2 hours ago
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Executive editor, Guardian Opinion
To meet the Rev Jesse Jackson was to meet a colossus. He was big in aura and grand in stature. Something radiated from him like a sheen: a drive, a self assurance, a fixity of purpose. He had vision, sharp intelligence and he had craft. Oh boy, did he have craft.
There was an elongated moment in a long interview I did with him in 2007, after a day of watching him talk and meet people during a visit to the UK, when I looked down at my notepad, listening all the while to his sonorous voice. It was his private voice, quieter, shorn of the performative element that marked him in public. I looked up and saw his eyes were shut, his head had lolled: he was pretty much asleep. He knew the message he wanted to send and how to impart it. He was literally doing it in his sleep.
For those of us for whom Martin Luther King and his lieutenants were heroic figures from literary and TV history, a visit from a titan of the US civil rights movement was akin to touching the hem of a guru’s garment. He came and spoke at an all-seats-taken, queue-around-the-block event organised by Operation Black Vote. And after 10 minutes of his address, part lectern exposition, part cadence-littered sermon, the reason for much of the fuss and awe became apparent.
“I am somebody.” Shorn of context, the sentence sounds self evident, perhaps trite. Adapted from a 1950s poem by Rev William Holmes Borders Sr, Jackson made it his mantra.
When he led that chant, as he often did, in front of thousands of people, it said everything to those of us entreated by society, its leaders and its institutions to believe that we were less than somebody. “I may be poor, but I am somebody”, “I may be young, but I am somebody”, “I may have made mistakes, but I am somebody”. He did many tangible things, his Operation Push initiatives, his voter-drive campaigns, his hostage-release efforts, his presidential campaigns. But I’m not sure anything was as effective as his mass dissemination of three words that helped give dignity to a people whose lives were a relentless fight to keep it.
He was a force, not least because he joined the dots. His presidential tilts in 1984 and 1988 were never going to end in the White House, but they nonetheless had traction because he understood the overlap between racial struggles and class. He saw people, but he also saw powerful themes, of othering, of inequality, of disenfranchisement. Leaders of that stripe are most dangerous – so mourn today, because we can ill afford to lose them.
Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington
I first met the Rev Jesse Jackson when I was a brand new MP in the 1980s. We were to take many photographs together down the years and, to this day, there is one in pride of place in my office in parliament. Meeting Jesse for the first time was overwhelming. As most people know, he was a protege of Martin Luther King and was in the Memphis motel with him when he was murdered. He was a figure who was a link to the time of the very height of the civil rights movement.
Meeting Jesse in the flesh was no disappointment. He was tall, commanding and charismatic. The kind of man people turned to look at in the street even when they did not know who he was.
We kept in touch over 30 years. If he was in London, we would get together; if I was close by in the US, we would meet. I learned a lot from him. He was very brave and I have always tried to show a little of that courage. After all, however difficult things might be for me, I was not risking my life every day as he did. He taught me the importance of having principles and sticking to them. Above all, I learned from Jesse never to forget the importance of being a voice for the voiceless.
His organising base was in Chicago’s South Side, but he was also a great internationalist. He travelled all over the world talking about racial justice in that inimitable southern preacher’s manner. The last time I met him was in 2021 at a conference in Paris about the international fight against racism.
If any single person could be said to carry on the legacy of King, it was Jesse. There were others who kept the organisations going, spoke and campaigned. But unconstrained by a political party, he was the civil rights figure of the age. It was a privilege to have known him.
Journalist and film-maker
The Rev Jesse Jackson was one of those names I was aware of long before I understood why. He was simply there, part of the wider landscape of Black political life, hovering at the edge of my consciousness.
I first encountered him in a school history lesson in the early 2000s when I was about 13. The US civil rights movement was referenced briefly, almost in passing. Martin Luther King was the centrepiece, as he always is, and the lesson moved on quickly. But I went home curious.
Those were the days of dial-up internet and bulky computers, when looking something up still felt like a deliberate act. I started with King – his life, his assassination – and it was there that I came across Jackson’s name. He had been with King in Memphis on the night he was killed. That detail stayed with me.
From there, I worked backwards, delving further into Jackson’s life and discovering the wider constellation of Black thinkers, organisers and artists who shaped that era. John Lewis. James Baldwin. Lorraine Hansberry. Nina Simone. Claude McKay.
My mother had already laid some of the groundwork. Through reggae music and the striking portrait of Marcus Garvey that hung on our wall, I understood that these struggles weren’t confined to the US. It spanned continents and generations.
Jackson would then turn up elsewhere. In cartoons such as South Park and the Boondocks; on the news, crying openly the night Barack Obama was elected US president. His presence bridged worlds from his pulpit to popular culture.
For me, he represented continuity. He was proof that history wasn’t abstract or distant, but lived, felt and carried forward by real people. He connected the sacrifices of the past to the possibilities of the present, making it clear that progress doesn’t just arrive. It’s fought for, held on to and handed down.
