The year is 1984. Jesse Jackson is running for president in the Democratic primary. It is easy to conclude that this image is merely another example of a politician taking advantage of a photo opportunity, an orchestrated projection of the idea that politicians represent the marginalized.
But this is Jesse Jackson, so there is more in this photo than immediately meets the eye.
Jesse Jackson was not a politician. Though many political analysts called him inexperienced, he seemed personally to attract the very constituencies his campaign sought to reach.
In his own imagination, and in the imagination of many Black working-class people, Jackson had always been their advocate. A former football star, the Greenville, South Carolina native was a veteran of the Southern Black freedom struggle. He had been a staffer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and director of its Operation Breadbasket.
An initiative of Martin Luther King, Jr., Operation Breadbasket, based in Chicago, aimed to ensure that corporations that directly benefited from their business operations in Black communities reinvested in those communities.
Under Jackson’s leadership, Operation Breadbasket led successful boycotts of large corporations unwilling to accede to its demands and executed what they called “covenants” where businesses like A&P Grocery agreed to hire and train Black employees for managerial positions, stock Black-created consumer items, utilize Black-owned service agencies, and to invest funds in Black-owned banks.
After he ran afoul of the SCLC’s leadership in the wake of King’s assassination—a controversy that haunted his efforts—Jackson branched out on his own by developing Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity, later changed to “Serve”).
Often appearing in a dashiki, leather jacket, Afro, and medallion of King’s likeness, Jackson frequently invoked the slogan “It’s nation time!” made famous by his comrade, Amiri Baraka. Appearing at the legendary Wattstax concert in 1972, he roused the crowd with his now famous cry of “I am somebody!"
These experiences attracted movement folk to the presidential campaign. Organizers like Ron Walters and Jack O’Dell were critical members of the campaign team. Ardent supporters Baraka and Frances Beale, as well as Black churches and social organizations, backed Jackson.
Jackson’s personal sensibilities often rankled Chicago’s machine politicians, the media, and other civil rights activists, but among the Black masses his message resonated. Together with progressive whites, college students, farmers, and Arab Americans, they were a composite portrait of those who had been effectively “locked out.”