Jesse Jackson Goes Home During Black History Month: He Can Rest in Peace because he Did his Job

Jesse Jakson has been a fighter against American racism all his life and the world knows that racism goes back to American slavery where they captured millions of Africans in their own homes in our continent and shipped them to the US as slaves with millions perishing in the sea.

His Rainbow Coalition, a bold alliance of Blacks, Whites, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and LGBTQ people, helped pave the way for a more progressive Democratic Party.

“Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow – red, yellow, brown, Black and White – and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” Jackson once said.

Through his eloquence and singular drive, Jackson didn’t just keep hope alive for himself. His dream of a vibrant, multiracial America still inspires millions of Americans today.

Jackson was once asked if it hurt that he didn’t become the nation’s first Black president.

“No, it doesn’t,” he told a Guardian columnist, “because I was a trailblazer, I was a pathfinder. I had to deal with doubt and cynicism and fears about a Black person running. There were Black scholars writing papers about why I was wasting my time. Even Blacks said a Black couldn’t win.”

Jackson smashed the perception that a Black person couldn’t be a viable presidential candidate. Some pundits predicted he would be outclassed by his more experienced political opponents during the presidential debates. They grudgingly recognized his charisma, but many never gave him credit for his analytical ability and political savvy.

The child prodigy who was a double outcast

“Jesse was an unusual kind of fella, even when he was just learning to talk,” Noah Robinson, Jackson’s father, told The New York Times in 1984. “He would say, ‘I’m going to lead people through the rivers of the water.’’’

Jackson’s signature line, “I Am Somebody,” which he often chanted during speeches, was aimed as much at himself as it was to his audience. Marshall Frady, who wrote “Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson,” said Jackson was prodigiously gifted but was plagued by “chasmic insecurities despite all he’s done.”

In 1984, Jesse Jackson negotiated the release of 48 Cuban and Cuban-American prisoners held in Cuba and of Navy Lieutenant Robert Goodman, an African-American pilot held hostage in Syria.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, left, and President Fidel Castro speak to reporters at Jose Marti Airport in Havana after Castro released Cuban and American political prisoners to Jackson in this June 28, 1984.

When Obama delivered his election-night victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park in 2008 to a massive crowd of cheering onlookers, the cameras caught Jackson looking on, tears in his eyes.

“I cried because I thought about those who made it possible who were not there,” Jackson later explained. “People who paid a real price: Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer… those in the movement in the South.”

America the so-called greatest country in the world was built on the backs of millions of Africans they captured and brought to the US to produce everything they needed.

It was the work of African American slaves that brought development and industrialized the US while all the work white folks in the US did was to brutalize and kill those niggers as they called them. But African Americans let the white racists know that they were going to fight and end racism.

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If they got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power”

Stokely Carmichael

Here is Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton who was killed in 1989

After he was shot before his death, Newton spoke his last words, saying, “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”

Then Martin Luther King and Malcolm X came up and told America that they and the African Americans in the US had a dream to end racism in the United States.

And then we have revolutionary fighters like Angela Davis who helped to fight racism in the US and take the fight to another level for human rights across the globe.

Harriet Tubman who organized the Underground Railway to help slaves flee to freedom wherever they could.

Adongo Ogony is a Human Rights Activist and a Writer who lives in Toronto, Canada