In Chicago, Jesse Jackson honed his court vision that would extend across America

I don’t remember the specifics of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention where I heard the Rev. Jesse Jackson speak. I believe the year was 1996, though I can’t recall the precise subject of the panel or broad strokes of the discussion. But I do remember what he said.

Jackson was on the dais with a group of professional basketball players, including young women from the newly launched WNBA, as they thanked their NBA brethren for the inspiration and for so thoroughly entrenching the game in popular culture. It was the efforts of those men, in the words of the young female players, that had made a brand-new professional women’s basketball league possible.

Then, Jackson spoke.

The NBA had significant cultural sway, and he was a fan, but what made the WNBA possible, Jackson said, was all the people who had advocated for Title IX legislation, which mandated funding for women’s college sports and created the pipeline of female athletes that could even populate a women’s professional basketball league, let alone stand up the support and enthusiasm the league required. His was an immediate, incisive clarification, and he paused to let the words sink in.

As a former college quarterback who had been offered an opportunity to play professional baseball, Jackson brought an athlete’s kinetic intelligence to activism.

“Reverend was always aware of and always wanted people to recognize that policy and legislation gives you some legs to stand on,” said Joseph Bryant, national sports director for Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition. “It was important for Reverend to always bring to light the context of these experiences.”

“His vision of equity and inclusion included sports,” said former Olympic fencer Nikki Franke, co-founder of the Black Women in Sport Foundation.

Jackson’s advocacy for sports was always an extension of his fight for social, political and economic justice. This was true whether he was talking about labor practices; fair housing; or hiring for C-Suites, coaches, general managers and team doctors in professional sports leagues. It was always undergirded by passion for the collective deliverance of the nation, by way of the redemptive power of equal opportunity. Jesse Jackson had court vision that covered America.

But growing up in Chicago, we understood him most significantly as our own. 

Jackson stood for decades in the post-Civil Rights gap, and this week’s homegoing services and memorials have me thinking hard about the Chicago of it all. About both the city and the man, and his testimony, the combination of which gave generations of young people an eye-level look at what it meant to inhabit your full proportions while Black, with all the creativity and incoming fire that entailed.

I’d heard about Jesse Jackson my entire life.

My parents had moved from South-feeling southern Illinois to Chicago as part of the second leg of the Great Migration. Jackson had been tapped by his mentor Martin Luther King Jr. to spearhead a national charge for economic equality and step up in Chicago, which would eventually serve as the headquarters of his organizations, the People United to Serve Humanity (PUSH) in 1971 and the Rainbow Coalition in 1984, after the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

My father knew Jackson from his undergraduate days at the University of Illinois, where they briefly overlapped, and I remember attending PUSH’s Black Expo as a child. Or perhaps I simply remember my parents attending, and Momma rhapsodizing about how good-looking Jackson was, how he’d kissed her cheek and she didn’t want to wash it. Stature and charisma were part of his gifts.

“Jesse was striking in presence — tall, beige, handsome, athletic. But those surface qualities quickly gave way to something more compelling: an exceptional mind paired with relentless discipline,” Hermene D. Hartman, a Jackson protege, confidant and close friend who met him as a student at Chicago’s Roosevelt University, reflected in her digital publication, N’digo.

“He was not afraid of power; he challenged it as he pursued his own,” she wrote. “He challenged, and he rhymed.” 

My colleague and friend Michael Wilbon, the renowned sports writer, analyst and commentator, recalled waking up one summer morning when he was 10 years old and seeing “a guy with a huge Afro and perfect sideburns wearing a dashiki” at his breakfast table. It was Jackson.

“My father had been the top salesperson on his route at Dean’s Food Co. in Chicago. And yet, he had been fired. He was also the only Black salesperson,” Wilbon said. When Jackson heard about it, he responded: “No, no, no, we’re not having that.”

Jackson organized a boycott, and Wilbon’s father was hired back within 48 hours.

“My father was so proud that he never had to get financial aid to send [me and my brother] anywhere, including Northwestern [University]. That was made possible by Jesse L. Jackson directly, just straight up.”

In his early years as a Washington Post columnist in the 1990s, Wilbon was critical of an instance of sports activism Jackson had undertaken. To illustrate his point, he recalled the story of Jackson saving his father’s job nearly 25 years earlier.

“I wrote about how his voice wasn’t needed there [in sports] as much as it was for families that were voiceless like mine were at that time,” he said. Jackson had sometimes called Wilbon, but didn’t know about their connection from the summer of 1969. The day after the column ran, “the first call I got the next morning was from Jesse, and he’s like, ‘I remember this. I remember your father.’… I didn’t think he’d remember, because I was 35, and there was a 25-year gap.”

“I was just saying to somebody, ‘When did Jesse go from being a guy who belonged to us to belonging to the nation?” Wilbon said. “But if I was a betting person. I would bet it was something sports related.”

As a former athlete, Jackson always had a personal bent toward sports.

“But he also viewed sports as a space and a place where there was an image of fairness that was taking place on the field that wasn’t always translated into other parts of life,” said Bryant, the Rainbow/PUSH sports director. “Oftentimes, the field is not balanced, the rules are not public, there are all types of unfair practices. …

“So Rev. Jackson’s connection to sports was still very much aligned with his drive for justice and equality, but there was a different spin that could be taken simply because the sports world has its own story to tell in how success is achieved, and yet it wasn’t being translated.”

This translation often included the behind-the-scenes, off-camera, whisper work of vouching for people whose lives had skidded into a bad patch, and they needed a push.

Jackson was close friends with legendary Georgetown men’s basketball coach John Thompson Jr. When Allen Iverson, a top high school prospect at the time, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after a racially charged bowling alley melee in 1993, his mother went to Thompson asking for help, and Jackson was among those who reached out to Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder to ask him to grant Iverson clemency.

The following year, when Iverson began his first season at Georgetown, Jackson told The Virginian-Pilot, “The politicians say lock up Iverson, I say lift him up.”

Athletes had voices that carried beyond the fields, courts, courses and stadiums. But their fame sometimes distanced them from the real talk of their communities. No matter how far he traveled or successful he became, Jackson could still bring word from the streets into every room he entered.

He could always play the inside-outside game that we learned to recognize from Chicago, from sports, from politics. He spoke all three of those dialects fluently; he spoke the language of the streets and the upper classes that gathered in rooms he’d had to punch his way into. What we would learn later is that both the boardroom and the block revolve around politics, and Jackson was an old-school politician.

Jackson had been friends with Muhammad Ali, and was close to Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, whom he eulogized. Jim Brown reached out to Jackson before the storied 1967 Cleveland Summit of professional athletes who supported Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War.

“I salute Jesse for 60 years in the trenches contributing to the struggle for social justice and freedom,” Harry Edwards, architect of the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights and University of California-Berkeley professor emeritus who pioneered the sociology of sport, emailed me to say. He sent a photo of himself, Abdul-Jabbar and Jackson from the day before Ali’s memorial service in 2016, and a game-day photo of himself and Jackson in the San Francisco 49ers locker room in 1994.

Jackson “was the person who I just called the long-distance runner, who was in the fight for social justice really longer than anybody else,” said author and academic Richard Lapchick, who used to speak annually at the Operation PUSH conventions in Chicago.

Lapchick was the American leader of the sports boycott of South Africa campaign when he first got to know Jackson. He also wrote the annual Racial & Gender Report Cards assessing diversity in professional sports, college sports and sports media for decades, and had a column on race for ESPN in which he’d often quote Jackson.

Lapchick and his wife were out to dinner in New Orleans once when he heard a prominent sports writer at a nearby table full of fellow sports writers say, “’Jackson was in the news today. Again. … He’s an ambulance chaser.’ And when she saw I was there at the end of the meeting, I know she was wondering if I heard that, but I did.”

Jackson “was always all-inclusive. If I was just talking about race, he would always broaden the discussion to include the status of women in sports,” Lapchick said. “So many people I worked with were obviously committed to these issues, but weren’t willing to risk anything and [put anything] on the line. Rev. Jackson would say whatever was on his mind, whatever the consequences.”

That NABJ convention wasn’t the first time I’d heard the Rev. Jesse Jackson speak.

That would have been at the 1984 funeral of basketball phenom Benji Wilson at Operation PUSH. Wilson was the nation’s top player before being gunned down blocks from his Chicago high school on the cusp of his senior season.

I hadn’t known Wilson, but we were the same age, and his death was so tragic that I felt compelled to attend his funeral at the Operation PUSH headquarters along with thousands of others.

I heard Jackson issue a warning that day: Gun violence was taking hold in Black communities, he told the crowd of mourners. Parents had to hold tight to their children and communities had to advocate, right now, for gun control, he warned urgently, or our destinies would be diminished and dogged by paroxysms of violence. It sounded to my young ears like prophecy.

By that time, Jackson had been all over the news. 

In 1983, when the winningly charismatic, deeply intellectual lawyer Harold Washington ran to become Chicago’s first Black mayor, Jackson campaigned with him, held rallies and his Operation PUSH coalition helped register 100,000 voters.

“Every day of our lives, we were the hall pushers. We built the city on our shoulders, we made the river run backwards, we stayed in people’s backyards because of restrictive covenants. We paid our taxes and couldn’t get represented. And yet we would not bow. We did not get weary. And in your own time, you raised up a man with the integrity, the intelligence, the environment, the drive,” Jackson exhorted a campaign crowd.

“We want Harold! We want Harold!” Jackson led the chants.

When Washington won, it felt like a personal triumph for some of us, and a shift in the known world to others. Some of my teachers and white classmates were palpably shocked. Others were apoplectic.

I remember a white boy sitting atop of his desk in my suburban high school. I don’t remember his name, or what he said about Washington, but I can still picture him yelling out, “I f‑‑‑ing hate Jesse Jackson!” His face was red and mottled, and his words were wrapped in a fury he could not fully language.

While I didn’t fully understand it either, I came to recognize that there was something about the way Jackson showed up in the world that acted as a proxy for an idea that had been baked into America, and has never been fully purged. The idea that people like Jesse Jackson, and by extension me and mine, didn’t deserve to take up so much space.

But chief among Jackson’s gifts were seeing around corners and recognizing shadow contracts. Showing up to places where people didn’t want to see him, didn’t think he belonged and didn’t want to hear what he had to say.

“People who don’t want things to change are going to hate people who are making change,” said Lapchick, who knows the truth of it. In 1978, he was beaten, concussed and the N-word was carved across his stomach by two masked men angry over his anti-apartheid work. “I think that drew Rev. Jackson to me, because he believed that I was willing to take those kinds of risks to fight for social justice.” As was Jackson, Lapchick said.

The notion that we didn’t belong was an idea that had long carried sway in the hyper-segregated Chicago of my childhood, but on the day of Washington’s victory, generations of young South Siders and West Siders and the whole of Chicagoland saw it defeated.

A year later in San Francisco, standing on the national stage at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, in soaring oratory, presidential candidate Jesse Jackson invoked a Rainbow Coalition of Native Americans, Blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics. He shouted out gay and lesbian communities, young Americans and the disabled. From slave ships to championships, he called our journey.

The Democratic convention was a great distance physically and psychically from Chicago, but Jesse Jackson had invited us. I rewatch the speech today, and I see the here and now in the bygone of his words. I hadn’t remembered the politics and platform, but I know I watched the speech as a teenager in the Chicago suburbs. Because Jackson’s exhortation “our time has come, our time has come,” rang in my ears.

Jackson showed up in places young people in Chicago wouldn’t have known to aspire to, and held space for us until we could arrive. 

I felt frightened by that white boy’s hatred in the suburbs of Chicago. 

But I was proud of Harold Washington and of the rousing, percussive, insistent muscularity of Jesse Jackson. I could not doubt that they belonged, which meant I would belong as well. Wherever I was going. Because I started in Chicago. I saw Jesse run. And I was proud to be Black.

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