The Jesse Jackson I knew

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Today, remembering Jesse Jackson

0:14We come before thee just now with heaviness of heart, broken spirit, wounded by the passing of our beloved brother, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. All this week, the life of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has died at the age of 84, has been celebrated and commemorated. He was many different things. Civil rights leader. And put a voter registration card in that other hand symbolising power and responsibility. Hostage negotiator. Whenever hostages are released, it's always an expression of some hope. Presidential candidate. My decision to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States of America.

1:04But there are things that everyone who met him remembers. He was this 6 '3", 225 pound guy who basically commanded an audience. I just remember him appearing larger than life in terms of presence. Big in frame and he was big in stature. He was tireless. We put him to bed at 1.30 in the morning and he got up at 6.30. If you happen to be on the other side of the room, he was going to make his way to the other side of the room, shake your hand and introduce himself. He kind of had this laser focus on whoever it was that he was talking to. And he always made you feel as if what you were saying was really important.

1:43His charisma, drive and vision saw him become the first black candidate who was a serious contender for the American presidency, paving the way for Barack Obama years later. helped in no small part by his talent of connecting with people wherever he went. Brothers and sisters, what time is it? He would say something and just to make sure that the audience were completely connected to him he would make them say it back to him. It was almost a complete mastery of his situation and of course the audience loved that. 2 ,000 black elected and appointed officials and legislatures and government. What time is it?

2:258 ,000! And I think that's one of the gifts that he had and everyone of that generation, that there was a really important message that they were trying to impart, but also it was just fantastic theatre. Unregistered black voters, what time is it? 8 ,000! For black Democrats, black Republicans, black Panthers, black Muslims, black independents. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, Jesse Jackson, the civil rights trailblazer who changed politics forever.

3:10Hugh Muir, you're the executive editor for Opinion here at The Guardian. Welcome to Stay In Focus. You met Jesse Jackson on a number of occasions when he came to the UK. But first, take us back to the beginning of his life. What was his early childhood like? Jesse Jackson had in some ways a kind of typical early childhood of people who've become prominent because it was, you know, it was far from affluent. He grew up in Greenville in South Carolina and that was a fairly poor era, but he was in the poor bit of it. I too know suffering. my great-grandfather was the sheriff of Greenville County who raped my great-grandmother and of that relationship my grandmother who was stolen from the plantation by my grandfather and then my father came out of that relationship I know suffering I was born to a teenage mother was born to a teenage mother and he took the name Jackson from someone that his mother later had a relationship with because Jackson was not his natural father.

4:10And he was often taunted, one, for being black, but also for his own family situation. And I think that he obviously would have had to stand up for himself and in some ways that sort of made him a stronger person, having to deal with that. he was always very bright and it was his education and his love of education that actually drew him into the civil rights movement in quite a small way, quite early because he went to his local library to get a particular book the libraries at that point were segregated and they didn't have that book but the white part of the library did have that book and so he was denied entry to the white bit of the library And so, I suppose echoing the Jesse we would know later on in life, he organized a sit-in.

5:01July 17, 1960, I went to jail in Greenville, South Carolina, trying to use a library. We marched to the library. And, of course, they had a knack for shutting the lights off that meant the library was closed. She says the protest wasn't planned, but developed naturally when a young Jesse Jackson needed to do some research for a homework assignment. How old would he have been then, kind of in his early 20s or late teens at that point? I think he would have been in his late teens, but even then, the organiser. I think he took seven people into the library. So we went back, and when we went back, they arrested us.

5:39This picture shows the young people, now called the Greenville Eight. He was arrested, but he clearly learnt some things about how you organise things and how you raise a voice.

5:58Five years later, in 1965, Martin Luther King organised a march from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama. Around 600 people took part, and the young Jesse Jackson was there. And so the march from Selma to Montgomery has begun. Dr Martin Luther King here, heading a procession of between 7 ,000 and 10 ,000 people on the first stage of their march towards Montgomery and the state capital. We hope that this will be a peaceful, non-violent demonstration of our determination to register and vote and to end police brutality and all of the other things that we've suffered here. Martin Luther King had organised a march in protest at denial of voting rights and so Jesse Jackson took the people down to that, caught King's eye and quickly was taken under King's wing and became a protege in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was King's main vehicle for activism.

6:55And of course, what Jackson learnt from that was that fusion of religion and political activism that would later become a real hallmark of what he did. And that, as you said, kind of fusion of religion, oratory, politics, civil rights, that came to kind of define his work. Was he always considered to be a great speaker? I think, yes, he did show that he'd learnt at the master's knee, if you like, from Martin Luther King very early on and very quickly established himself as one of the main leaders. He was first given a local role in a thing called Operation Breadbasket. White supermarkets like this are boycotted by Operation Breadbasket if they don't stock enough black goods and hire enough black employees.

7:45He became the head of the Chicago branch of that. So that started giving him a profile, and of course it would have meant that he had to make a lot of speeches. The economic power is not the only leverage, and I think that the black community is driving for economic independence, for political independence, for military independence, for social, for religious and psychological independence, which means that we will control our community as do other ethnic groups. You have to understand that, in a way, the genius of Martin Luther King, later taken on by Jesse Jackson, was taking the religion out of the purely theological and fusing that with politics as we know it on planet Earth, if you like.

8:27So he was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. And that's really key. When you look at his approach to his activism, certainly when you listen to his speeches, that's absolutely a Pentecostal Baptist preaching fused with politics, with the politics of anti-racism, of anti-sexism. I believe that we will go from guttermost to uttermost. I believe that we will go from slaveship to championship. I believe that we will go from outhouse to statehouse to courthouse of White House, I believe we will rise all the way to the top. I believe that.

9:27Martin Luther King Jr. was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Shot in the face as he stood alone on the balcony of his hotel room. He died in a hospital an hour later. In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. It was a defining moment for Jesse Jackson. When you saw your friend and mentor in that condition, what was going through your head? I was traumatised. It was full of pain and anger and sorrow and desperation and many emotions at the same time. But it also brought to the surface underlying tensions around his relationship to King. Jesse Jackson was never everyone's favourite person, not least because there were people there who thought that he was probably too close to Martin Luther King and that maybe he had a patronage that they would have liked to have.

10:19And so he always faced criticism and questioning of things that he had said, even about what he did and where he was on the night that Martin Luther King was shot. Well, he was there. He was at the Lorraine Motel. But there were always arguments and debates about his actual proximity to it. He also said that immediately after King had been shot that he cradled him in his arms. And there were others who dispute that and basically accused him of trying to aggrandize himself while making himself seem much closer to those events than he actually was. And then I heard Jesse Jackson say, he told me, Jesse, take our people onto the mountaintop.

11:05And that didn't bother me, even though I know Jesse got nowhere near him. And then Jesse said, I held his head in my hand while he died. And that didn't get to me. And then Jesse said, look at my shirt. And I looked around and showed up, and Jesse Jackson's shirt was drenched in blood. And I realised the only way Jesse could have gotten that blood was stoop down on that floor within a raven motel and rake that blood off that floor and put that blood on him. And I went crazy. I really tried to kill Jesse. The other thing that became controversial was that And whilst many of the lieutenants of Martin Luther King stayed around Memphis, almost in a kind of period of mourning, Jackson didn't.

11:56He went back to Chicago, I think it was. He began doing a series of national interviews. And I think he almost saw it as, you know, we have to seize the narrative and we have to get on the front foot about what we do next. Others just saw it as, well, basically, you think there's a vacancy and you're trying to fill it. But of course that didn't make him very popular with a lot of people outside the movement, because as I say some people saw him as being almost too effective and quite dangerous, but also inside the movement as well because there would be some level of competitive rivalry. After Martin Luther King's death, in 1971 Jesse Jackson founded PUSH, a campaign group that would allow him to grow his reputation as a civil rights leader.

12:40And he continued to be an unstoppable force. inspirational to some, but considered dangerous by others. I think at the time, it's quite easy if you're a formidable, very high-profile public figure to be put in a particular box. And so when you're a religious leader, OK, that's fine. And when you're a religious leader who gets involved in activism, well, OK, that's fine as well. But if you're a religious leader who then goes beyond that and you're appealing not just to church people, not just to black people, but to people of a certain class, if you're able to emphasise the intersectionality in what you're doing, which is what he did, he basically said, you know, I think that you matter too.

13:23He had his great catchphrase, I am somebody, and he tried to relate it to everyone. He said that, you know, if you're a woman, you're somebody. If you're gay, you're somebody. And that sounds kind of routine now, but at the time it wasn't, And it particularly wasn't for a black church leader to say that. There's that really famous clip of him on Sesame Street, isn't there? Yeah, he did two things. He did, in the same year, I think it was 1972, he did Wattstacks, the music festival. To celebrate our homecoming and our own sense of somebodiness. Where there was a huge rendition of the I am somebody poem and the call and response.

14:05I am somebody. I may be poor, but I am somebody. I may be a welfare. And he also then did a poignant version of it on Sesame Street where he sat there with his big afro. It's very moving. The camera panned across and you saw a group of children who were of different ages and races. And he got them all saying, I am somebody as well. Ready on the stop? Yeah. OK. Here we go. I am. I am. Somebody. Somebody. I am. I am. Somebody. Somebody. I may be poor. I may be poor. But I am. I am. Somebody. Somebody. I may be young.

15:03But his work wasn't limited to politics and preaching. In the 80s and 90s, he helped release dozens of American hostages and prisoners abroad through his own brand of unofficial diplomacy. Lieutenant Robert Goodman, freed only yesterday after one month in Syrian captivity, looked healthy and happy. As his entire family looked on, Goodman expressed thanks to both Jackson and the administration. He negotiated with Syria in 1983, Cuba in 1984, Iraq in 1990 and Yugoslavia in 1999. He often operated without US government approval and used personal and direct dialogue with world leaders such as Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein.

15:49But he was also criticised for it. Well, he could do that and it was win-win because he got a huge profile when he went on those rescue missions. He was all over the news as almost being the only person who could do this. And so it was women for him and sometimes it was successful as well. But he couldn't have done that had he sat inside the establishment. It was just the fact that he was knowledgeable of it but not part of it that allowed him to be able to do that. It was especially meaningful to us that once we got our telegram back from President Assad, We then called Senator Charles Percy, chairman of our foreign relations committee, which we thought was the appropriate thing to do.

16:31He then got us in contact with the State Department. And then, of course, he had his two presidential runs, 1984 and then 88. How significant a moment was it when he announced that he was going to run for president in 1984? Well, I think it was almost the culmination of the profile that he built. And I think people were pleased, but a bit incredulous. No black American had sought the presidency for a very long time. I think he had a passion, very formidable organizational skills, which he will have learned from his earlier life back in Chicago. And so that run actually was going quite well. It didn't succeed.

17:10Ultimately, he said some things, and particularly his advocacy of a Palestinian state that cost him quite a lot of votes, particularly in New York. But it was not seen as a failure. And I think it was seen as a marker, maybe for him, maybe for someone else. But I think the feeling was that a taboo had been broken. America is not like a blanket, one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt, many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. the white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the business person, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.

18:06In 1988, Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination once more. The president should be a leader.

18:20Jesse Jackson is a leader. He provided leadership to end the Chicago fireman's strike, leadership to negotiate a settlement to the nurses' strike in Buffalo and the teachers' strike in St. Louis. Jesse Jackson also successfully negotiated the return of Lieutenant Goodman from Syria. Leadership. For President Jesse Jackson.

18:46He took everything he'd learned from 1984 and found a team that would help him run a more organized and focused campaign. My name is Delmarie Cobb and I'm a political consultant here in Chicago and I was Jesse Jackson's National Travelling Press Secretary in 1988 when he ran for president. Jerry Austin. I'm a long-time, now retired political consultant in the United States, and I was Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign manager.

19:21Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984, and it wasn't really a run. It was really more of a protest candidacy. So in 1988, we went to Willie Brown, who was the Speaker of the House, and asked him to chair his campaign. And Willie Brown responded that he would only do that if Jesse Jackson found a real campaign manager and ran a real campaign. So Jackson said to Brown, find somebody. And one thing led to another. And I got a phone call from somebody who knew Willie Brown and knew me and asked me if I would like to be Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign manager. So I signed on. And he said, you got a plan for this campaign?

20:02I said, actually, I do. And he said, well, what is it? I said, well, the first endorsement we need is from the press corps. The press corps has to look at you as a viable candidate, which they never did in 1984. How do we do that? Number one, we need to get a plan. The challenge for Jackson was to find a way to compete in 20 states at once, with no money. By March, the campaign was already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. For a strategy, Jackson turned to his campaign manager, Gerald Austin. We decided that the best way to deal with Super Tuesday is we never would have a million dollars for media.

20:46But if we were able to get a large enough plane to take the media with us and go to four or five or sometimes even six different media markets in a day... The first time I actually went with him to an event, And it was what they call a Jefferson Humphrey dinner. And when Jesse got to speak, all of a sudden, from out of the kitchen came the cooks, came the waiters and waitresses, all the people working to hear him speak. And I thought to myself, I've never seen this before. No other candidates went to an Indian reservation or went to a poor church in Mississippi or went to a coal mining area or went to a rural area in Appalachia.

21:28And what he brought to those people was recognition they existed, which is important to begin with, and to get them involved in that voting, you know, was something that they should do and they could benefit from it by electing people that they liked. I was facing foreclosure, had gotten the foreclosure notice in the spring of 85 and got a hold of Jesse and we got a telegram to our local banker. He offered to come sit down at a mediation table and try to work this thing out between myself and my bankers. And we wound up going through some reorganization, giving some things back, but we still got every acre and we're going to farm.

22:10And we're going to continue to come. We targeted congressional districts that had a large black population. And at that time, the rules were, if you won that district, you got all of the delegates. So that was the initial goal. And we showed that we were winning. And that's how the press corps came to start to cover us. And from there, we were considered a viable candidate. In the South, almost 20 % of eligible voters are black. Jackson's strategy depended on a large black voter turnout. In March of 1988, at the United House of Prayer in Charlotte, North Carolina, we saw something we had not seen a month before in the chilly towns of Iowa.

22:57Instead of polite interest in the Jackson campaign, we saw enthusiasm. Unlike the other high-profile Democratic candidates, The Reverend Jesse Jackson had to find alternative ways to fund his campaign. Whenever he spoke, whether it was to 2 ,000 people in an upscale church in New York, or whether it was to 200 poor people in Meridian, Mississippi, we passed the hat. And so in New York, he'd ask, who'll give me$1 ,000? Five people raised their hand. And then he'd say, 500, 100. Well, we could raise for 2 ,000 people, we could raise$20 ,000 or$30 ,000 at that event in New York. Now you go to Meridian, Mississippi, with 200 very, very poor people, and he would ask for who would give me$1 ,000.

23:48And nobody raised their hand. Who would give me$500,$100,$50? No one raised their hand. Lastly, he said, who would give me something? Everybody raised their hand. And we passed the hat, mostly dollar bills, sometimes a$5 bill. And I asked him, why do you do that? And he said, because the people in this church in Mississippi, by giving me a dollar, have basically bought into my campaign. And they will gladly, proudly tell their neighbors and friends that they're part of the campaign. We were joking all the time about the fact that he would pass out the Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets to raise money.

24:28And, you know, by him being the black candidate, he had to do other ways of raising money. I mean, he wasn't able to raise money like Dukakis and George Bush. What's even more interesting, if you think about who was in the race, you had Joe Biden, you had Al Gore. All of them dropped out of the race and he was still standing. They were establishment. They had establishment ways of raising money and getting to people. He had anti-establishment ways of getting money and getting to people and getting his word out. And so the church was one of his ways of getting money. So on Sundays and other days on our schedule, we had churches.

25:11And we went to churches, and the churches were packed. And he made his speeches, and then he made his ask. And then they passed the Kentucky Fried Chicken Buckets. And then we collected them at the end. And that's what kept the campaign going. Brother Jesse, now he's running for the presidency, but don't come here trying to take this away from me because I am the president here.

25:44You must have seen a lot of iconic speeches on the campaign trail. Did you help him write any of them? No, they were all his, but after a while, you know the speeches, and I pretty much knew them by heart after hearing them. And I knew that there were times, based on what the calendar or based on where we were, that there might be things he wanted to say that he didn't say. and this was the other thing I found absolutely amazing is that I could sneak a note to him and he would look at the note and incorporate what it was I was telling him and never miss a beat. In the end, Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign finished when he lost out on the Democratic nomination to Michael Dukakis.

26:34But he still managed to make one of his most iconic speeches at the Democratic National Convention that July. We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. On tomorrow night and beyond. Keep hope alive. I love you very much. Coming up, how Jesse Jackson opened the door to the Obama presidency.

27:20Do you think that he ever believed that he could become president? Or do you think that that campaign that you worked on with him, that wasn't really the point? It was about something else. I believe he believed he could become president. Maybe in 1984, he didn't believe it. But in 1988, I think he did believe it. And coming in second was significant. And so what he did was, even if he couldn't become president, he understood what power that gave him. And so that's what I talk about is being in the room with his delegates in Atlanta because they wanted him to take the fight to the floor to become vice president.