When the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived in Chicago, he was a classic nobody nobody sent: He was from the South, Black and in his 20s. By the clannish rules of Chicago politics circa 1964, he shouldn’t have amounted to much.
But he became somebody.
And now that he’s gone and a procession of memorial services will begin Thursday, these questions come to mind: Did Chicago make Jackson who he was? And to what extent did Jackson make the city what it is today?
The battles he fought here and mostly won helped earn him a national profile. They also made the city and the country more equitable and just. And he did it the Chicago way — direct, in your face, backing down only as tactical retreat. Rarely wavering and never giving up.
Beginning in 1966 with Operation Breadbasket, Jackson’s first assignment from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he used boycotts to force A&P, Pacific Tea Co. and other grocery chains to give Black job applicants a fair shot. The grocers gave in: The power of Jackson’s boycott left them no choice.
Jackson used his knack for grabbing attention as a tool. Along with Al Raby, head of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, Jackson helped select Marquette Park as the target for a 1966 fair housing march, at which racist white hecklers infamously threw rocks, bricks and bottles and hit King in the head.
Jackson’s PR instincts at times played out as theatrical or self-serving. After witnessing King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, Jackson rushed back to Chicago to tell the story. During a stirring Chicago City Council speech, he wore a turtleneck he said was stained with King’s blood. That earned him a rebuke from some in King’s inner circle who viewed it as a performative bid to take up King’s mantle.
But as a lesson in a Chicago-style pursuit of power, it worked: The visuals and language Jackson used did help him claim leadership as an heir to the King legacy.
As Jackson’s national profile grew, Chicago’s white establishment had a reflexive, negative reaction.
During the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries, Jackson crisscrossed the country in search of an alternative to Sen. George McGovern for president — earning the nickname “Jetstream Jesse” from Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko.
As the years passed and Royko kept using the sobriquet, many read it as a dig at Jackson’s tendency to show up anywhere in the U.S. or abroad where he deemed civil rights activism was needed — a form of self-aggrandizing crisis chasing. But Jackson did use his travels to important effect: flying to places such as Serbia, Gambia and Syria to secure the release of Americans held captive, for example, or to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, to help quell racial unrest after the police killing of Michael Brown.
Closer to home, during the 1972 campaign, Jackson and Ald. Bill Singer put forward a racially diverse delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Miami and succeeded in unseating the one led by Chicago’s boss, Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Daley’s national political power was never the same, and neither was Jackson’s. Seemingly overnight, he was a national force. “The convention made him a hero on the left,” said Don Rose, a longtime Chicago political consultant and onetime press aide to Jackson.
Jackson put his fingerprints all over Chicago after Daley’s death.
During the legendary blizzard of 1979, Jackson’s attacks on then-Mayor Michael Bilandic for closing CTA stations in Black communities helped Jane Byrne win the mayor’s office. Then, after Byrne appointed only white people to the Chicago Housing Authority board in 1982, Jackson led a boycott of Byrne’s ChicagoFest. The next year, a Jackson-led voter registration drive helped Harold Washington become Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983.
Even as he expanded his national profile, Jackson continued to use Chicago, and especially his Saturday morning rallies at his Operation PUSH headquarters on the South Side, as a base for his political ambitions — and a must-visit destination for any national politician seeking his endorsement. This culminated in his “Rainbow Coalition” run for president in 1984 and another in 1988, the most formidable campaigns by a Black aspirant until Barack Obama ran in 2008.
Jackson’s prime-time speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, with its “Our time has come” refrain, can be mentioned in the same breath as any of the best by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy or King.
But by the time Obama rose to prominence, Jackson seemed sidelined.
In an unguarded moment, appearing as an Obama surrogate on Fox News, Jackson was caught by a live microphone saying he wanted to cut off certain Obama body parts because the candidate was “talking down to Black people.”
Soon after that, I got to know Jackson while writing a profile of him at this uncomfortable moment: a historic civil rights leader, watching Obama’ s candidacy from the outside in.
The “hot mic” incident was the most embarrassing moment of his career, Jackson told me. After it, he spent 10 days in the Arizona desert “talking with Dr. King, reading the Bible and talking with myself.”
He ultimately decided an Obama presidency would be a delight to him. “I have lived long enough to see the fruits of my labors,” he said. “I’ve been blessed since the 1960s. I’ve seen 40 years of struggle from the front lines.”
Weeks into the reporting, musician Isaac Hayes died, and I flew with Jackson to the funeral in Memphis. Between the funeral and the burial, we drove to the Lorraine Motel. We walked up the concrete staircase to the balcony where King was shot.
Visitors can get close to that horrific yet hallowed spot. But a heavy metal chain blocks guests from stepping onto the balcony.
Not Jackson.
Deep into a detailed recounting of this pivotal moment in his life — and the nation’s history — Jackson stepped right over the chain. He leaned against the steel railing and carried on with his memories.
In its way, the impromptu balcony moment with me was vintage Jackson. A civil rights warrior since youth, a political and moral leader all his adult life, he stepped over barriers that stopped everyone else.
After all, Jackson had a story to tell: in this instance, about King’s assassination; in his life’s work, about the need for equality and justice in a society riven by racism. His vision of a better nation.
Now, with Jackson gone, it’s our duty to work toward the dream he pursued all his life.
David Greising is president of the Better Government Association.
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