Jesse Jackson - keeping hope alive

With Rev. Jesse Jackson’s death last week and all the homegoing ceremonies starting today, lot of memories bubbled up for me. Jackson, of course, was - as they say - a complex person. Yet the voice he gave to those facing struggles and the vision he held out for this country always resonated with me.

I first encountered him in 1968 as a college student when I had two opportunities to go to his amazing Saturday Breadbasket gatherings at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Chicago. It was sort of a church service, but also community organizing with music from Ben Branch and his orchestra and choir and special guests, including farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez during my first visit there. 

And then Jackson spoke. Well, Jackson preached and ended with his signature call and response: “I am…somebody…I may be poor… but I am…somebody.” On it went to “I am…a child of God…I am…somebody.” (You can see a classic version here when he was on Sesame Street. And here’s a more typical version with a crowd.

The second time I was there as part of an inter-racial program from Friendship House. We got to meet with him for a while after the gathering. This was only a couple of months after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in Memphis as Jackson stood below the motel balcony when the fatal shots rang out. Our conversation with him was a more subdued one than hearing Jackson speaking from the stage. He tried to convey to us the need for the work for racial justice to continue.

(Hermine Hartman was a student who started attending Saturday Breakfast at about the same time I was there. Here is a 4-minute segment of her recollections. She ends reflecting on his “Keep hope alive” chant. 

Because of those early experiences, I followed Jackson’s career. When he ran for president in 1984 and campaigned at the Wisconsin Capital, I took my then 6-year-old daughter along to see him. As he worked his way down the line to shake hands, there were these security people with big rifles that made me both question the wisdom of bringing her and drove home the daily danger with which he had to live. 

The next go-round was during his 1988 campaign, when I had a chance to interview him on his campaign bus during a stop in Madison. I was the editorial page editor at The Capital Times and I wrote our endorsement of him in that Spring’s presidential primary in Wisconsin. He came in second behind Michael Dukakis. The Cap Times this week ran an editorial recalling that moment. You can find it here.

I never encountered him in person again, but I was shaped by his clarion calls for justice and dignity and a spirit of hope in the most discouraging of times. Those encounters have been part of the reason I have continued over the years to face the racial divides in our society, to seek ways to get across them and to advocate for changes to our political, educational, economic, and social systems that continue to divide us. 

What he said to our small group in 1968 remains true today – the work for racial justice must continue, in part because we are all…somebody. And we can’t give up. We must keep hope alive.