Jesse Jackson, slowed at 82, is still showing up and keeping hope alive

With determined effort, he would stab his fork into a piece of fruit, then lift it slowly toward his mouth. Five seconds, 10 seconds, finally his lips would part and the fruit would go in. Sometimes it got stuck there, caught halfway, but he kept working at it, keeping hope alive, as he has been doing for all of his long and singular life.

The room was closed to the public, leaving Jackson alone with a nurse and two aides, Shelley Davis and Christopher Hodges, who called themselves handlers. That meant taking care of a range of tasks, from arranging their boss’s toiletries in the morning to scheduling his trips and visitors to translating his every word. Back in the 1980s, when he twice ran for president, Jackson was the political bard of America, whose soaring riffs on the lives of forgotten people evoked the poetry of Langston Hughes or Philip Levine and the wailing saxophone soul of John Coltrane. It was not just the call-and-response chants of “I am somebody!” and “Keep hope alive!,” but the word portraits of the maids who “catch the early bus” and “change the beds you slept in.”

Now words are slow to form, one by one, each a struggle, soft, guttural, blurring, indistinct, his mouth barely moving.

But his mind is still active. When Davis and Hodges were asked what hours they worked for the reverend, a twinkle came to Jackson’s eyes. He said something. What was it?

“He said 9 to 5,” translated Davis, and he and Hodges broke out laughing. Of all the things Jesse Jackson is and has been, a 9-to-5 man is not one of them. Last year, he officially retired from his longtime position as the head of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, though he preferred to say that he didn’t retire but “pivoted.” And even with Parkinson’s, the work goes on.

“We have never done 9 to 5,” said Davis, who has worked for Jackson for 24 years and once Googled “Prince Charles’s butler” to learn how to best do his job.

“Even when he was in the hospital [with covid, in 2021] he was not 9 to 5,” added Hodges. “We’d get phone calls day and night. You know, even when we leave, we never really leave. This person wants to talk to the reverend. That person. It never ends.”

Along with his ability to entrance with words, Jackson’s other dominant characteristic has been his willingness to show up, year after year. If it was not literally 24-7, it was close. If there was a civil rights rally, Jackson was there. If union workers were picketing, he would join the line. If an Indian nation was fighting a desecration of its lands, he joined their struggle. He was with civil rights activists, peace activists, labor activists, climate activists, human rights activists, anti-nuclear activists. Whatever was going on in what he saw as the struggle, he was there.

He was in Selma in 1965 the week of the bloody police action against civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He was in the parking lot of the Lorraine Hotel on that early April night in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. And he was in Chicago’s Grant Park, holding an American flag and with tears streaming down his cheeks, on the night in November 2008 when Barack Obama was elected the first Black president.

For most of Jackson’s adult life, Chicago, the host city of the Democratic convention, was where he showed up most. Of all the luminaries with Windy City connections who appeared at the United Center this week, including Barack Obama and talk show icon Oprah Winfrey, only former first lady Michelle Obama could make a stronger claim to Chicago, and she by only a few months. The South Side of Chicago has been Jackson’s home base for six decades, since he arrived in 1964, the year of Michelle’s birth, to study at the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Jackson did not speak at this Chicago convention, but he was there, and his legacy was everywhere, if underappreciated. Early on the first night, before prime time but with the arena nearly full, he was pushed onstage in his wheelchair by two of his sons and his most famous disciple, the Rev. Al Sharpton. The thunderous applause went on for several minutes. Cameras panned to members of the audience in tears. Jackson’s face lit up, his eyes sparkling, his puffed cheeks rising from a broad smile. He lifted his hands and gave a thumbs-up sign.

And then he was wheeled off, and the convention moved on, leaving him behind. It was on convention eve, out at the commodious Rainbow PUSH headquarters at the corner of 50th and Drexel Boulevard on Chicago’s South Side, that Jackson’s life and contributions were fully recognized. Hundreds of national activists and Chicago citizens filled the hall as dozens of speakers from the progressive movement paid tribute. “The progressive caucus arose from the vision of Jesse Jackson,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). “We are here on your shoulders, Reverend.” Jackson, in a blue suit and paisley tie, sat in his wheelchair at the front of the middle-right aisle, taking it all in, unable to show his appreciation with more than a thin smile.

While he was never a party insider, Jackson trained a platoon of Black women organizers who rose through the ranks to high leadership positions. Donna Brazile, who twice led the Democratic National Committee, worked on his 1984 campaign. Leah Daughtry, another former Jackson aide, ran the conventions in 2008 and 2016. And Minyon Moore, who worked on Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns, was the chairperson of this year’s convention. “Reverend would always say: ‘They stole Minyon. They stole Donna,’” Davis recalled at Thursday’s breakfast. “Anyone that started with him, he’d smile and say they were stolen from him.”

“David stole Minyon,” Jackson said, overhearing Davis’s explanation, referring to David Wilhelm, who began with Jackson in 1988 and took Moore with him when he went on to help run Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign four years later.

The restaurant conversation was then interrupted by the appearance of Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), whose aide had arranged a brief stop-in through handler Davis.

“Hey, Rev., how you doing?” she said, moving behind his wheelchair to give Jackson a hug. “So good to see you. You know Chicago is the city that raised me. Cabrini-Green on the North Side. Granddaddy had a little church on the South Side. So I owe you. I owe you for so much.”

Pressley went on, reminiscing to the group: “You know, when I was an aide to Senator [John] Kerry, or when I was on the Boston City Council, I was in a lot of rooms with Reverend Jackson. And he would always acknowledge me, turn to me as the only other person of color in the room. He always made me feel seen and made sure they listened to me.”

They posed for a few cellphone pictures. Jackson smiled. “Always handsome,” Pressley said. The congresswoman said she had to move on, she was going to an interfaith vigil calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.

In the old days, before his disease slowed him down, Jackson would have been there, too, he said. His voice was still blurred, but he had something more he wanted to say. He was against all violence. Violence on any side. Violence only hurt the cause, he said. And so did any expression of antisemitism. And one more thing. “Netanyahu is responsible for the spread of antisemitism more than [Louis] Farrakhan,” he said, as Davis translated. The Chicago-based leader of the Nation of Islam was known for making antisemitic statements. “But Netanyahu’s bombs killed thousands of people,” Jackson said of the Israeli prime minister. “Farrakhan never killed anyone.”

Davis then announced that someone else was at the front of the restaurant waiting to see him: the representative from the South Korean consulate. Jackson stuck his fork into a hunk of melon and slowly raised it to his mouth. The piece was too big. He had to put it down, and his nurse cut it for him.