Adekeye Adebajo | The preacher of lost causes

African-American civil rights preacher, Jesse Jackson, who recently died at the age of 84, was described by the New York Times’s Peter Applebome as “the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama”.

Jackson, incredibly, never held any elected position, and despite a long history of civic struggles, became something of a relic, chasing lost causes as black mayors, governors, and eventually, a black president became the main beneficiaries of the heroic battles that he and his generation of civil rights leaders waged in the 1950s and 1960s.

It was his two presidential runs that laid the path for Kenyan-Kansan Barack Obama to become the first black president of the US in 2008. But many also criticised Jackson’s overweening ambition, egoistical opportunism, and moral lapses.

EARLY LIFE

Jesse Louis Burns was born in South Carolina on October 8, 1941. His 16-year old mother, Helen Burns, worked as a cosmetologist. His father, Noah Robinson, was a 33-year old former boxer and neighbour who was married with his own family. His rejection of his son left permanent scars.

Belatedly adopted by his mother’s husband, Charles Jackson, Jesse was later sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Mathilda “Tibby” Burns, in a shack, representing a second rejection. Though an illiterate domestic servant, “Tibby” – an indomitable Mother Courage – acquired books for Jesse from the rich white families she worked for and persistently pushed him to study. As Jackson noted: “She never stopped dreaming for me.”

Jesse enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on a football scholarship in 1959. He was, however, racially abused and transferred to the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, becoming president of the student body. It was here that Jackson met and married fellow student Jacqueline Lavinia Brown in 1962, with whom he subsequently had five children. At first reluctant to become involved in civil rights protests, Jesse led his first anti-segregation march to downtown Greensboro with hundreds of students in June 1963.

CIVIL RIGHTS

Jackson then studied at the Chicago Theological Seminary. Roiled by the brutal beatings of black protesters in Selma in March 1965, he mobilised a group of seminarians to head to Alabama. It was at this march that Jackson first met Martin Luther King, who became the mentor that Jesse hero-worshipped. The Nobel Peace laureate invited Jackson to join his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to head its Chicago branch.

Jackson was with King in Memphis to support a garbage workers’ strike in April 1968 when the civil rights stalwart was shot. He then tarnished his reputation by touring television studios in Chicago wearing an olive sweater with King’s blood on it. He claimed that he was the last person to have spoken to his martyred leader, cradling his head in his hands, a version challenged by other SCLC leaders. Jackson resigned from the SCLC after being suspended. He was now a shepherd in search of a new flock, continuing to champion civic rights in America, South Africa, Palestine, and Haiti. He was particularly active in the anti-apartheid struggle, noting: “As a young civil rights activist, I knew how raw and ugly and violent the apartheid regime was.”

THE 1984 AND 1988 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS

Jackson’s historic 1984 and 1988 presidential bids saw him deliver eloquent and rousing speeches at both Democratic Party conventions, which harked back nostalgically to the civil rights era of an activist government in which a multiracial coalition championed the rights of the racially oppressed and marginalised. In 1984, Jesse famously declared: “My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.” He preached full employment, healthcare, welfare, and taxing the rich, continuing King’s push for economic equality to complement the gains of political freedom. Four years later, Jackson sold himself as the champion of the “outcast,” “subclass,” and “underclass.”

Jesse’s vision and ideas were, however, cheered rather than embraced by a centrist Democratic Party more committed to gradualist reform than radical revolution. His campaign was nearly derailed when he used the racist, anti-Jewish slur “Hymietown” to describe New York. Jackson only very reluctantly distanced himself from the fire-breathing Muslim preacher Louis Farrakhan, a lesson Obama learned during his 2008 presidential campaign in quickly denouncing his fiery former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Jesse came third (behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart) in the 1984 Democratic primary, with 3.2 million votes (18 per cent). He more than doubled this total four years later to nearly seven million – 30 per cent of the overall vote – coming a respectable second to Michael Dukakis and easily defeating Al Gore, who became Bill Clinton’s vice-president just four years later before winning the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2000.

PUSH RAINBOW COALITION

South Africa’s Nobel Peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had championed a vision of “the Rainbow People of God”. His fellow African-American preacher, Jesse Jackson, adopted the leitmotif of a multiracial rainbow in seeking to unite Americans into a progressive movement. Jackson spent most of his life in civic activism as the leader of the Rainbow Push Coalition, sometimes being accused of “shakedowns” of white-dominated corporations to fund his organisation, family, and friends. Jesse would suffer a devastating personal scandal in 2001 after revealing that he had fathered a child two years earlier with former staffer Karin Stanford. By this time, Jesse had become something of an anachronism: a moral leader in an era of practical politics in which the power of the purse had overtaken the power of the prose.

INTO THE HOUSE OF ANCESTORS

One of Jesse’s greatest, but often unremarked achievements, was to have popularised the term “African-American” from 1989. He insisted that – like Italian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Irish-Americans – his black compatriots must take pride in their ancestral home. Jesse pushed back strongly against less politically aware black figures like Whoopi Goldberg and Morgan Freeman, who rejected this identification. It was fitting that Jackson served as the first-ever Special Envoy for Democracy and Human Rights in Africa under president Bill Clinton (1997-2001), contributing to peace efforts in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Kenya, and the Congo. Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, befittingly, attended Jesse’s recent funeral service in Chicago.

Jackson’s final decade was wracked by illness, having been diagnosed with Parkinsons disease in November 2017. He will be fondly remembered across the Black World and beyond as a preacher who restored black pride and dignity and relentlessly pursued their lost causes until the very end.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.