Rev. Jesse Jackson charmed the great and the infamous, trying to make a difference

The Century Shopping Centre at 2828 N. Clark Street was built inside the old Diversey Theatre, a defunct 1925 vaudeville house. It has an interior atrium, sort of Water Tower Place Lite, and a winding ramp, past seven stories of shops.

My then wife-to-be and I were wandering there, years ago, heading up the ramp, when we encountered a mass of people coming the other way. Rev. Jesse Jackson, with a knot of shoppers, photographers and media. Campaigning for Eugene Sawyer, if I recall correctly.

"I'd like to meet him!" my future spouse said.

I brought her up to Rev. Jackson and made the introduction.

"May I kiss you?" he asked, to my surprise, and hers. But she agreed. The kiss was exchanged.

We parted ways, the famous civil rights leaders and his entourage heading one way, my significant other and I heading another. Someone needed to say something. A thought came to me.

"Congratulations," I said. "You just kissed Yasser Arafat by proxy."

That neatly summarizes the dilemma of Rev. Jackson, who died Tuesday. He met the Dalai Lama and the bloodstained leader of the P.L.O. He hung out with Martin Luther King and Robert Mugabe, responsible for the deaths of 20,000 Zimbabweans. A moral man, generally, who met highly immoral people and sometimes held their hands and prayed. He visited Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad and Fidel Castro.

"Jackson has made a career of giving dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic a chance to show their gentler side by releasing captives at his request," Time magazine noted in 1999. "It’s not mere ego tripping, as some cynics charge, or an expression of Jackson’s deeply held belief in nonviolence. It’s almost Faustian. I think he needs the rush that only bargaining with evil can provide."

Another dilemma for Rev. Jackson. To draw media attention to particular problems, prisoners, picket lines, he needed to draw attention to himself. It wasn't supposed to be about him. Yet it was.

Rev. Jackson was master of firing torpedoes that circled back and impacted into his own vessel. He mounted the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate in 1984, then hired Louis Farrakhan to do his campaign security and called New York "Hymietown" in the presence of a newspaper reporter, who Farrakhan later threatened to kill for spilling the beans.

The "man of contrasts" summation might be a cliche. But with Rev. Jackson, it was true. He could whipsaw you with it. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, Jackson made the rounds of editorial offices, humbly pointing out that it was pioneers such as, ahem, himself, who made Obama's triumph possible.

Then Jackson immediately said, into an open Fox News microphone, that he'd like to castrate Obama. Which puffed away the cloud of revered pioneer respect he was trying to fog around himself.

Like so much else, how you view Jesse Jackson comes down — in my opinion — to race. For Black people, generally, Rev. Jackson was a dynamic champion, fighting for rights, demanding justice, the heir to Dr. King. White folks tended to make cathedrals with our fingertips and catalogue the flaws. He wasn't fighting for jobs and social justice. He was a shake-down artist.

In 2005, I described it in the Sun-Times this way:

"The Rev. Jackson's particular trademark iniquity has always been The Big Threat—the specter of a boycott, or picket, or other race-based corporate embarrassment that has kept countless CEOs up at night and inspired countless fat checks cut to Operation PUSH to make all the trouble go away.

"Those boycotts and strikes rarely happen — they're not supposed to, because when they do they're not that effective. As with any other kind of extortion, the idea is to get the payoff, not to burn down the grocery store."

But that is not the takeaway for Rev. Jackson. In writing his obituary, the moment in his long life that resonated with me is when, denied use of the Greenville Public Library in 1960, he returned with seven friends and got themselves arrested, becoming the Greenville Eight, going to jail for the then radical notion that a Black man should be able to check out a book from the public library. Greenville closed down its entire library system rather than comply.

That lone fact — the city shutting all the libraries, for everyone, and blaming Black residents for having the effrontery to want to read books as being the cause of this misfortune, is a reminder of the society that Jackson found himself in, and that we find ourselves in, still. He was a human being with flaws, as are we all, but he engaged with that society all his life, never quit, and succeeded far more than most.