Rev. Jesse Jackson never stopped lifting me — and the country — up

One of the great strengths of our movement is that our leaders do more than inspire young people — they keep the door open for them. The leaders who carried forward the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood that movements survive only when the next generation is welcomed in. Leaders like Joseph Lowery, the Rev. James Orange, the Rev. Earl Shinholster, Andrew Young and many others lived that commitment.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson carried it farther than most. He gave time — minutes, hours, sometimes days — to younger people trying to find their way.

When I first raised my hand to volunteer, I was 14. I was short for my age. I had a bad stutter. But I heard that a man who had taken risks alongside Dr. King was running for president, and I wanted to help.

I helped lead Youth for Jackson in my county. We registered voters. We believed we could change things. And while I was giving my stump speech around my county on his behalf, I decided I had to conquer my stutter. I set my mind to it until I figured it out.

He asked to meet me when he came to speak at Stanford University. He treated young organizers like we belonged in the room.

In my early 20s, after I had been kicked out of college for organizing protests, I walked into his home in Washington, D.C. He was serving as a shadow senator. The topic was winning voting rights for Washington, D.C. — a perennial and yet always urgent battle. We talked strategy. He listened more than he spoke.

Years later, when the pressure mounted while I was leading the NAACP, he was still the person I would turn to first for advice and quiet moments. And when things got especially hot, he would just look and say: “Flood rules. Eyes open. Mouth shut. Keep stepping forward.”

We drove out to Rockford together because we heard 3-year-old girls who had witnessed a police shooting were losing their hair from trauma. We arrived from the funeral of a Black teenager beaten to death with two-by-fours in the streets of Chicago — some said for crossing into the wrong territory, others because hateful people believed he was gay. Jackson went where the pain was — to help people heal, to help them find their power to move forward and to push all of us forward again.

When voting rights came under assault, he did the same. When immigrant rights came under attack, he did the same. When working people of any color came under attack, he did the same.

In my 50s, Dave Chappelle and I sat on either side of Jackson as we watched Kamala Harris, a Black woman, accept our party’s nomination for president of the United States. It felt more than appropriate that that moment — like President Barack Obama accepting victory on election night years earlier — happened in Jackson’s town of Chicago.

Across every chapter, he was there. Not as a symbol. As a worker in the struggle.

The lesson was simple. Show up. Keep going. Hold the door open for others.

That is how movements are reborn and rebuilt — even after setbacks, even when the odds feel like they are mounting against us. That is how freedom moves forward.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.