Jesse Jackson—slandered, libeled, redeemed
The white South made a villain of a native son, but the region never had a better champion for it on the big stage than Jesse Jackson.
In 1984, Jesse Jackson lost his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, just as he did in 1988.
Big party politics has an inertia to it, and it favors the surer bet. Jackson—who died Tuesday at the age of 84—was never that, even if his 1984 speech at the Democratic National Convention is the purest distillation of modern liberalism you will ever see.
He was a preacher born in the "slums" of Greenville, SC. He was educated at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, NC, the same place that birthed the South's sit-ins. He was a myth builder who never feared piercing the myths—the big one being that Martin Luther King Jr's dream has already come true. And, even at the end of his own life, he was a traumatized man who stood on that balcony in Memphis and joked with King moments before a bullet took him.
King was teasing Jackson about his casual dinner wardrobe before the shots. "I said, 'Doc, the prerequisite for eating is an appetite, not a tie,'" Jackson remembered with a laugh. "He said, 'You're crazy.""
Jackson, unlike King, went on to delve directly in party politics. In his 1984 address at the DNC, Jackson promised that "the linchpin of progressive politics in our nation will not come from the North." It would come from the South.
