Jesse Jackson

I had a dream last night, amongst others, about the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was alone at a party. I felt quite sorry for him, even if he does have the deserved character of a pariah to some these days.

Today, in Illinois, and doubtless with reference to Lincoln, the first 'black' nominee of a major American party will address large crowds and launch his general election ticket. Frederick Douglass, and Shirley Chisolm aside, Jackson will deserve more of the references that flow to others than they do. His runs in 1984 and 1988 were ground-breaking. Indeed, had things happened in a slightly different way at the earlier date he may even have snatched the nomination himself.

I recall my father, who had a view of black people which belonged to Northern Irish working men in the seventies, sitting quiet and lost in Jackson's 84 speech to the Democratic convention, and encouraging me to do the same. For all the rhyming, near-mad poetry of his recent activities, and the swearing, I urge you to think about how beautiful Jackson and his campaign were at that moment, and how they touched so many.

Jackson, as a very young man, walked with Martin Luther King. In a state of confusion, and shock, or out of some existential dramaturgic drive, he was the first to dip his hands in King's blood, and the last of whom King spoke when alive. I've always thought that some of his desperation, and his lyricism, can be attributed to the madness of that moment of King's death at the Lorraine Hotel.

Jackson is often criticised for that action, of course. Many seem to know better what they would have done. I always thought of Jackie Kennedy making sure she kept her bloody dress on 'so that they could see what they had done' to put the action of deranged anointment in context, and I think that you should too.

What is it to be a young man and to walk with a hero who falls? Jackson has fallen himself, multiply, in the years since. He has lived long enough to see the grandchildren of people he fought for reach a degree of freedom that made his campaigns ancient, and a little embarassing to some of them.

There are first-part and second-part players in America's black stories. Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X have been defanged and elevated to the first rank, for instance. Mention of their names these days is as much a product of a white wish for 'depth' as of an ignorance of their radicalism when alive, as, probably, is that of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.

There are second part players too; Sojourner Truth, Marcus Garvey, Wallace Fard, and Ralph Abernathy are normally pushed forth as archetypes when required. I am sure that my reader can think of others. There is enough material in Willie Brown for a whole series of blog posts, for instance. I cast no aspersions on characters or personal achievement by my definition by the way, or at least I do not mean to.

But Jackson stands somewhere between them; eternally liminal, not quite great, not quite secondary. I think of him torn between the young man stunned and self daubed by King's blood, and the old, sharp suited lyrical ghost of a thousand specious hauntings, told off by his son and treated badly by a shameless press. Yet he should be acknowledged undestroyed.

If Obama has applause, and crowds, and a realistic chance to be president now, however, some--even a little tiny part--of the credit, must today go to Jesse Jackson.