Reverend: He Went Where God Sent Him

The Life, the Movement, and the Moral Fire of the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.

October 8, 1941. A boy arrives into a Greenville, South Carolina, morning already heavy with Jim Crow heat and the smell of red Carolina clay. His mother, 17-year-old Helen Burns, endures the whispers of a small town and holds her son close anyway. She does not flinch. Neither does he. Not once in the more than eight decades that follow.

He went where God sent him.

That boy — born Jesse Louis Burns, who would become the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. — grew up on Ridge Street, a Black neighborhood carved away from the rest of Greenville like a piece of bread nobody wanted. He walked five miles to school while a schoolhouse sat two blocks from his door, reserved for white children. He learned early what the world thought of him. And he decided, early, that the world was wrong.

He got to know his biological father, Noah Robinson, Sr., a strapping man with broad shoulders who was a professional boxer and “big man in town” who was both feared and respected by white men. Jackson once peered over a fence and thought he had looked in a mirror when he saw the face of his brother Noah, Jr., who played with his own stepsiblings, and later another set of Robinson brothers. For many years, they were forbidden from playing together. 

Though Jackson was the oldest, he spent his early years as an only child, feeling the outside sting of being born out of wedlock, to a mother who had to abandon her education and opera dreams to raise a little boy.

After Helen, now a beautician, married a war veteran named Charles Jackson, the future leader, who had been teased and taunted, took the name Jackson just before he enrolled in elementary school. A sister came with his stepfather and later a baby brother named after his father.

His grandmother, Matilda Burns, called Grandmother Tibby, was the first theologian in his life, though she never held a degree. She could not read or write, but she carried home discarded books and magazines from the white families whose houses she cleaned so the boy could read. And she pressed her hands on his shoulders and gave him the covenant that became the spine of his entire existence: “Promise me you’ll be somebody. Ain’t no such word as ‘can’t.’ Nothing is impossible for those who have the Lord.” That was not porch talk. That was a charge from God, an understanding that every human life carries a divine worth no poverty or cruelty can touch, that the sacred spark inside a person does not require anyone’s permission to burn.

Jesse Jackson entered Sterling High School in 1955 and became, by every measure, one of the most remarkable young men that building had ever produced. His classmates called him The Filibusterer, because when students needed a teacher distracted from an assignment they had not finished, they sent Jesse to talk and he delivered. He earned As and Bs across the board, not through natural ease but through relentless discipline. His French teacher, Mrs. Xanthene Norris, recalled that he was the only football player she ever had who asked for his assignment when he would miss class for practice. 

His classmates elected him president of his class and president of the honor society in the ninth grade, and he held both positions through graduation. He earned varsity letters in football, basketball and baseball. His coach, the Rev. J.D. Mathis, rated him one of the finest high school quarterbacks he had ever coached, calling him fierce and unbreakable under pressure. On the baseball mound, his arm was a rifle. In his senior year, he was named co-best athlete at Sterling High. At the height of Jim Crow’s power, Jackson graduated in 1959 as a scholar-athlete who had earned the right to choose his own future.

The New York Giants offered him a $6,000 contract. The Chicago White Sox expressed interest as well. He was 18 years old with a blazing fastball and every reason to be excited. But when he discovered that the Giants had simultaneously offered a white hometown player named Dickie Dietz a contract worth $95,000 — same sport, same town, same season — the excitement curdled into something harder and more clarifying. The difference was $89,000 drawn along the color line. He turned the contract down. That quiet refusal was the first negotiation of his life.

A football scholarship took him north to the University of Illinois in 1959, where he found the same wall wearing a different uniform. The coaches told him there were no Black quarterbacks at Illinois and there would be none. He could stay, but only at halfback or end, so he poured himself into his studies, became a member of Omega Psi Phi in his freshman year, and thought hard about his future. He refused the coach’s offer and while on holiday break, decided to work on an assignment. The books and reference materials he needed were in the whites-only library in Greenville.

In 1960, he said he was arrested for trying to enter, and his parents were both angry and encouraged that they had raised a young man with a sense of dignity and self-worth. Charles, Sr., warned him about what might happen if he were imprisoned in a Carolina jail or worse, a prison. Black men who stood up to white folks didn’t last too long. Undeterred, 20-year-old Jackson understood, as a young Black male, what role awaited him. He would not allow society to look down upon him or to underestimate him as others had done for most of his childhood.

Months later, in February 1961, four students at North Carolina A&T had walked into a Greensboro Woolworth’s, sat at a whites-only lunch counter, and refused to leave.  Jackson read about it while contemplating his future and was electrified. He transferred to A&T, eventually joining the campus when the “Movement” was already underway, and felt, for the first time, that his real education had begun.

At A&T, Jesse Jackson became everything at once. The university’s president, Dr. Samuel Proctor, took special interest in him.  He was the starting quarterback and became team captain, commanding the field with the same force he brought to every room. The sociology major was elected head of Omega Psi Phi fraternity and became a dominant campus leader. He was an honor student and thought he would become an attorney. And in the middle of all of it, he met a freshman from Virginia named Jacqueline Lavinia Brown. She was quiet and precise and did not suffer fools.

The first time he ever spoke to her, he was clowning with a group of football players and shouted across the yard, “Hey baby, I’m going to marry you!” She stepped into a mud puddle, ruined a pair of shoes, and wanted nothing to do with him. But they later shared a class, and Jacqueline, petite and beautiful with deep dimples and full of unbridled fire in spirit, found, as she would recall, that he was “very bright and sensitive.” He was as serious about her as he was about everything else that mattered to him. They were married Dec. 31, 1962, in the home of his parents’ in Greenville. Jacqueline’s family drove up from Virginia. Her brothers and sisters listened to the ceremony over the telephone.

In 1964, the newly weds and their newborn daughter, Santita packed up and moved to Chicago so Jackson could begin his studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. The budding minister also met lifelong friends and confidants Gary Massoni, Dave Wallace and, later, Frank Watkins, white seminarians committed to racial justice and perhaps awestruck by Jackson’s energy, focus and ability to move people into action. Jackson connected with C.T. Vivian and Rev. James Bevel, a Chicago-based SCLC organizer and started networking within the movement to bring his talents to bear.

Jacqueline worked in the seminary library to help keep the family going. Jackson played on the seminary’s basketball, baseball and football teams, helping turn those squads from perpetual underdogs into intramural champions against the University of Chicago. He absorbed theology, law and the geography of injustice. He was learning the inside of Black Chicago the hard way, too.

When Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political machine offered him a position as a transit toll collector, the young seminary student refused. He considered it an insult to his education and his purpose. He went instead to work as a salesman for John H. Johnson, the Black publishing titan who owned both Jet and Ebony magazines. His job was to walk the Black wards of the South and West sides, knocking on doors, selling those publications to newsstands one by one. He was learning the heartbeat of the city, block by block, before anyone gave him a platform to address it. The activist took on other odd jobs to make ends meet as his family began to expand.

The Chicago Freedom Movement was already in full effect when Jackson arrived from the South. He joined the fight for desegregation and funding in public schools, where predominantly Black schools placed children in Willis Wagons, in parking lots. Jackson conceived and co-founded the Kenwood Oakwood Community Organization (KOCO) in 1965 as an organizing base.

In March 1965, watching a televised news report about state troopers beating peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the budding Baptist preacher got on a plane and flew south to find Dr. King. He asked for a job. King eventually said yes. And on Feb. 11, 1966, in the fellowship hall of Jubilee CME Church on Chicago’s South Side, America’s Drum Major, 12 years his senior, stood before 300 Black pastors and named 24-year-old Jesse Jackson to lead Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. It was not a gesture. It was a commission.

What followed was a revolution waged with ledger books and milk crates. When Country Delight Dairy told a room full of Black ministers that their people were lazy and preferred welfare, Breadbasket launched a selective-buying campaign on Good Friday 1966, and the dairy crumbled within days. A&P, Jewel Tea, Seven-Up, Continental Baking, Walgreens — each one was confronted, each one came to the table. Jackson was aided by Rev. Willie Barrow, another King aide who came in the form of a petite, fiery woman who knew organizing strategies.

Between 1966 and 1971, Operation Breadbasket generated an estimated $199 million in wages in today’s dollars and thousands of jobs, while opening grocery store shelves across Chicago to Black-owned products: Parker House Sausage, Johnson Products, Grove Fresh Orange Juice, and Joe Louis Milk. As Jackson preached it: “Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.”

Using his organizing prowess and ability to “organize around people’s self-interest,” Jackson amassed the financial and political support of Chicago’s most powerful Black labor, business, and political leaders. The young leader also built communications channels and relationships with powerful, youth street organizations, including the Black Stone Rangers. He raised thousands of dollars for SCLC and helped center the city–rather than Harlem, where the minister and Cong. Adam Clayton Powell led—as the northern focus of the controversial Civil Rights Movement.

Coretta Scott King took note. “I came home and said to Martin,” she recalled, “I think that Jesse Jackson and Operation Breadbasket have something that is needed in every community across the nation.” In August 1967, King appointed the Chicago organizer national director of Operation Breadbasket, which was the last major national appointment King ever made.

King was assassinated in a U.S. government-sponsored conspiracy in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Just before the sniper’s bullet fired, the Nobel Peace Prize winner had been talking to Jackson and others as he stood exposed on a motel balcony. Two months later, on June 30, 1968, Rev. Jackson was ordained a Baptist minister at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side by the legendary Rev. Clay Evans, one of the city’s towering church leaders. He became an official minister, and the Movement had not paused to mourn.

Black Power and militant uprisings ensued across the country, and Jackson, like his contemporaries, embraced the soul power aesthetic of his generation. Though he remained nonviolent, his oratory was a necessary bridge between those who wanted armed revolution and those who sought nonviolent social change.

Yet, perhaps unbeknownst, his ordination had consecrated its next voice. The man who had come to Chicago as a seminary student, who had carried Jet and Ebony to newsstands and sat at the feet of the greatest freedom preacher of the 20th century, was now formally called to preach — and he would do so for the rest of his life, not from behind a single pulpit but from every corner of the world where the poor needed someone to say their name out loud.

As Rev. Jackson would later write of his own faith formation: “My faith tradition has always been inextricably bound with the tradition of the abolition of slavery, the struggles to end colonial occupation, and the Civil Rights Movement. The blood, sweat, and tears of the movement have run through my life; they touched and entangled me with an indelible spirit of never giving up.”

While Rev. Ralph Abernathy served as SCLC’s leader and worked to keep King’s movement from becoming a memorial tribute, Rev. Jackson launched Black Expo. The event bridged Black businesses, consumers, corporations, and financial and cultural institutions into a massive event to highlight the demand for economic justice. The nation’s biggest entertainers—Isaac Hayes, The Jackson 5, Sammy Davis, Jr., Quincy Jones, Marvin Gaye, other Motown artists, Aretha Franklin, gospel stars and more, held sold-out concerts to raise money for the movement. Even heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali made regular appearances at Black Expo, held in the city’s massive Amphitheater near the stockyards on the South Side.

In December 1971 with the financial backing of Franklin and others, he founded Operation P.U.S.H. (People United to Serve Humanity) headquartered on Chicago’s South Side. It was eventually established its headquarters in a former synagogue. Every Saturday morning, 2,000 people filled that building to hear Rev. Jackson speak and give the charge. He fought the Chicago Board of Education for children in underfunded public schools who arrived hungry and left further behind. The Kenwood Oakwood Community Organization (KOCO) and PUSH For Excellence (PUSH Excel) were formed by him to continue the fight for public education, to provide student scholarships, and promote enrollment in HBCUs.

Affectionately called “Reverend” by his staff, Jackson moved like a whirlwind and demanded that those who worked beside him keep up. He confronted LaSalle Street banks and Wall Street corporations with the same fire he had brought to Country Delight Dairy. His PUSH Excel program carried the message of personal responsibility into schools across the country: stay in school, stay off drugs, do your homework, because freedom without education is a door with no key. 

To his employees, and throughout his 65-year career, the Baptist preacher/politician/global champion was a demanding and challenging boss — exacting, demanding focus, impatient with mediocrity, relentless in his expectations. You had to know what was happening in the world around you, not just where you lived. Somehow, though one could have heard one of his speeches a hundred times before, each delivery seemed fresh. To those who worked with him, including this writer for more than 25 years, his staff witnessed something else: a true leader who invested in their growth, pressed them toward their best selves, and believed in their capacity to do more than they imagined possible. Many who came through his orbit went on to distinguished careers in law, politics, journalism, entertainment, activism and ministry, carrying his imprint long after they had left the organization.

Reverend Jesse Jackson was not merely an American leader. He was a global revolutionary, and that must be said plainly. He visited South Africa in 1979, stood in Soweto under apartheid, and extended solidarity to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress when the United States government kept its distance. He returned in 1994 for Mandela’s inauguration as president of a free nation,  a friendship forged in struggle, honored in victory. He traveled to Cuba and sat with Fidel Castro. He broke bread with Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat when American politicians would not say his name in public, insisting there would be no peace in the Middle East without a Palestinian homeland. He stood with Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement in Grenada. He preached in Soweto and New Delhi, Ghana, Bangkok, Paris, Rome, El Salvador, Bahia, and London. In a 2006 sermon at Regina Mundi Church in Soweto, he invoked the words of Isaiah: beauty from ashes, light from darkness, hope from despair. That was not poetry. That was his governing theology.

That global vision produced results no diplomatic pouch could match. In 1984, he flew to Syria with Minister Louis Farrakhan and a delegation of physicians and ministers, and walked out with Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, a prisoner of war held by President Hafez al-Assad, secured not by military force but by moral authority. He negotiated the release of 48 prisoners from Cuba, and he once said he didn’t even get a “thank you” from one of them. He secured freedom for American hostages in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. In 1999, he sat across from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and brought home three U.S. soldiers held in Kosovo. He went where no administration asked him to go, because he believed what he preached: that every human being stands on holy ground, and no border or ideology changes that.

Within days of returning from Kosovo, he was in Decatur, IL, trying to reinstate seven Black boys back into the school system after they were unjustly expelled under zero-tolerance policies. He, and three staffers, were surrounded by KKK members, skinheads and so-called Nazis and had their lives threatened during the week’s long campaign—yet Rev. Jackson, who was aggressively arrested and thrown in jail,  never wavered. 

Jackson’s presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988 rewrote American political possibilities. He created the National Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial, multiethnic political organization,  and based it in Washington, D.C. The name came from slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Sr., and it not only managed his political work but also created and advocated for just, ethical, and sound public policy initiatives. His Citizenship Education Fund was a riff on a similar organization created by King, focusing on voter registration and civic engagement. 

In San Francisco in 1984, the civil rights leader stood before the Democratic National Convention and declared: “My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.” In 1988, running on living wages, universal health care, free college tuition and an end to the war on drugs, he won the Michigan primary, finished first or second in 46 of 56 primary contests, and registered more than 2 million new voters. 

Jackson forced the Democratic Party to abandon winner-take-all delegate rules in favor of proportional representation — the structural change that made Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory mathematically possible. Rev. Jackson said it plainly: “We changed the rules in ’88, which made it possible for Barack to win.” He did not run to win the White House. He ran to open the door. He is the godfather of the modern American progressive movement, and the movement owes him that acknowledgment without revision.

He stumbled, too. In 1984, an off-the-record remark referring to New York City by an alleged off-the-cuff remark became a defining wound. He was accused of antisemitism. He apologized, repeatedly and publicly, but the moniler remained. History must hold that wound alongside the work because an honest accounting of great and complicated people demands nothing less.

Death threats were not few and far between–they were many. Suspicious packages arrived to his offices. His home telephone rang with nefarious voices on the other end. He and his staff were followed and tracked, and their cars almost ran off the road. Whites and the disturbed came to churches or rallies where he spoke with knives or intent on doing bodily harm. His personal detail, including JD Anderson, Chris, Howard, and others, put their lives on the line to protect him. Alert staffers kept a watchful eye on those who offered him things to eat and drink. Some came to PUSH and sat among the crowd during his Saturday Morning Forum. He was tracked by the Chicago Police Department Red Squad. Rev. Jackson was not afraid.

In 1990, Rev. Jackson was elected as the first “shadow” senator for the District of Columbia, serving until 1997. He rejected the seat’s moniker for its racist connotations and rebranded his position as “statehood senator” and became the leading voice calling for the federal government to recognize D.C. as its 51st state. At the end of his term, President Bill Clinton named him a special envoy to Africa.

As “Special Envoy of the President and Secretary of State for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa,” Rev. Jackson assumed an official diplomatic role and was instrumental in resolving key conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and Nigeria.

By 1995, Jackson had returned fully to his Chicago base and merged his organizations and staff into the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, anchoring all operations in the former synagogue turned vibrant civil rights hub at 930 E. 50th Street. After an adjustment period, the combined staff found their rhythm and worked to ensure the quest to “serve humanity” was present, consistent and effective.

When staff conflicts arose, mostly due to ideological differences (Rainbow staffers were policy- and process-oriented and always looked at the intersection of business, finance, and policy; PUSH staffers understood grassroots organizing, timing, and the need to act quickly), he would reprimand and also act as a pastor. “Imagine how much work we can get done when nobody is worrying about getting the credit,” he would admonish.

The Reverend’s day began before sunup, and he rarely slept. His travelling staff slept or took their breaks when he did because if he took a nap and woke up rested, he would have 1,000 more new ideas. This sort of always on demand persona created a cadre of professionals who soon began to outwork and outpace him. If he got up at five, as a communications director, you’d have to rise at 3:30 a.m. or four.

“If I wake up and have to tell you what’s going on, why are you here?” he once said. And after the message was received and he began getting 4 a.m. calls, he remarked only half joking, “I can’t be overloaded. Give me some time to wake all the way up. The problem will still be here an hour from now.” But then, if you asked for a vacation or time off, he’d say, “Your enemy doesn’t take a vacation; they ain’t asking for time off.”

He never quit and never tapped out. “I Am Somebody,” Rev. Jackson continued to intone from his Chicago headquarters every Saturday morning radio program and later TV program. He did not originate those words — they came first from the Rev. William Holmes Borders of Atlanta’s Wheat Street Baptist Church, and Dr. King carried them north. But the Rev. Jackson made them his own. He turned the “I Am Somebody” mantra into a call-and-response that shook two thousand people to their feet in his auditoriums; inspired tens of thousands of school children, and gave hope to incarcerated men, women and youth. He gave back to the people what had always been theirs: dignity denied, purpose, and affirmation that they matter.

Reverend received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton on Aug. 9, 2000, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Some supporters often encouraged him to retire, but he rebuked such things as ridiculous. “Freedom fighters don’t retire,” he once quipped. “We must never stop fighting for God is on our side.” Still, the icon turned celebrity to many crafted a remarkable life for a kid who walked barefoot and had to endure bullying because of how he came into this world.

In 2008, he openly wept in Grant Park after Obama gained the Democratic nomination for U.S. President and stood firmly in the path Jackson and Rep. Shirley Chisholm had trailblazed. Reverend had not shied away from criticizing what he believed was a platform that “talked down to Black people,” and would not go far enough to address the systemic harms to the descendants of slaves, indigenous people in the Americas, farmers, the poor and the least of these. His progressive politics spawned the careers of hundreds of elected officials across race, gender and ethnicities. When Sen. Bernie Sanders launched his bid for the presidency, he ran on Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition platform, which he rebranded as the progressive agenda.

Despite is diagnosis and progressive illness, Rev. Jackson continued pushing forward. He walked picket lines, led marches, negotiated on behalf of others, and showed up every Saturday morning on Chicago’s South Side to be with “the people.” A thousand books can be written about him, and perhaps, none will fully capture the complexity and miraculousness of who he was and all that he did with the roughly 739,512 hours he was given.

He and Jacqueline, married for nearly seven decades, built a family together through it all: five children, Santita, Jesse Jr., Jonathan, Yusef and Jacqueline Jr., and later he had a sixth child, Ashley. They helped bring their grandchildren into the world–and saw their adult children reach remarkable heights and prestige in their own careers in government, academics, entertainment, science, business and law.

Jacqueline, a civil rights leader in her own right, was the foundation of the powerful household, managing the home, children and, eventually, a corporation that managed her husband’s affairs, never asking for the spotlight and never needing it.  When she was arrested and placed in solitary confinement while protesting U.S. naval bombings in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2001, her husband went into a feverish pitch to secure his wife’s freedom.

He was a loving and proud father who tried to carve out time from an impossible schedule; a man who wept openly at his children’s achievements; and a granddaddy who watched his grandchildren with quiet wonder. Rev. Jackson grew to embody what Grandmother Tibby’s covenant and his mother Helen had set into motion all those decades ago on Ridge Street.

Complex and at times called “complicated” by some, he was, as he said of himself, “not a perfect servant” but “a public servant, doing my best against the odds.” The schools he fought for still need fighting for. The banks on LaSalle Street still need watching. The corporations on Wall Street still need accountability. The children who arrive at school hungry still need someone willing to make noise on their behalf. The global poor he carried in his heart still need someone to stand at their door.

On February 17th in the wee hours of the budding Chicago morning, Rev. Jackson, age 84, took his last breath and joined the ancestors. His wife and son Jesse, startled by his stunted breathing pattern, were by his side.

The “County Preacher” is no longer here. But the work is. But the challenge is. But the people he trained are. “No generation can choose the age or circumstance in which it is born,” he once preached, “but through leadership it can choose to make the age in which it is born an age of enlightenment.” This is the age we have been given. The fire he tended for nearly 70 years does not go out unless we let it. And if we loved him at all — if we meant a single word of it — we pick it up and carry it forward. 

True activism and advocacy is often a thankless job; and often those who do the most labor, the most work, the behind-the-scenes tasks are overlooked, forgotten or purposely excised from history. When the water is calm and the coast is clear, sometimes people forget who helped them navigate through it; who threw them a life preserver or gave them CPR. These workers are put on the back pages, treated as footnotes or as mere means to an end. They become a nobody, trotted out only to reaffirm or use their knowledge and or showcase the earned scars to build up, empower and enrich others. Then they are discarded again.

That cannot be done to Jesse Jackson, though some may try. He was too big and too present. He was front and center, taking the tackles so others could run. They criticized and lied on him too. But he kept tackling, blocking and running the ball.

“You are somebody,”  he once said to some high school kids who were staring up at him in an auditorium. “Act like it.”