Civil rights activist alongside Martin Luther King, even on the day of his assassination. Then twice candidate for the White House, humanitarian worker and mediator in international crises: all this was the Baptist Reverend Jessie Jackson, who died at the age of 84 in his home in Chicago.
In 2017 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and had been hospitalized since last November due to a particularly serious neurodegenerative condition. For over six decades the reverend was one of the most recognizable and discussed figures in American politics: a tireless organizer, preacher of the populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” made up of the poor and forgotten.
“My base is the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected and the despised,” he said in his speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention, with the solemn cadences of someone speaking from the pulpit of a black church. He himself was born in that poverty, in South Carolina, in that South of segregation and discrimination: Jesse Louis Burn at birth, was the son of a sixteen-year-old majorette and a former boxer married to another woman. Jackson took the surname of the stepfather who adopted him years later without ever truly considering him a son. And it was in Martin Luther King that Jesse, among his first protégés, found a father figure and a mentor, while remaining a free agent in the civil rights movement. He was 26 years old when, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, he witnessed Mlk’s assassination and later claimed to have held the dying reverend in his arms, with that blood on the green “turtleneck” with which he later went on television. with an account disputed by other witnesses. Some time before with Mlk he had taken part in the historic marches from Selma to Montgomery.
His notoriety reached its peak in the 1980s when, twice a candidate for the White House in 1984 and 1988, despite failing to win the nomination he obtained millions of votes with a message based on “self help”: «You can live in a degraded neighborhood – he often said – but the degradation must not be within you». His enthralling rhetoric – as the New York Times recalls – was inseparable from other aspects. His ego, instinct for self-promotion and personal weaknesses (in 2001 he had an illegitimate daughter with an employee of his organization) were a source of irritation to friends and admirers and a target of ridicule for critics.
“I hope God forgives him,” said at the time of the second presidential race, Mlk’s successor and close collaborator, Ralph Abernathy, who could not stand Jackson’s attempt to make the legacy of the father of civil rights his own. Jackson, however, was not just internal politics. The electoral events were no longer the same without him (the election of Bill Clinton, whom Toni Morrison defined as “the first black president”, and that of Obama had him as a trailblazer).
But after those experiences, for years the reverend used his charisma as a mediator to unofficially resolve international crises and hostage-taking. In 1984 in Damascus he obtained the release of pilot Robert Goodman, then he flew to Cuba where Fidel Castro freed 23 prisoners. In 1999, during the Kosovo war, he met Slobodan Milosevic and rescued three captured American soldiers, while on the eve of the first Gulf War in 1990 we find him in Iraq negotiating with Saddam Hussein.
The condolences for his passing are bipartisan. Jackson “was a force of nature”, recalls Donald Trump, who however does not miss the opportunity to attack Barack Obama, claiming that the reverend and the former president “could not stand each other”.
I, on the other hand, continues the tycoon, “worked well with him, and this is proof that I’m not racist.” A reference to the accusations made against him for the video clip of recent days in which the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama, with the support of artificial intelligence, were mounted on the bodies of monkeys. And for better or for worse, Jackson paved the way for the Obamas: “Michelle and I grew up on his shoulders,” said the first black president in US history, thus paying homage to the first African-American candidate.