Clarence Page: The Rev. Jesse Jackson is not retiring, only ‘pivoting,’ and still keeping hope alive
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With the news that the Rev. Jesse Jackson is retiring or, as he prefers to call it, “pivoting” from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition that he has led for more than a half-century, an old question comes to mind: Who will be the next Black Moses?
The question has special meaning for me after Jackson acknowledged a few years ago that, as I suspected, I’m one of the few old-timers left who have been covering him off and on for longer than any other journalists. It’s a modest distinction, but these days, I’ll take congratulations wherever I can find them.
Along the way, I have heard the “Black Moses” question come up persistently since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, not to mention Malcolm X, Chicago’s Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers and so many other promising Black leaders who have been taken from us over the years.
Looking back, I imagine questions like that have troubled Jackson, too, especially in moments like the one during a live broadcast of NBC’s “Meet the Press” when a light bulb exploded with a loud bang, causing Jackson to visibly wince. I’m sure I wasn’t the only viewer to think in that instance: Oh, no, not again.
I’d rather think about the first time I saw him live and in person, back in 1969, when I, fresh out of journalism school, began spending what would become many years on and off “the Jesse beat,” as I called it.
I watched him from the back of a standing-room-only Saturday morning crowd at the grand old Capitol Theatre at 79th and Halsted streets, since demolished. The “Country Preacher,” as many called him, was an awesome sight — in the original meaning of the word that’s often overused these days. He was awe-inspiring.
“I am ...!” he shouted into the microphone, beginning his signature chant, which the crowd repeated, “... somebody!”
It breaks my heart to hear this once-magnificent orator struggle to speak after having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. But, even if he can’t project his familiar charisma as much from a wheelchair, I can still see hints of the charisma he projected when he had an Afro as big as a basketball and led the masses in a new spin on the “old-time religion” of which our family elders sang.
Gossip that portrayed Jackson as “Dr. King’s protege” or “hand-picked successor” turned out to be largely exaggerated or wishful thinking. But he made the most of what he had, which was a talent for transforming conventional politics and current affairs into an agenda for political action, all of it delivered in sound bites ready-made for TV reporters and editors to put on the air.
A young Jackson in 1966 was assigned by King’s Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference to lead its Chicago-based economic programs known as Operation Breadbasket. Jackson and the conference parted ways in early 1971, and Jackson launched his own economic empowerment organization called Operation PUSH, People United to Save Humanity, which was changed later in a prudent burst of humility from “Save” to “Serve.”
When Jackson ran for president in 1984, he became the first African American to win any major-party state primary or caucus. Four years later, he more than doubled his previous results.
Jackson, to his credit, was willing to put his appeal to the great test of democracy, which is elections, but, alas, not in an election he had a chance of actually winning. Many people in Washington notably wanted him to run for D.C. mayor in the 1990s, when sitting Mayor Marion Barry reportedly quipped sarcastically to a journalist, “Jesse don’t know how to run nothing but his mouth.”
Well, managing large government bureaucracies may not have been his strong suit, but love him or not, I’ll always remember his ability to motivate powerful politicians, corporate leaders, community organizers and a lot of ordinary families — in the words of an old African American saying, “Make a way out of no way.”
And let us not forget perhaps his most memorable slogan, “Keep hope alive!”
Some of us still hear you, Rev.
Twitter @cptime
