Can the breach between Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama be healed?
Somehow, a man with three names has been reduced to four words. Say Martin Luther King Jr. and the phrase "I have a dream" comes to mind as if that sums up his life or his relevance to the events swirling around his memory next week in Washington with the inauguration of Barack Obama who many mistake as his spiritual son.
As the nation marks King's birthday, and as he is elevated to the pantheon of officially sanctioned heroes, many forget that he was a man who led a movement, who never sought office, and whose contribution was as a teacher of moral laws and an activist in righteous struggles. We mark his birthday only because so many fought for it its recognition of the spirit of Stevie Wonder's birthday song and Nina Simone's sad lament.
The movement that King led is, in fact, still alive and meeting as a shell of its former self in New York. This week at a Summit organized in New York by Jesse Jackson, one of his disciples, there is a discussion on the economy and how its collapse is impacting the people King gave his life for, like the striking garbage men of Memphis.
It is also battling to redefine its program at a time when activists have moved from the streets to digital platforms, from face to face to Facebook, from tumult to Twitter, from agitation in the streets to deal making in the suites.
Jackson of course knows about this divide and tried to cross it boldly in 1984 and 1988 in two historic presidential campaigns that shook up the Democratic Party, won primaries, and party rule changes that permitted the proportional allocation of primary votes that enabled Obama's victories.
Just as Barack reached into fellow organizer Cesar Chavez's tool kit for the phrase "Si Se Puede!" (Yes We Can!), Jesse's living legacy is a largely unacknowledged building block in the chain of history that has taken us to this point. His tears at the victory rally in Chicago were connected to a history that our media often buries.
I spoke to Jesse for a film I am making with Videovision's Anant Singh about the Obama campaign. I asked him about what was going through his mind on that joyous night in Grant Park where many heads were broken by the police back in 1968.
"Really, it was two things," he told me. "It was the draw of the moment. In my mind's eye, I saw martyrs, whose caskets I walked behind, and friends with whom I worked who are somewhere in poverty or dead. Children in villages of Kenya, Haiti, who could not afford a television or somewhere around some radio, hoping that there'd be this great redemptive, transformative breakthrough.
So it was the draw of that moment, and most of the people I knew who live down in Alabama or Mississippi, who made this moment happen but couldn't afford to be there. And I felt them. And it was also a journey, the journey to get us there."
Memories flooded in, and he spoke with an almost stream of consciousness:
"I was jailed trying to use a public library along with seven of my classmates. We couldn't take a picture in the state capitol, but dogs could. Many of us kill about the right to vote. James Meredith shot … Two Jews were killed because they were seen as meddling in Mississippi politics. Reverend James Reeve, Jimmy Lee Jackson, these people, these mostly nameless, faceless martyrs, they made the big part of it possible. And often those who make the big part possible are not invited to the party. They can't afford to come to the party.
"And I wept again for them, because I wanted them to be there and I thought that if Doctor came, Chavez maybe just be there for a moment in time, and I just kept thinking about Martin Luther King, just like…if they were just there for a moment in time, my whole life would have been fulfilled. So I was thinking about the joy and the journey. That kind of took me to a level of ecstasy and joy."
This was not a history referenced by most commentators in covering the Obama campaign.
There is a complicated tension between civil rights leaders and President-elect Obama. Their difference is more about how change can be made---will it all come from the inside through an inherently conservative, compromised and bureaucratic political process or does there need to be pressure from the outside at the grass roots or "street heat" as one of the Reverend's supporters put it?
Is the Movement model fashioned by King and civil rights organization calling for activism still needed or is it passé. Is there still a need and role for the Reverend Jacksons?
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