Dean Greg Sterling today issued the following message about the late Jesse Jackson.
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“Keep hope alive!” These are the words that the Rev. Jesse Jackson shouted four times at the conclusion of the electrifying speech he delivered at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Yesterday his voice fell silent.
Rev. Jackson was arguably the most influential Black American between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama. He was significant to many of us for multiple reasons. We all admired him for the long road of his personal life from abject poverty to national and international status. He was a gifted speaker—and this is an understatement—and irrepressible in his pursuits. In the speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention, he said: “I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it was not born in you, and you can make it.” Rev. Jackson was born into a Jim Crow society and rose above personal and systemic circumstances most white Americans never face.
He was the first African American—the identifying marker that he championed and helped to popularize in American English—whom many of us, myself included, took seriously as a presidential candidate. He was only the second African American to contend for the highest office in a major party. And he did more than just contend: he won 29% of the vote in the Democratic primaries in the 1988 election, a significant increase over the support he received in 1984. What attracted me was his formation of the National Rainbow Coalition. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, he said: “My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.” It was hard not to hear an echo of “He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18–19 citing Isaiah 61:1; 58:6; 61:2).
He was a superb orator. I have always thought that his two speeches at the 1984 and 1988 conventions were the highlights of the Conventions; his second speech is considered by many to be a classic speech in American politics. I only watched those on television, but I did hear him some years later when he spoke at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. When he walked into the room, his presence electrified the audience in a way that no scholar could. He did not disappoint us with his speech.
As important as he is to American political history, I think that his real calling was as a minister. He was—if I may borrow an image from Paul—a clay jar, but the treasure within that clay jar was evident to all (2 Cor 4:7). The youngest among King’s inner circle, he looked to Martin Luther King, Jr., as the father whom he did not have in his early life. Although there were cracks in the jar of his life, he was unswerving in his stance to serve as a moral voice for those who do not have a voice. And he did this unashamedly as a minister.
My heart aches as I write these lines knowing that there are loud voices today that have confused Christianity and patriotism. I think of the words of William Sloane Coffin, a YDS alumnus and the former chaplain of Yale: “There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with all the world.” Jesse Jackson carried on a lover’s quarrel with America because, like Coffin, he believed the gospel message. As long as we do, we keep hope alive.