The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s death surprised me with sadness. Though we didn’t really know each other, he and I intersected enough through decades of American history that I felt like I’d lost yet another friend in a time of shortening days.
I became aware of Jackson, a son of my home state of South Carolina, in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Jackson, then 26, was at his side and has been a cultural and political constant ever since.
Throughout the ’70s, a decade I spent largely in university libraries, Jackson earned headlines pushing for social justice in poor, Black neighborhoods and organized boycotts to pressure corporations to hire African Americans. He flourished in a melee of youthful discontent. The women’s liberation movement and protests against the Vietnam War coalesced with civil rights into a juggernaut of radical change. No one was immune to the chaos that Jackson helped create.
In 1984, I sat up straight when Jackson delivered his historic Rainbow Coalition speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Watching from home, where I was confined to bed rest for the final three months of my pregnancy, I was mesmerized when Jackson declared, “Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, Brown, Black and White — and we’re all precious in God’s sight.”
Amen, brother.
Before the 1984 convention, disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to attend and further sidelined by my beat as food and wine writer for the Mercury News in San Jose, I was determined to produce a timely byline. But how could I squeeze a political story out of a food beat? I landed on a silly but salable idea: If we are what we eat, shouldn’t we know what aspiring presidents consume?
My first call was to Jackson’s home in Chicago. I nearly fell off the sofa when Jackson’s wife, Jacqueline Jackson, picked up. When I explained my idea, she was all in. Jackson’s favorite food was fried chicken, she told me. His favorite snack was raisins. And his favorite dessert was chocolate cake. When I asked for her cake recipe, she said, “I don’t use a recipe. I just throw in a handful of this and a handful of that.” Our conversation ended with her promise to trace her hand on a piece of paper and tell me approximately how many of those hands I’d need to replicate the dessert. She not only drew me her hand, but included her fingernails, knuckles and her wedding ring. It was a work of art, which we published along with the “recipe.”
I saw Jackson a few more times through the years, attending his speeches the way others attended rock concerts. In June 1999, I was in France when I learned that Jackson would be speaking at the American University of Paris. By then, he had become a global figure, chatting up dictators, securing hostage releases and leapfrogging from crisis to crisis. Just the month before, he had secured the release of three American soldiers from captivity by Yugoslav forces.
At the top of his game, surrounded by media and protesters, Jackson arrived 30 minutes late to the university venue where 150 people were futilely fanning themselves in the stifling heat of a building without AC.
He swept into the room like a deity searching for a pedestal. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the once-humble civil rights organizer would embrace his own myth. Most politicians do. Moreover, Jackson had telegraphed his elevated self-image in a 1983 Associated Press profile in which Sharon Cohen wrote that he saw himself walking “the lonely, dusty road of the prophets” sent forth like Jesus, Gandhi and King “to show others the way out of the wilderness.”
If he wasn’t a prophet, his acolytes treated him as such. Sermonizing from the lectern, Jackson was sweating profusely. Every gesture sent rivulets of sweat spattering to the floor, whereupon a Jackson aide would scuttle crablike to the spot and, with eucharistic reverence, wipe up the reverend’s sacred secretions. This comical scene replayed throughout the speech, which I don’t recall at all.
Our last intersection was a decade later in New York, where we were guests at a dinner hosted by United Nations ambassador Susan Rice. Jackson stood apart, watching the swarm of younger notables. Sensing our mutual invisibility, I wandered over, introduced myself and shared memories of our accidental encounters. He was gracious, humble and seemed grateful. He asked if I would pose for a picture with him. I said it would be an honor.
My sadness isn’t only for Jackson but also for the end of an era that, for all its fraught moments, aimed for a more just society and an elevated purpose that called upon our better angels. I’m afraid those angels may have been Jackson’s advance team and have taken flight with him. Rest in peace, Rev. Jackson. You’re in the best company now.
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