention speech: “America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread,” he said. “The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.”
Jackson ran again in 1988, improving upon his past performance. He won 13 states, including once again his home state. Twenty years later, Bill Clinton would seemingly dismiss Barack Obama’s 2008 South Carolina rout when he told reporters, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ‘84 and ‘88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” Implicit in that statement was that Jackson couldn’t prevail outside of states with a significant Black electorate, and Obama would face similar challenges among what Hillary Clinton would later call “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”
However, aside from race, Jackson and Obama were very different candidates. Obama was more measured and politically moderate. Jackson was not just a lifelong activist. Jackson was a New Deal Democrat but without FDR’s racial blind spots. His policies would’ve left no one behind. Bernie Sanders even endorsed him. (Jackson won Vermont in 1988.) Jackson was also an early advocate for the Palestinian people, which put him at odds with a young New York politician called Chuck Schumer. In many ways, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a more likely successor to Jackson.
During his 1988 Democratic convention speech, Jackson confronted the Reagan administration’s self-serving narrative about the poor and desperate. He presented poverty and income inequality as threats to Americans of all colors.
Most poor people are not lazy. They are not black. They are not brown. They are mostly white and female and young. But whether White, Black or Brown, a hungry baby’s belly turned inside out is the same color-- color it pain, color it hurt, color it agony.
Most poor people are not on welfare. Some of them are illiterate and can’t read the want-ad sections. And when they can, they can’t find a job that matches the address. They work hard everyday. I know, I live amongst them. They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people’s children. They work every day.
They clean the streets. They work everyday. They drive dangerous cabs. They change the beds you slept in in these hotels last night and can’t get a union contract. They work everyday.
No, no, they’re not lazy. Someone must defend them because it’s right and they cannot speak for themselves. They work in hospitals. I know they do. They wipe the bodies of those who are sick with fever and pain. They empty their bedpans. They clean out their commodes. No job is beneath them, and yet when they get sick they cannot lie in the bed they made up every day. America, that is not right
Unfortunately, the Democratic nominee that year was Michael Dukakis. who was somehow even less inspiring than Walter Mondale. Reaganomics would endure, through George H.W. Bush, for another four years.
I’ve written about the infamous “Sister Souljah” moment that white moderates love so much and keep demanding from Democrats. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton spoke at Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition where he repudiated statements rapper and political activist Sister Souljah (Lisa Williamson) had made in a Washington Post interview, as well as some specific lyrics in her music. Williamson had been a guest at the Rainbow Coalition the previous night, and this was a calculated effort on the Clinton’s campaign part to distance the “New Democrat” from Jackson, who white moderate Democrats had long resented. This was apparently successful. A blue collar white guy from Ohio told the New York Times, “When Bill Clinton told Jesse Jackson where to get off, that’s when he won my vote.” (Of course, Clinton publicly asserting dominance over Jackson probably didn’t help him win so much as a tanking economy, but it probably didn’t hurt.)
Beyond any racial implications, the “Sister Souljah” moment demonstrated that Clinton was willing to neutralize the political left, which Jackson so passionately represented. The two men had a strained relationship, though Clinton did reach out to Jackson for “private prayer sessions” during his impeachment for fellatio-related felonies. “Once a Nemesis, Jackson Has Become the President’s Spiritual Adviser,” the Times reported.
Barack Obama was not the perpetual scandal machine that Clinton was as president, so Obama never publicly needed Jackson’s “spiritual counsel.” Their relationship was cordial but not particularly close. Still, Obama’s victory on election night 2008 moved Jackson to tears. The man born just a year after Jackson helped integrate my public library had been elected president. Jackson deserved any pride he felt in that moment.
Black people from Jackson and my father’s generations have endured horrors but nonetheless view the world through a hopeful lens. It’s a stark contrast to many of their white counterparts who see the world more harshly. They feel marginalized by all the change and demand a return to “simpler” times. Jackson embraced hope, rejected despair, and fought to keep moving the world forward.
The closing lines from Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Democratic Convention speech might not have been the words of a president, but they remain the call to action from a true leader and champion.
I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it wasn’t born in you, and you can make it.
Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint.
You must not surrender. You may or may not get there but just know that you’re qualified. And you hold on, and hold out. We must never surrender. America will get better and better.
Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. On tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive!
(Watch the whole speech below.)
I had the honor and privilege of attending one of Jesse Jackson’s campaign event in Mendocino, CA in 1987. He was introduced by author Alice Walker. It was a sunny/foggy/rainy day, as it often was on an expanse of coastal headlands. It was, and is, an incredibly beautiful place. As a child of the Deep South, as was Jesse Jackson, though separated by the realities of the racism and discrimination that he suffered.
I was deeply moved and inspired by his message.
Rest In Power, Jesse.
I remember being in a car stuck listening to rush Limbaugh rant and rail about jackson, and the utter loathing my parents have for him. That was when I first noticed how venomously cruel they could get politically. It's also one of the things that ended up making me split with my family in that vein.