Charged with carrying on Dr. King’s legacy, Jesse Jackson proved to be a titan of civil rights on his own accord | Editorial

There’s an old saying that “only the good die young.” Not true, of course, but the sentiment is understandable given the complex twists and turns of any life, including that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights titan and noteworthy presidential candidate, who at age 84 died Tuesday at his home in Chicago.

The Rev. Jackson’s rise into America’s awareness was itself triggered by a death. He was with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of a Memphis hotel in 1968 when an assassin’s bullet killed his mentor. Who knew then that the Rev. Jackson would become as forceful a voice for equality as King, and later, a credible though unsuccessful political candidate for the nation’s highest office?

Both the Rev. Jackson and King were gifted with voices that moved people to action, not just with their words, but with how they expressed them. King’s cadence perfected in sermons from pulpits across the South stirred the souls of folks who were cautioned to peaceably place their bodies in harm’s way to achieve dignity.

The Rev. Jackson more so appealed to people’s outrage as he urged protesters to let their oppressors know, “I am somebody!” Hearing the Rev. Jackson speak, you got the feeling that those three words meant more to him than the disparate treatment Black people were afforded in then-segregated America. It was true that some aspects of the Rev. Jackson’s life had also been a struggle.

Born in 1941 in Greenville, S.C., the mother of Jesse Louis Burns was a 16-year-old high school majorette who had been impregnated by a 33-year-old married man who lived next door, but denied his paternity. Two years later, Jesse’s mother married Charles Jackson, whom she met when he was a barbershop shoeshine man. Jackson sent the boy to live with his grandmother and didn’t adopt Jesse until he was 16 years old.

After high school, the Rev. Jackson enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on a football scholarship. After his freshman year, he transferred to North Carolina A&T University, a historically Black institution in Greensboro, N.C., where he became a leader in his Omega Psi Phi fraternity chapter and president of the student body. In those roles, the seeds of the Rev. Jackson’s dynamic activism were sown.

Earlier, the Rev. Jackson had been a member of the “Greenville Eight,” the eight African American students arrested for refusing to leave the then-segregated Greenville County Public Library. By 1965, he was marching with King in Selma, Ala., and in 1967 was named head of Operation Breadbasket, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference program developed to help poor Black communities across the nation.

The Rev. Jackson eventually left the SCLC after King’s death and, in 1971, created his own organization, Operation PUSH, and later the Rainbow Push Coalition, which became as involved in politics as it was with social justice. That political involvement is credited with being a factor in the 1983 election of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington.

The Rev. Jackson’s subsequent 1984 presidential campaign resonated with voters of all colors and backgrounds who agreed with him that America wasn’t doing enough “to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to teach the illiterate, to provide jobs for the jobless, and to choose the human race over the nuclear race.”

The Rev. Jackson won 465 delegates to the 1984 Democratic National Convention and 1,218 delegates in 1988, both times far exceeding Shirley Chisholm’s 151 delegates when the New York member of Congress ran for president in 1972. But the Rev. Jackson never gave it a third shot. He instead spoke out for justice not just in this country but around the world, and, in 2000, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

Those were good times, but life isn’t always good.

There was the revelation in 2001 that the Rev. Jackson had fathered a child with a woman other than his wife. There was the pain of seeing his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., a former congressman, plead guilty in 2013 to misspending $750,000 in campaign funds for personal use and being sentenced to 30 months in prison. Then, there were health issues. In 2017, the Rev. Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a neurological disorder in which mobility and speech decline over time.

Watching the Rev. Jackson in his final years, attending public events but barely able to move or speak, made you wish for a better summation of a life once so full of zest and vigor. But the Rev. Jackson has left behind vivid memories captured in print, video, and downloads of a man history should not forget. Memories of crowds screaming, “Run, Jesse, Run,” as the Rev. Jackson tried to fulfill a political dream left to be carried out by someone else. Thank God, Jesse did live to see that.