What Reverend Jesse Jackson Means to Me

... and what he can teach us in the age of MAGA christo-fascism

In recent years debilitating disease has virtually halted the remarkable activism of Reverend Jesse Jackson that has contributed so much to the quest for justice in America. Like so many in my generation, my memories of him abound, from his leadership of protests in the public square to his historic campaigns for the presidency of the United States. But, as I recall, the first time I actually encountered him in the flesh was in the late 1970’s. I was standing in line outside an Eastside Manhattan funeral parlor waiting to pay my respects to some public figure. Surprisingly, I don’t recall who that figure was. What I do recall is Jackson’s tall, regal, ramrod straight figure in an exquisitely tailored midnight blue suit striding through the hushed crowd with a fluid, leonine gait. His soaring self-confidence and sense of personal power were palpable. Man, was I impressed!

That’s the recollection of Jesse Jackson that stayed with me through the years as he led marches, delivered stirring orations and pithy, inspirational slogans such as, “You are somebody!” and “Keep hope alive!” But it was in early 1984 that Jesse Jackson did something that left an indelible impression on me far beyond my New York City sighting of him, even beyond everything he’d yet said and done.

On December 3, 1983, the jet flown by twenty-seven year-old Navy Lt. Robert Goodman was shot down over Lebanon during a bombing raid targeting Syrian forces, who took him prisoner. The fervent efforts of President Ronald Reagan to secure Goodman’s freedom and the equally fervent rejection of those efforts by the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, dominated the international headlines. Enter Jesse Jackson. A man of considerable political savvy and unstinting boldness, Jackson determined that he might accomplish what the president of the United States and his diplomatic corps could not.

Undaunted by Reagan’s attempts to discourage his involvement, Jackson assembled a delegation of religious leaders and flew to Syria to negotiate for Goodman’s release. Prior to Jackson’s meeting with al-Assad, Syria’s foreign minister had informed him that Goodman’s release was contingent upon the United States ending its flights over Syrian-held areas in Lebanon, a demand Reagan refused. Nonetheless, with his characteristic boldness, somehow Jackson managed to secure a meeting with al-Assad on January 2, 1984. Two days later, Reverend Jesse Jackson was on his way home with the freed Goodman in tow.

Publicly, Jackson said that al-Assad released Goodman simply because he calculated it to be in his political interest. Years later, however, after we had developed a personal friendship, Jackson told me that al-Assad capitulated because he’d spoken to him not as the head of a nation, but as he would to any brother on the street. “You know Ronald Reagan would love to kick your ass, don’t you?” he said he told him with a grin. “And if you don’t let Goodman go, he’s going to kick your ass good. So,” he laughingly declared, “save your ass and let me take him home!” Al-Assad, also laughing by now replied, “Okay, Jesse! Let’s work it out.”

Jackson’s success as a diplomat without portfolio when all other efforts had failed was astounding. But it is what happened next that is still holds me in awe.

Reagan welcomed Goodman home with a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. Jackson was invited to stand behind him with the airman. Reagan, no friend of the civil rights movement and unwilling to further bolster Jackson’s reputation, made no provision for him to speak despite his central role in the drama. When Reagan finished speaking, Jackson did something that I marvel about to this day. This son of a teenaged mother, born and raised in the bowels of the segregated South, who had spent more time in the streets than in the halls of power, casually stepped to the presidential podium, seized the microphone and, to the shock of the frowning Reagan, addressed America with brilliant extended remarks. With his usual eloquence Jackson declared, in part,

[I]t is significant that we were in Damascus, for one reason that many of us identify with Damascus is that a man traveling along that road many years ago fell off of a horse and was knocked unconscious. When he awakened, he saw a new light. It was the Apostle Paul, and because he saw that new light, the world has never been the same since. As it were, December of this past year, Lieutenant Robert Goodman was knocked from a plane and knocked unconscious. The Syrians had the right to kill him; they did not. They nursed him back to good health. And in due time, they released him. And thus, we see another light on this day.

I was dumbstruck. Before the entire world Reverend Jesse Jackson had actually bogarted the microphone of the President of the United States.

In truth, I really don’t recall what Jackson said that day; I cribbed the above snippet of his speech from the internet. But what I do recall is the amazing spectacle of a black man boldly refusing to be relegated to silence by the most powerful person in the world. I have never forgotten that scene. To this day, I am excited every time I think of Jackson’s Rose Garden coup.

Yet he wasn’t finished freeing Americans from foreign tyrants. Shortly after Goodman’s release, Jackson negotiated the release of twenty-two Americans in Cuba; in 1991 he persuaded Saddam Hussein to release hostages in Iran prior to the Persian Gulf War; and during the 1999 war in Kosovo, he negotiated the release of prisoners being held in the former Yugoslavia.

Ironically, years later Jesse Jackson and I came to develop a warm personal friendship. In 2011 his son, Jesse Jackson, Jr., recommended he read my book, The Politics of Jesus. To my pleasant surprise, Reverend Jackson reached out to share that he carried the book everywhere in the same way, he said, as Martin Luther King carried Howard Thurman’s classic, Jesus and the Disinherited, in his travels. Since then, over gratifying hours of energetic conversation we have exchanged ideas and insights, both political and theological, and bonded as black men committed to family and to building a world of justice. I found Jesse Jackson to be one of the most brilliant analytical minds I have ever encountered.

But there is one more example of his diplomatic magic that I must mention, one that I had the privilege of personally witnessing. It received little notice in the press, but in some ways it is more significant than Goodman’s rescue.

Although the West African nation of Gambia had not executed a prisoner in thirty years, in August of 2012 Yahya Jammah, the since deposed president of Gambia, for some reason announced that he planned to execute all of Gambia’s forty-seven death row prisoners within a month, no matter the disposition of their cases. A deeply concerned Jackson decided to travel to Gambia to try to save the condemned. He invited me and several clergymen to accompany him.

We were greeted at Banjul Airport by a group of Gambia’s highest government officials, including the chief justice of its Supreme Court, a clear function of Jackson’s heroic stature throughout much of Africa. In a convoy of black Mercedes Benz limousines, replete with an armed security detail, we were whisked to the office of the president. After introductions and protocol niceties, Reverend Jackson asked us to leave him alone with the president. Jammah was widely considered a megalomaniacal despot who, apparently believing his political decisions were divinely inspired, consistently refused to reconsider them as a show of his strength and wisdom. Nonetheless, Jackson emerged from the meeting in less than an hour having persuaded Jammah to declare a total moratorium on capital punishment, which effectively spared the lives of the remaining thirty-nine death row inmates (unfortunately, nine were executed before our arrival). Jammah also released to Jackson two incarcerated American citizens, one of whom who had been sentenced to death for distributing literature critical of Jammah.

Reverend Jesse Jackson has been an untiring fighter for human rights and dignity since he joined Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama in 1965. As with many public figures, he has had his share of controversies, missteps, and sometimes serious mistakes, but none can overshadow his extraordinary record as an international human and civil rights leader and political activist. For more than half a century he has fought for policies to ensure equal economic, social and political rights for African Americans, women and same-gender loving folks, and has been a stalwart for Palestinian rights. His fight for policies to ensure equal minority access to the ballot box has significantly impacted voter registration, participation, and political representation for black folks and other minority groups. His successful advocacy of election rule changes during his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination ultimately ensured more equitable vote distribution, without which Barack Obama could not have become America’s first black president.

His untiring efforts to make a better world have touched the lives of millions, both at home and abroad. But what means most to me about Jesse Jackson, what I will always cherish deeply, is that he demonstrated for me, and for so many others, that indefatigable moral commitment to justice coupled with unerring courage can be as powerful, if not more powerful, than the highest soaring hatred and the most entrenched systemic injustice. I believe that regardless of one’s politics and beliefs, the activist legacy of Reverend Jesse Jackson provides a crucial inspiring lesson for all people of goodwill as we face the awful onslaught of christo-fascism and political repression upon our Constitution, our democratic institutions, and everything that is fair and just in American life.