It was his bus, his campaign bus. This was in the spring of 1988, the weekend before the Indiana presidential primary.
Jackson had agreed to an interview with me, one of the few extended sit-downs he would do in Indiana.
It was the back end of what had been a heady time for both Jackson and America. In what was his second run for the presidency, Jackson had experienced surprising success in the early primaries and caucuses. Before the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination ended, Jackson would win 11 primaries or caucuses.
For a brief moment when Jackson was the frontrunner, Americans seriously contemplated for the first time the possibility that a Black American could be president.
By the time he came to Indiana, though, the more traditional elements of the Democratic Party were coalescing behind Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, a competent man with all the charisma of a bath towel.
Jackson met me at the front of his bus, engulfing my not-small paw in his larger one with a firm handshake before leading me back through the large bus.
When we arrived at the rear, where he had a makeshift office set up, I stopped to survey the surroundings, alert to the symbolism of a Black man transforming the back of a bus, once a site of oppression, into a manifestation of power.
I looked at Jackson to see if he was conscious of the setting’s symbolism.
He smiled.
He was.
When we sat down to talk, he reclined, fatigue rolling off him like a spring mist. I’d done my research on him—tracking the successes, tragedies and controversies that had marked his rise to prominence.
Still, I didn’t know what to expect from him. Observers’ perceptions of him were so divided—he inspired either adulation or detestation—that it was hard to peer through the partisan, ideological or personal fog to discern a clear picture.
What I learned almost immediately was that Jackson possessed perhaps the most agile mind I’d ever encountered. He grasped implications and complexities faster than anyone else with whom I’d ever talked.
But there was depth to him, too. As the conversation rolled on, it became clear that he was a more complex and complicated figure than either his supporters or his critics realized.
Because of the circumstances, I pressed on the possibility of a breakthrough in the logjam that was America’s tragic history regarding race. He grappled with the question while continuing to insist that he was more than simply the Black candidate—that he saw himself as the voice and the champion of all who were dispossessed.
He mentioned the custodians and catering workers who gathered in doorways to listen to his speeches, convinced that he was the only national leader who spoke for them.
“That’s powerful stuff,” he said softly, wearily. “Humbling.”
What surprised me was his vulnerability. I had expected, given his oversize presence onstage, a considerable amount of bravado—and there was that.
But there also was uncertainty, even insecurity.
When I asked about his evolving position on abortion, his speech slowed as he wrestled with his own thoughts.
The out-of-wedlock child of a single mother, denied by his biological father and disparaged by his stepfather, he said he saw the issue from more than one perspective. He wanted women to have control over their own bodies, he explained, but he was aware that his own mother’s life might have been less complicated if she had chosen not to give birth to him.
What struck me most during the interview was his humanity, the combination of great gifts and gnawing doubts that defined him.
I wasn’t surprised by much that followed that interview—his often baffled attempts to find a path forward from his last run for the presidency, the revelations of marital infidelity on his part and his complicated relationship with the Black leader who traveled the path Jackson blazed to become president, Barack Obama.
When I think these days of Jesse Jackson and that long-ago conversation, I do so humbly. Perhaps without intending to, Jackson reminded me both then and now that even huge historical changes are made by human beings much like the rest of us.
Jesse Jackson died Feb. 17 after a battle with Parkinson’s. He was 84.
May he rest in peace.
