Opinion: The enduring dignity of Jesse Jackson

I covered the Rev. Jesse Jackson from the mid 1970’s, when I was a scruffy underground press reporter, and he was the young minister who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and was there when Dr. King was assassinated.

He was matchlessly eloquent and compelling, but he had his critics, both political and personal. Politics in Chicago can be fierce and fractious.

I went down to Mississippi in 1984 to cover his first campaign for president; by then I was working for NPR. At a press conference at a school in Jackson, another reporter from Chicago and I noticed the watch on Jackson’s wrist. It was gold, thick, and bejeweled.

We asked, “What can you tell us about your watch, Reverend Jackson?”

He glanced down with disdain. It was a gift from an African head of state, he told us, who appreciated his work for social justice.

We asked, “Would this expensive gift make you support his policies if you became president? Should presidential candidates take valuable personal gifts from foreign leaders?”

The reverend fumed. As we filed out of the classroom, Jackson took us both in his strong grip to ask, “You boys fly down from The Big Windy just to give me junk about a watch?” And he didn’t say junk.

The Jackson campaign rolled on through Meridian, Natchez, and Hattiesburg. Many of the towns had been notorious datelines during the Civil Rights Movement. He’d remind crowds that there were many unregistered Black voters in those counties — he was running to change that — and recall the story of David slaying Goliath to thunder that unregistered voters were, “Rocks, just laying around…

“It’s 1984 now!” Jackson would peal. “Hands that once picked cotton can now pick presidents.”

The crowds would raise their hands to cheer, and dab their eyes.

We reporters had a couple of other small skirmishes with the reverend on his campaign swing. But the last night on the trail ended with a prayer meeting in a church, where Jackson summoned the same power to rouse a small congregation as he would a crowd of thousands. As he called on parishioners to sing “Just A Closer Walk with Thee”, one of his aides leaned over to me in a church pew to say, “The reverend would like you to join him in the Amen Corner.”

Reporters should not join candidates on campaign platforms. But it was a church, filled with people who had lived through history, and now sang in prayer. Sometimes, even reporters have human responses. When The Rev. Jackson died this week at the age of 84, I felt blessed to remember that one night in Mississippi, I got to stand in the Amen Corner with Jesse Jackson. His words seemed to pierce the heavens.