As I was growing up in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s, my parents were on the frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement.

They took me to protest marches and Civil Rights meetings and instilled in me the need to stand up to racism in all forms. They also installed in me that as a Black person I had just as much right to the American dream and equal justice as any American. But as I grew up there were a handful of pivotal points that help to re-enforce my self worth and my individual value as person.

Having two parents who were educators, I always had a strong sense of my value despite society constantly signaling otherwise. I remember well when Black Power became a symbol and Black pride a requirement. So, too, I remember a rallying cry after Martin Luther King’s assassination. That was Jesse Jackson’s iconic call and response speech

“I am somebody. I am somebody. I may be poor, but I am somebody. I may be young, but I am somebody. I may be on welfare, but I am somebody,” Jackson, who died Feb. 17, would preach over and over. “My face is different, my hair is different, but I am somebody. I am Black, brown or white. I speak a different language, but I must be respected, protected, never rejected. I am God’s child.”

Jackson’s insistence that Black people had value was a message that resonated with me and the broader Black community. Black people had endured negative images and negative values imposed on them for so long that many of us had absorbed internal doubt about our own worth. Back then, sometimes I even needed to be reminded that what we were going through was not justified, not of our own making.

We were not lazy. We needed fair consideration when we applied for a job. We weren’t destined to be poor. Redlining has stripped away generational wealth.

But before those concepts could be accepted, we had to be reminded of our value, which cannot be determined by anybody but ourselves. Jackson also reminded us that where we started does not determine where we end up.

The Civil Rights Movement went some distance in getting more white Americans to accept their fellow Black citizens as equals. But even more importantly, it got Black Americans to believe in ourselves as a people, to believe we deserve justice and deserve to be treated as individual human beings. Before he ever ran for president, Jesse Jackson used his platform — with his preacher’s cadence, sing-songy repetition and invocation of the African tradition of call and response — he helped to show all people the dignity and value of Black Americans.

Jackson boldly ran for president twice in the 1980s, laying the psychological and political groundwork for a more conventional Black Chicagoan, Barack Obama, to seize the office two decades later. Jackson campaigned as an anti-establishment outsider in 1984 and 1988, freewheeling efforts that pundits dismissed as having no chance.

His second run, however, defied gravity, winning about a dozen Democratic primaries and caucuses and finishing second to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. He was the first Black candidate to run a competitive campaign for president. In the 1988 race, he bested Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, who went on to become vice president; Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt, later House majority leader; and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, who withdrew early but eventually served as vice president and then president.

Jackson’s campaigns animated Black voters and seeded a sense of possibility that only existed in fiction before then — a Black American could indeed become president. He assembled a coalition of the young, people of color and white progressives—a Rainbow Coalition he called it, a name borrowed from Mel King’s campaign for Boston mayor in 1983. Jackson’s campaign slogan was “Keep Hope Alive.”

The political coalition that Barrack Obama assembled for his winning campaigns in 2008 and 2012 resembled Jackson’s. Obama invoked a similar hopefulness with his slogan, “Yes, we can.” He titled his pre-campaign biography, “The Audacity of Hope.” But Obama presented voters with a more conventional profile: a U.S. senator, former state senator, lawyer and Ivy League graduate.

Barack Obama has acknowledged that Jackson “set a precedent for African Americans running for the highest office in the land.”

Unlike all previous presidents to that point, Jackson had not held elected office or served in the military. Those gaps in his experience shaped a media narrative that he was not qualified to be president.

Some Black observers pinpointed another pattern behind his campaigns ultimately failing — racially polarized voting, that is, whites who would not cast their ballot for a Black candidate. A year after the 1988 campaign, New York artist David Hammons produced a mixed-media portrait of Jackson that was displayed in downtown Washington, D.C. He was depicted as blond-haired, blue-eyed white man, with these words scrawled across his jacket and tie: “How ya like me now?”

Donald Trump had never won elected office or served in the military before launching his campaign for the Republican nomination in 2016. But news media, showing evident bias, never presented a narrative that he was unqualified for the office. Jackson had to be smarting over the difference in how his campaigns were regarded at the time they occurred.

There was much more to Jackson’s life than his political campaigns: his rise from birth to an unwed mother, his college education, his public ministry, his association with King, his PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) organization, his advocacy and his role as a husband and father.

But with his affirmation of the worth of Black people and his brazen bids for the presidency, he left his mark on his people and the nation. Well done, Jesse. Godspeed.

Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner