Jesse Jackson - Sadness and Appreciation
The passing of Jesse Jackson brings sadness to me this morning!
Until a few weeks ago, I knew virtually nothing about Bad Bunny. I can only imagine how so many people who are under 50 or 60 must think related to Jackson. Do many of them even know who he was? He was not in the news in recent years, and seemingly irrelevant for so many. I'm sad thinking of this.
Jesse Jackson made mistakes that tarnished his image (at least among white people) at times, was brash, and really spoke his mind. When one focuses on his mistakes, rather than the great things he accomplished in life, we continue to hold Black Men such as Jesse Jackson to a higher standard because of our racism (or internalized issues related to racism).
Those interested can read of Jesse Jackson's accomplishments at sites such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Jackson .
It is important for me to acknowledge a man like Jesse Jackson and appreciate him for what he really was, a trailblazer and one who accomplished a lot in his life.
In reading the details of life this morning I note that he was born in the city where a father and son related to my life partner live. Both father and son have accomplished noted things in their lives. They two have had setbacks.
The father's path includes also having been a quarterback at North Carolina A&T on his way to becoming a judge and lawyer. The son has been victimized particularly due to racism, which has greatly complicated his life.
Being a Black Man in this country has always been a challenge! Today as I remember Jesse Jackson, I reflect both on his greatness and the horrific present realities of "being Black" in a country where our former Black President has just been essentially verbally "erased" by our current president. He, similar to Jackson, didn't take it silently!
We have a long way to go! Thanks Jesse Jackson for doing your part!
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In 1972, a 30-year-old Jesse Jackson sat on the Sesame Street steps with a group of children and taught them something that American society was still refusing to fully believe about Black people.
When Jesse Jackson died on a Tuesday at the age of 84, the internet did not reach first for his presidential campaigns.
It did not reach for his diplomatic missions, his decades of civil rights organizing, or his years standing at the side of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It reached for a two-minute clip filmed in 1972, on the steps of a fictional New York street, surrounded by children who had no idea they were participating in something that would still be moving people half a century later. That instinct, that collective reach toward that particular moment, tells you something important about what Jesse Jackson meant and what that Sesame Street segment actually was.
It was not a television appearance. It was a transmission.
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, into the layered reality of the Jim Crow South. He came into a world that had already decided, through law and custom and violence, that Black lives occupied a diminished tier of American humanity. The architecture of segregation communicated a single message to Black children from the moment they were old enough to read a sign on a water fountain or a waiting room door.
That message was: you are not somebody.
Jackson grew up absorbing that message from the outside and resisting it from within. He was a gifted student and athlete who earned a football scholarship to the University of Illinois before transferring to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a historically Black institution in Greensboro where he became student body president and deepened his engagement with the civil rights movement that was reshaping the South around him.
He was drawn into the orbit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and eventually into the direct presence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose movement was using nonviolent direct action to dismantle the legal infrastructure of American apartheid. Jackson became one of King's most prominent young lieutenants, a preacher's son with an orator's gift and an organizer's instinct who understood that the movement needed both the fire of the pulpit and the strategy of the street.
He was present at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated. That moment marked Jackson permanently, as it marked everyone who survived it, and it intensified his commitment to carrying forward a movement that had just lost its most visible leader.
By 1971, Jackson had founded Operation PUSH, People United to Save Humanity, in Chicago, an organization dedicated to economic empowerment and civil rights advocacy for Black Americans. He was 30 years old, already nationally known, already recognizable as one of the most powerful voices in Black America, and already using the poem "I Am Somebody" as a rallying cry in his speeches and public appearances.
The poem had been written by the Reverend William Holmes Borders Sr., the pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, whose ministry had made him one of the most significant figures in Atlanta's Black community for decades. Borders wrote with the theological conviction that human dignity was not granted by governments or social systems but by God, and that no law, no custom, and no act of oppression could revoke what the Creator had established.
The poem carried that conviction in every line. It was written to be spoken aloud, to be felt in the body, to move through a room like a current. Jackson recognized its power immediately and made it a central instrument of his public ministry, using the call-and-response structure that is deeply rooted in the African American church tradition to turn audiences from passive listeners into active participants in their own affirmation.
When Jackson brought that poem to Sesame Street in 1972, he was bringing something that had been forged in the crucible of the civil rights movement into the living rooms of American children at a moment when the country was still raw from the battles of the previous decade.
Sesame Street itself was a radical act dressed in the clothing of a children's program. It had launched in 1969 with a deliberate and documented mission to serve children who were being underserved by American educational television, specifically low-income children and children of color who were entering school significantly behind their more affluent peers in basic literacy and numeracy. The show's creators understood that television was already in those homes, that it was already shaping young minds, and that the question was not whether children would learn from it but what they would learn.
The show's casting was intentional and groundbreaking. Its regular cast included Black, Latino, and white characters living and working together on the same street, treating each other with dignity and warmth, in a representation of integrated community life that did not yet exist in most of American television and did not yet fully exist in most of American cities.
For Black children watching in 1969, 1970, 1971, seeing Gordon and Susan and later other Black characters as central, respected, intelligent members of a beloved community was not a small thing. It was a counter-narrative delivered directly into the imagination at the age when imagination is most plastic and most permanent.
Jesse Jackson sitting on those steps in 1972 extended that counter-narrative into territory that even Sesame Street had not yet fully occupied. He was not playing a character. He was himself, a real Black man of national prominence and moral authority, sitting down with children and looking them in the eye and telling them something that American society was still, in practice, denying.
The segment is simple in its structure and devastating in its impact. Jackson begins the poem, delivering each line with the cadence of a preacher who knows exactly how much weight each word carries. The children respond, and as the segment progresses their voices grow louder and more certain, the way voices do when they begin to feel the truth of what they are saying rather than just the sound of it.
I am somebody.
Those three words contained an entire argument in 1972. They contained it in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was signed. They contained it in 1955 when Emmett Till was murdered. They contained it in 1619 when the first enslaved Africans arrived on American shores. They contained it in every courtroom, every school board meeting, every legislative chamber where the question of Black humanity had been debated by people who had already decided the answer.
Jesse Jackson brought those three words to children who were four and five and six years old, children who were just beginning to form the understanding of themselves that would shape everything that followed in their lives, and he said them with the full force of everything he knew and everything he had seen and everything he believed.
The children said them back. And something happened in that exchange that television rarely achieves and almost never achieves for children.
By the end of the segment, Jackson expanded the affirmation outward, encompassing the full diversity of the children around him. Black, brown, white, speaking different languages, but deserving of respect, protection, and belonging. The camera moved across their faces, a visual that was genuinely unprecedented in American children's television, a multicultural group of young children unified not by a song about sharing or a lesson about the alphabet but by a declaration of mutual dignity rooted in the most serious moral and political struggle of the American 20th century.
That image in 1972 was not just heartwarming. It was a political statement made in the language of childhood, delivered through a medium that reached millions of homes, translated into terms that a five-year-old could feel in their chest and carry into the schoolyard.
Jackson went on from that Sesame Street appearance to build one of the most consequential careers in American public life. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, winning primaries and caucuses in states across the country and demonstrating that a Black candidate could compete seriously on the national stage in a way that directly anticipated and helped make possible what happened in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president.
He ran again in 1988, performing even more strongly, winning more than seven million votes in the primary and finishing second in the delegate count. His Rainbow Coalition brought together Black voters, Latino voters, working-class white voters, and progressive activists in a coalition that challenged the Democratic Party establishment and permanently expanded the imagination of what American presidential politics could look like.
He conducted diplomatic missions that freed American hostages and prisoners held abroad, negotiating in Syria, Cuba, and Iraq in situations where official government channels had failed or been closed. He remained a visible and active voice on issues of racial justice, economic equity, and international human rights across five decades of public life.
And yet the clip that the world reached for when he died was two minutes long and filmed in 1972.
That says something true about what endures. The speeches, the campaigns, the negotiations, the decades of organizing, all of it mattered and all of it shaped the world. But the two minutes on those steps with those children captured something that the rest of his career built upon but could never quite replicate.
It captured Jesse Jackson in direct and unmediated contact with the next generation, pouring into children the exact thing that the world around them was designed to take away. It captured the call-and-response tradition of the Black church translated into the language of children's television, the ancient rhythm of affirmation that had sustained Black communities through slavery and segregation and terror now being transmitted to five-year-olds in living rooms across America.
It captured the radical act of telling a child that they are somebody, knowing that the world will spend the rest of that child's life trying to convince them otherwise.
Jesse Jackson knew what that effort cost. He had lived it. He had stood in Memphis in 1968 and watched the movement lose its prophet. He had organized and marched and spoken and run and fought for decades against a society that remained stubbornly committed to the proposition that Black lives were worth less.
And in 1972, he sat down on some steps in New York and looked at a group of children and said: I am somebody.
He said it because they needed to hear it. He said it because he needed to say it. He said it because Reverend Borders had written it and because the church tradition had sanctified it and because the civil rights movement had made it a declaration of war against every system that denied it.
He said it and the children said it back and the camera captured it and 50 years later the world is still watching.
That is what legacy looks like when it is built not just for the present but for every future that comes after. Jesse Jackson gave many things to Black America and to the country he spent his life trying to make live up to its own promises.
But those two minutes on Sesame Street may have reached the furthest. Because they went directly into the hearts of children before the world had finished teaching them to doubt themselves.
Black history does not only live in the marches and the legislation and the courtroom victories. It lives in the moments when someone looked at a Black child and told them the truth about who they are before the lies had time to settle in.
Jesse Jackson told that truth on a Tuesday in 1972 to a group of children who shouted it back at him like they had always known it.
We must keep telling it. To every child who needs to hear it. In every language. On every step we can find.
Because it is still true. It was always true.
I am somebody.
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