It is a fitting political irony that as a weeklong series of funeral services and public memorials for two-time presidential candidate Jesse Jackson is getting underway, politicians in both parties are engaged in a debate about “affordability.” Even as I type that word, I can imagine the Rev. Jesse Jackson in his prime, using his unique rhythmic cadence to roll that word around into soaring rhetoric. He would likely link affordability with opportunity, stability, security, catastrophe and the responsibility America has to people who can’t afford life’s necessities.
It would sound like church. It would hit like the hook in a popular rap song and yet resonate with the folks who listen to country music in their pickup trucks or classic rock on the jukebox at the local tavern.
He should be eulogized as someone who spoke the language of working people and as someone who fully understood their struggles.
Jackson, who sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 and 1988, and who died this month at age 84, had a gift that’s become increasingly rare in politics. He should be eulogized as someone who spoke the language of working people and as someone who fully understood their struggles. Campaigning has become so expensive and rarified that almost no one who aspires to our nation’s highest offices has any lived experience on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. So, we often get the aesthetics of populism without the authenticity.
The people running for high office are almost never those who have experienced the deep pang of hunger or calloused hands, or those who’ve had utilities shut off because the bills have not been paid. And our nation has become so polarized that the big-tent idea of open-armed inclusion often devolves into a more tribal brand of politics. But for a time, Jackson’s brand was the epitome of an open-armed approach. While he was rooted in Black liberation, his mission to create a “rainbow coalition” allowed him to preach a message that landed effectively across racial lines.
And in that brief window of time in the 1980s, our country heard from a presidential candidate who understood that people who worked hard but earned little deserved not just a shoutout, but an entire movement. The actual word “affordability” may not have appeared in Jackson’s speeches, but the essential focus of his campaigns was to create a path toward a world where an entire class of people was not permanently locked in poverty.
If you have never heard Jackson’s 1988 speech to the Democratic National Convention, then do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing. Not just a highlight reel. All of it. There is a line about a particular group of Americans in that speech I will never forget. “They take the early bus.” It was visceral and visual. When you hear it, you can see the folks he’s talking about: standing on a street corner, lunch box in hand, shivering against the cold, perhaps up so early the sun is still asleep.
He was talking about Americans who were distanced from power. He was also talking about the workers who, even as he was speaking, were standing in the place where power percolates. He gave a shoutout to the workers in that convention hall who would stay behind after the balloons dropped, to fold up the chairs and sweep up the confetti.
I’m a working person’s person. That’s why I understand you whether you’re Black or white. I understand work. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hand.”
jesse jackson at the 1988 Democratic national convetion
Jackson also used his time on that stage in Atlanta to spotlight the people who cleaned rooms and emptied bedpans in hospitals yet could not afford to recuperate in those same beds when they got sick because they lacked health insurance or the money to pay big bills. A Black man born in South Carolina who adopted Chicago as his home, Jackson spoke about working people and to working people in way that transcended race and geography.
“I’m a working person’s person,” he said at that convention speech. “That’s why I understand you whether you’re Black or white. I understand work. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hand.”
He talked about America as a great big quilt — patches stitched together that didn’t easily fit and were not perfectly aligned and yet were more beautiful locked together as fragments than left alone as scraps. It was a powerful analogy when I heard it in 1988, but when I listened again recently, I felt a pang of nostalgic regret. With so much division and weaponized politics, our country sometimes feels less like a quilt and more like a balkanized nation.
For a time, he was the most influential and most recognized Black leader in America and was a bridge between the Civil Rights Movement and the progressive multicultural politics that got Barack Obama elected as America’s first Black president. As a public figure who rode that long train of history, he was both powerful and powerfully complicated, and anyone who covered the long arc of his career has seen all sides.
I saw him at Operation PUSH rallies when I was a kid visiting cousins in Chicago. I still remember standing in a gymnasium full of Black kids all yelling in unison — “I am somebody!” — and feeling something shift deep down in my chest. You never forget that kind of thing. He knew that.
Jackson was at Denver’s Mile High Stadium on the day in 2008 when Sen. Barack Obama was set to accept the nomination as the Democrats’ candidate for president. The field was full of journalists doing on-the-fly interviews with members of Congress, state governors and other luminaries, but Jackson didn’t command the same attention he had in his younger years. The journalists were swarming in other directions. He walked over to me and another Black journalist and greeted us with a kind of a weird embrace where he used each of his hands to grab one of ours. But when we tried to let go, he held on tight. With both of us still in his grasp, he started talking louder and louder.
Sure, he used us as a launchpad to attract a larger crowd. But it wasn’t just weird. It was poignant. In his own way he was telling those scribes, “I am still somebody.” He was preaching about the monumental nature of the evening and how the calendar had collided with history. It was Aug. 28, 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. had given his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, and 53 years after Emmett Till was brutally killed in Mississippi. Jackson was connecting Obama’s imminent nomination to that history in his unmistakable cadence. Other journalists took notice. The circle around us grew. Then grew bigger still. Only then did he release our hands from his clutches and turn away to fully face the cameras that had encircled us. Here was a man who had once commanded entire arenas, finding the foothold on the margins of someone else’s mark on history. As difficult as it probably was for Jackson to watch the young senator with a funny name grab that brass ring by winning the Democratic nomination, the civil rights elder could still take some satisfaction in knowing that he helped pave Obama’s path when he ran for president twice and asked America to “keep hope alive.” Jackson opened a door he would never walk through himself. Many civil rights icons died young. Jackson lived long enough to be celebrated and misunderstood. To be both maligned and misguided. His offensive description of New York City as “Hymietown” and his hot-mic jab at Obama gave people a reason to distance themselves from the civil rights icon and diminish his storied history. Toward the end of his life, he was at times kept at the margins and treated as someone out of touch or past his prime. My kids, who are young adults, knew him as a familiar face at protests and press conferences, but are too young to know him as the orator and movement builder and the man who cajoled corporations to diversify their ranks. They didn’t know what his voice could do to a room. They didn’t fully understand the bridges he built. That is the curse of longevity. Your failures and your frailties catch up to your legacy and sometimes outrun it. Jackson was many things in life, but know this: A lot of people got their start in politics, organizing, business, journalism and leadership because of him. He built confidence. He built infrastructure. He built a vocabulary for Black political ambition at a time when America wasn’t ready for Black authority in its highest offices. He was somebody who should be remembered and celebrated for all of that. If politicians really want to know how to talk to Americans who feel the economy works against them and how to connect with those who are struggling to afford food, shelter and health care, then Jesse Jackson and his 1988 convention speech is the perfect place to start.
Michele Norris is a senior contributing editor for MS NOW. 
