Kids: In the world!
He has every child in the hall standing tall, chanting at the top of his lungs, flushed with self-importance, completely transported—the freckle-faced boy among them. In closing, Jackson comes back to the phrase he has shouted so often one wonders if it isn’t a poultice for some long-ago, private wound of pride: “I am.”
Kids: I am!
Jesse: Somebody.
Kids: Somebody!
Jesse: God bless America.
Kids: God bless America.
Over the din of applause, I inquire of the freckle-faced boy, “Did you like him a little better than you thought you would?”
“He’s O.K.” The kids are still howling.
“Would you like to meet him in person?”
“Yeah!” His eyes light up.
And so, as Jackson is coming down the aisle, I signal to him. “Reverend, would you say hello to this young man? He’s heard that if a black person becomes president, white people become slaves.”
Instantly, Jackson bends over and clasps the boy’s arm and croons, “Oh, that’s not true. I love you very much, buddy. O.K.? All right?”
Tears gush out and the boy buries his face, his whole world of thought-stultifying prejudice suddenly in collapse. “Feel better,” soothes Jackson. “God bless you, brother. I love you, buddy, O.K.?”
There isn’t a dry eye all around us.
Jesse Jackson has always had a feel for the hurting ones. Some call it empathy; others believe there is divinity in the man. He also has one eye out at all times for the limelight. Within an hour of this moving encounter, Jesse Jackson, Democratic front-runner in the presidential race, is bragging to reporters about how beautifully he handled it.
Jesse Jackson may be the hungriest man in the world. He is as hungry for the crowds as they are for him. The distortions of segregation in the South in the forties left their mark, to be sure, but behind his tropism for the limelight, underneath all the braggadocio that is mistaken for arrogance, lies Jesse Louis Jackson’s greatest longing in life—the lust for legitimacy.
His personal psychological need happens to coincide with the black experience in America, a tremendous yearning to be affirmed as full-fledged members of the national constituency. All these years Jackson has been tunneling up, and in the long climb he has clung tenaciously to everything he could use, stepped over warm bodies, greedily dipped his fingers in the blood of his hallowed predecessor, Martin Luther King Jr., shaken down businessmen, black and white, absorbed some of the tactics of Boss Daley, and brought with him baggage that is decidedly distasteful. He has never held a conventional job or stood for elective office. The organizations he has created and spearheaded—PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition—have functioned, above all, as personality cults for Jesse Jackson. Yet with his superhuman drive and charisma, and the verbal pyrotechnics that allow him to move from lofty oration to tub-thumping money raising, he has carved out a unique position for himself in American political life and earned the attention of the whole world.
Gail Sheehy
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