Brack: S.C.’s Jesse Jackson made a real difference

With everything that’s going on in the world, thoughts keep returning to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Greenville native who bridged the worlds of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and former President Barack Obama.

Jackson, who passed away at age 84 this week in Chicago, grew up in segregated South Carolina. He was a star quarterback and student body president at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, N.C., from which he graduated in 1964. The next year, he started to work for King, who was assassinated in 1968 on the second-floor walkway of a Memphis hotel while talking to Jackson in the parking lot below.

Jackson quickly matured into an inspirational civil rights organizer and political leader known across the world as a mentor who evangelized hope before it became Obama’s presidential mantra.

In 1984, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president and did so well that his candidacy spurred party rule changes that later benefited Obama. He ran again in 1988, winning South Carolina and about a dozen other primaries and state caucuses, only to lose the nomination to former Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis.

But his powerful 1984 convention speech continues to set a standard for progressives who want unity, fairness and real change in a broken American political system:

“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.

“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.”

America was, for Jesse Jackson, a Rainbow Coalition, which was the name he gave his movement to inspire social justice and help the disenchanted, the disenfranchised, the disgusted.

Across the country, people have spent the week telling stories about Jackson’s patient leadership and charismatic energy.

What I most remember about Jackson were his large quarterback hands, soft and powerful at the same time. He also had an uncommon patient grace and ability to concentrate his listening.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker of Camden recalled encountering Jackson last about 30 years ago at a United Nations dinner.

“He was gracious, humble and seemed grateful,” she wrote this week. “My sadness [now] 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.”

Michelle Singletary, another Washington Post columnist, remembered hearing Jackson loudly say, “I am somebody,” when she was in elementary school in a poor Baltimore neighborhood in 1970.

She said he “spoke life into me, eventually inspiring me to go to college. His words pushed me to overcome the feeling of being unwanted.”

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., and Jackson were students at rival S.C. high schools and colleges. But the rivalry forged a friendship, he recalled, that was a constant.

“A life lived defying odds, Reverend Jackson showed us that if we all work together, we can bend the arc of the moral universe and change history. Operation Breadbasket, anti-apartheid activism, voter registration and corporate diversity were among just a few of his initiatives that advanced opportunity and equality for Black Americans.”

One former South Carolina reporter who ran into Jackson periodically remembered him this way: “Watching him speak during the 1988 primaries was a life-changing event. His message wasn’t primarily about race, but about the things that could unite us. It was a secular message delivered with the tone and cadence of a sermon.

“He was a rare man of courage, conviction, principle and charisma. We could use a few million more like him.”

Yes, we can. Rest in peace, Jesse Louis Jackson (1941-2026).

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@charlestoncitypaper.com