From childhood through my journalism career, Jesse Jackson remained a commanding force

I was a teen when I first met the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Well, I didn’t really meet him, I just entered his civil rights orbit, not knowing this was the man the Black community would call to challenge racism, inequity and lack of representation for the next five decades.

It was late '70s. My parents had moved us from the Near South Side to southwest suburban Woodridge, enrolling us kids at a then-predominantly white high school.

Black families were just beginning to integrate the area, and Downers Grove South High was experiencing racial strife. A girl named Tina moved there from the South Side, and this new friend couldn’t hang out on weekends because her grandmother dragged her to Operation PUSH every Saturday.

Her granny invited us to come along, saying with the strife at the school, it would be good for us kids to hear from this civil rights leader battling racism and discrimination. Tina said there were cute boys there. Off we went.

Our other friends eventually peeled off, but every Saturday until Tina moved, I was listening intently to Jackson assuring me that “I Am Somebody!”

Fast forward. It’s 1984. I’m attending the predominantly white University of Iowa, and Jackson is the second Black candidate ever to run for U.S. president. He’s winning statewide primaries and caucuses — the first Black candidate to do so.

I remember watching his campaign speeches with some of our small, tight-knit Black student population, jokingly chanting his slogan, "Run, Jesse, Run," while believing he didn’t have a snowball’s chance. But the joke was on us. He finished third in the Democratic primary, garnering 18% of the popular vote and registering 1 million new voters.

It’s 1987 now. I finish grad school, get my dream job in journalism and am watching Jackson run again as a major contender for the 1988 election. He registers a whopping 7 million new voters and builds a "Rainbow Coalition" that propels him to rarefied air — a second-place finish in the primary that put respect on his name. His famous "Keep Hope Alive" speech at the Democratic National Convention brings me and my Black journalist friends watching together nearly to tears.

Before and after that historic campaign, throughout the '80s and '90s, there were no beats I was assigned where I didn’t encounter the man our Black community simply called "Jesse." On the race and social justice and urban affairs beats, he was the required interview. But he also was a constant on education or politics, housing and policing, business and finance, nonprofits, sports — always there agitating, demanding equity and insisting economic justice was absolutely social justice.

Unrelenting activism

Lots of our Black middle class owed corporate climbs and successful entrepreneurship to his unrelenting activism — Rainbow PUSH boycotts forcing corporations to open exclusionary jobs and contracts, distributorships, franchises and board memberships. In those days, no company wanted to see Jesse leading a picket line outside their offices. His successful actions against Ford Motor Co., Anheuser-Busch, Major League Baseball, Nike and Mitsubishi are just a few I followed and wrote about.

Then there was his international diplomacy. No one could bring ’em home like Jesse could as he traveled the globe, securing freedom for U.S. servicemen, international political prisoners and hostages. I was glued to news feeds following Jesse with U.S. Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, captured in Syria, in 1983; and U.S. Army Sgts. Andrew Ramirez and Christopher Stone, along with Spc. Steven Gonzales, captured in Yugoslavia, in 1999. Soon after, I erupted in cheers with everyone else the moments Jesse landed with them on American soil.

His advocacy extended to my industry, which historically has little problem highlighting inequity unless fingers are pointed at it. Knowing it mattered in coverage of our community, he fiercely championed newsroom diversity. Many legendary Chicago journalists had jobs saved or promotions fueled by discreet letters or phone calls from Jesse, or picketing. As I was graduating from college, he was leading an ’85 boycott of WBBM-TV, Channel 2, after the city’s only Black anchor, Harry Porterfield, was replaced when the station brought back Bill Kurtis to reunite him with Walter Jacobson. The boycott led to the historic hiring of the first Black general manager of a network-owned station — and a young Lester Holt who succeeded the duo years later.

What the Black community knew was that when racial trouble came, you called Jesse. We knew societal powers-that-be did not want to contend with this civil rights leader and the public excoriation he and Rainbow PUSH brought. Through the National Association of Black Journalists at the national level, and as a longtime officer of the NABJ-Chicago chapter, we partnered for decades with Jesse on issues of newsroom inequity and coverage bias.

When his personal troubles came to light, initial judgment faded quickly in Chicago’s Black community. We were forgiving, in a "He who is without sin …" kind of way, accepting Jesse as a complicated figure — as history’s brilliant and famous usually are, a little messiness to be found in all closets. Certainly, it was so with his mentor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose calling changed the trajectory of a nation. And so it was with Jesse, last of the great civil rights icons, whom history will measure by his calling that continued well into his debilitating illness.

Invited to visit him at home those final weeks, a Jackson family friend said she chose not to, preferring to remember the 1970s, afro-haired, dashiki-garbed, rafters-shaking orator who mesmerized an army of volunteers when Rainbow PUSH was still on 79th Street, before moving to 930 E. 50th St.

As for me, I'll remember the man who took me under his wings as the rookie lone reporter covering Rainbow PUSH every Saturday morning in the early ’90s, giving me scoops that raised my profile, inspired other outlets to start showing up and seeded a decades-long journalist-source relationship. My archive of stories of and photos with Jesse are immense, likely the same for many Black journalists of my generation. One sticks out, however, and I was driven to find and share it the day he died. It was the late '90s. O.J. Simpson had been found not guilty of the 1994 murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, after lawyer Johnnie Cochran famously stated in his ’95 trial, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

Half the country applauded the verdict; the other half abhorred it.

Cochran shot to fame, making plans to set up shop in cities including Chicago. It was a weekend. I got a call from Jesse telling me to get down to Midway Airport right away.

"Why?" I stammered. "Do you want an exclusive with Johnnie Cochran or don't you?" Jesse asked.

I hightailed it to Midway, met and interviewed the legendary Cochran and wrote a story that was picked up nationally. I’m grinning like a Cheshire cat in the photo at the scoop I'd just gotten. That was the Jesse I knew, the Jesse I’ll remember.

Now when racial trouble comes, who we gonna call?

Maudlyne Ihejirika is the director of Journalism & Storytelling at the Field Foundation of Illinois. She worked at the Sun-Times for 29 years.