Life
David Hume Kennerly/Getty
The civil rights hero who paved the way for Obama
Jesse Jackson came from humble beginnings, says The New York Times. The civil rights campaigner, who died this week aged 84, was born in the poor town of Greenville, South Carolina to a 16-year-old schoolgirl and her 33-year-old married neighbour. When his mother married another man two years later, the couple had their own son and Jesse was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in a tiny house around the corner. Rejected by his father and not fully embraced by his stepfather, who didn’t formally adopt him for another 14 years, it was a tough start. “People ask, ‘Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?’” he said in 1984. “They’d never seen the house I’m running from.”
After university and training to become a Baptist minister, says The Times, Jackson went to work for Martin Luther King. He was there when King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, but was accused of exploiting the tragedy to bolster his profile: he appeared on talk shows the following day in a shirt still stained with King’s blood, and his claim that he cradled his mentor’s head as he lay dying was fiercely disputed. Nevertheless, Jackson’s star continued to rise and in 1984 he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, seeking to build a “Rainbow Coalition” of minorities and the poor. Despite controversies – notably an anti-Semitic reference to New York as “hymietown” – his soaring oratory helped him defy expectations, finishing third in that race and second when he ran again in 1988. On the night Barack Obama won the 2008 election, Jackson stood among the crowds in Chicago’s Grant Park, tears streaming down his face, knowing he had “blazed the trail” for a black man rising to the highest office in the land.
🌍📸 Jackson “popped up in the most unlikely places”, says Helen Andrews in The Spectator: negotiating the release of hostages in Lebanon; lobbying for earthquake relief in Armenia. He had meetings with Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević. And his fame was truly global. During a visit to Zimbabwe in 1989, he was walking down the dirt trail to Victoria Falls when a group of men who were hunkered under a tree stood up and pointed: “Is this… is this the great Reverend Jesse Jackson?”
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