Hero, Heel, Hustle Man: Jesse Jackson, An Appreciation

Say what you will, can you imagine an America in which he never existed?

I was just sitting down at my desk in a soaring office tower overlooking Lake Michigan when the phone rang. “Washington Post, Chicago bureau,” I said.

“Jon,” the voice on the other end said excitedly, “this is Rev-un Jackson.”

Good morning, Reverend Ja...”

“Jon, we’ve got to talk about…” he interrupted. When Reverend Jackson had something on his mind—and he always had something on his mind—he hadn’t time for any banalities.

He would call occasionally in the months after I accompanied him on a 1998 nostalgia tour of Appalachia as he weighed a 2000 presidential campaign, which was nothing more than a vainglorious attempt to recapture the startling energy from his 1984 and 1988 White House bids that were growing more distant in the public’s rearview mirror as the 21^st century dawned. It would be an exaggeration to say that we’d become friends, but I’d gotten to know him a bit as we talked for hours on end while sitting next to him on the bus as we traversed the border between Ohio and West Virginia.

Like most everyone in his orbit, I was of two minds about Jackson, at once drawn to him, like the sun, yet repelled by his solipsism that threatened to destroy everything he touched. And although his 1998 tour was little more than a vanity project, it also offered a glimpse of this deeply flawed titan of American politics who towered over the final years of the 20^th century like no one else. I wrote at the time:

“Flanked by union officials, actor and liberal activist Martin Sheen and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, an evangelical and conservative who is often at odds with Jackson’s brand of politics, Jackson exhorted the audience to ‘leave no American behind.’

Jackson’s political organization, the Chicago-based Operation PUSH/Rainbow Coalition, has focused its efforts this year on building a coalition of poor working-class voters from mostly white rural communities, such as Appalachia, and heavily black and Latino inner-city areas.

With the nation enjoying a major economic expansion, elected officials have turned away from the problems of the poorest Americans: affordable housing, lack of health insurance, failing public schools and stagnant wages, Jackson said.

Jackson said that the obstacles confronting coal miners in this mountainous region where President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his War on Poverty are not vastly different from those facing jobless steelworkers on Chicago’s South Side.

‘We’re here today to change the framework of the national debate,’ Jackson said. ‘The media wants to talk about sex and tapes,’ he said, in reference to the scandal surrounding President Clinton’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky. ‘Politicians want to talk about politics and posturing. We seek to bring dignity, jobs and justice to Appalachia. We’re blessed enough and we’re fortunate enough that we should share America’s growth with all of its people.’

That Jackson was singularly responsible for squandering what might have been the Republic’s best opportunity since Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination to fulfill his vision of a pluralistic society was not lost on me even then as a 33-year-old African American whose revolutionary consciousness had not yet fully formed. In his refusal to abandon an increasingly conservative Democratic party to form a third party that represented the working class, Jackson anticipated the party’s cuckolding of Senator Bernie Sanders following his failed 2020 presidential campaign.

Still, there was something magical about watching Jackson connect with white West Virginia coal miners and Midwestern college students on a level that transcended electoral politics. In my career as a journalist I have been in close proximity to Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Robert Mugabe, Paul Wellstone, Cyril Ramaphosa, Marion Barry, Coleman Young, Kenneth Kaunda, and Hugo Chavez; only Chavez had Jackson’s magnetic personal charisma combined with a knack for knowing precisely what gesture or words would win someone over in a particular moment.

I was introduced to Reverend Jackson a half-century ago as a fifth-grader at Indianapolis Public School #106 when he addressed a school assembly, urging the mostly African American student body on with a message and a cadence that I associated only with Muhammad Ali up until that point.

“I am — somebody.

“I may be poor, but I am — somebody.

“I may be on welfare, but I am — somebody.

“I may be uneducated, but I am — somebody.

“I may be in jail, but I am — somebody.”

And then:

“If you can conceive it, and believe it, you can achieve it.”

If he had been a cult leader, my 10-year-old self would’ve joined on the spot.

Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns transformed the nation, though not as he had hoped. When two Dixiecrats—Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Tennessee’s U.S. Senator Al Gore—were plotting to recapture the White House in the 1992 election after 12 years of Republicans in the Oval office, their choice was clear: they could parrot Jackson’s big-tent strategy that sought to expand the interracial coalition that propelled the New Deal with policies that were unambiguously pro-worker; or they could compete for bigoted, white suburban voters with policies and rhetoric that portrayed Democrats as more racist than the GOP.

You need only consider Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign to understand which strategy Clinton and Gore chose and endures to this day.

Reverend Jackson was impossible to categorize; he was not one thing or the other but all things and another. A civil rights leader and a capitalist. A Black nationalist who feared Black men. A married man of the cloth who fathered a child out of wedlock. Martin Luther King Jr. famously scolded him for his careerist ambition. When he floated the idea of challenging Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry at the polls, Barry mocked him, declaring “Jesse don’t wanna run nothing but his mouth.” Black South Africans loathed Jackson for daring to lecture them.

While they were close allies, Chicago’s first African American Mayor, Harold Washington, resented Jackson’s thunder-stealing antics, according to many Black Chicagoans who recall Washington comically struggling to free his hand from the reverend’s grasp as he tried to raise their fists in tandem in a gesture of solidarity and triumph. Bruce Dixon, the late managing editor at Black Agenda Report, once told me that Jackson had approached the chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, about collaborating on some commercial scheme. Hampton wasn’t trying to hear it and when he’d finally had enough, he signaled to three Panthers, who promptly frog-marched the minister from the premises and bounced him off the pavement.

And then there is this: in 2009 I was interviewing a half-dozen workers at Republic Windows and Doors at a southside Chicago restaurant when Jackson materialized outside. The workers—four Mexican immigrants and two African Americans—had organized a sit-down strike months earlier when company executives had decided to relocate to Iowa without paying their employees the back pay and benefits they were entitled to under their union contract. With Jackson’s endorsement, the workers had won their back pay and started a successful workers’ cooperative. But none of the workers had ever met Jackson. When they saw him approaching the restaurant’s door, all six leapt to their feet and rushed to greet him in the parking lot. Jackson spoke patiently with the group in freezing winter temperatures for what had to be 15 minutes. All six workers returned to the table beaming like lottery winners.

Regardless of what anyone thought of him, Reverend Jackson was ours. He belonged to working people generally and African Americans most of all because he was a product of Black culture, and a recognizable figure in the neighborhood. He was “Hustle man,” who grew up with nothing and vowed to do whatever it took to get a bag for himself and his family. Maybe he opened a car wash, or a chain of them, or maybe he ran numbers, or organized illegal gambling from his garage. But long after he made enough money to move out, he remained in the hood, showing up for summer barbecues and Thanksgiving dinner, pitching in $100 here and there for a high school graduation gift or to help a neighbor out of a jam. They were deeply flawed men but all in all they were an asset to their community, helping us get through.

Jesse Jackson was the greatest Hustle Man of all time. I had tried to maintain a professional distance when our paths crossed nearly 30 years ago because white newsroom editors police Black reporters’ relationships to the people we covered. But the truth is that I loved the man from the moment I first laid eyes on him at a school assembly 50 years ago and I’ll continue to love him for as many days as I have left on this earth.

He was family.

And for those who say that he fell short of the glory one too many times, I would only ask if you can even imagine an America in which Reverend Jesse Jackson had never existed?

I would propose that we, the people, might both honor and redeem him by settling our quarrels and coming together to construct, at long last, a Beloved Community.

It’s Nation Time!