The
year was 1960. At home in Greenville, South Carolina, during a break in his
first semester at North Carolina A&T University, he went to the “Black”
library in town to check out a book he needed to write a term paper. The
librarian told him that they didn’t have it in their collection, but assured
him that her friend, a librarian at the “white” library, would break policy and
allow him to take the book. At the larger, more modern library across town, he was
attempting to check out the book when a police officer forcibly ejected him from
the library and threw him down on the curb. Jackson told me that he sat and
cried. But he later joined with seven other students to form what historians call
the “Greenville Eight,” which led an ultimately victorious movement to
integrate library services in the city.
At
North Carolina A&T, Jackson led protests against police brutality and
organized with a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In
1965, he interrupted his graduate studies at the University of Chicago to lead
a delegation down to Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery marches
for voting rights. It was there that Jackson met Dr. Martin Luther King, and
earned a position on his staff. For the next half century, despite the risks
and pain associated with civil rights activism, Jackson led efforts to
integrate an apartheid economy. His fight against redlining, hiring
discrimination, and exclusion of racial minorities from trade unions earned him
the nickname the “apostle
of economics.” He led protests and boycotts against
corporations like General
Motors and Burger
King,
and the giants of Silicon
Valley, securing thousands of jobs for Black workers and
millions of dollars of ancillary benefits for Black professionals and
entrepreneurs.
In
the 1980s, the Democratic Party was also in desperate need of reform. One might
say that Jackson helped Democrats become “woke.” When party leaders, including
Sen. Edward Kennedy and Sen. Walter Mondale, endorsed white opponents of Harold
Washington in the Democratic primary for Chicago mayor in 1983, Jackson
searched for a Black leader to run for president as a challenge to the
“indifference and mediocrity of the white establishment within the party.” When
they all declined, Jackson himself ran. The mainstream press predicted Jackson
would register as a mere asterisk in the 1984 race, but he defied expectations
by winning nearly one out of every five votes. In 1988, he outperformed Joe
Biden and Al Gore to take second place in the Democratic primary, ushering
millions of new voters into the party. “We built a multiracial, multilingual,
multigendered coalition,” Jackson said to me, flashing a smile.