All hail the life, deeds, eloquent rhetoric and cherished memories of Jesse Jackson, the once-incandescent black spokesperson and social-justice firebrand who made his name as an activist (Rainbow PUSH Coalition), politician and ordained Baptist minister.
Jackson was as much of a superstar-of-color during the mid-to-late 20th Century as Barack Obama was in the 21st Century.
He peaked from the mid ’60s until his extra-powerful 1984 and slightly less riveting 1988 presidential campaigns. He continued to symbolically matter into the ’90s and aughts.
Jackson was there at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered. He was a super-influential earth-mover and power broker during the 1972 Democratic Convention in ’72. He famously wept in Chicago when Barack Obama was elected 11.4.08. The 1984 “hymietown” remark probably killed his presidential aspirations, but he never stopped being a leading civil rights torch-bearer of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Not to mention his Saturday Night Live visits.
Jackson disappointed me personally by not standing up against woke fanaticism during the terror (2017 to 2024), but since “woke” began as a BlackLivesMatter thing he probably felt that he couldn’t divest himself.
Jackson, Robert Duvall, Frederick Wiseman…legends are suddenly dropping like flies.