eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307775849 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/29/2010 |
| Series: | Great Lives |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Sales rank: | 898,161 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
1
Keeping Hope Alive
IT WAS ANOTHER hot, sticky summer night in Atlanta, Georgia. But the heat was not the main thing on the minds of the several thousand people at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in the Omni Coliseum. They were waiting anxiously to hear the man who had dominated the Democratic race for president and had captured the imagination of millions of Americans. Everyone knew by now that this man would not be their candidate for president, but whether he would enthusiastically support the winning ticket was a matter of great concern. The man they were waiting for was Jesse Louis Jackson.
Jackson was not just another runner-up for the nomination. In a field of seven candidates, he was one of only two to survive the long, grueling round of state primaries. The seven million votes he had earned had not been enough to win the nomination. That prize was about to go to his chief rival, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. There had been high hopes that Dukakis would choose Jesse as his running mate, but he was passed over for vice president, too. Jesse had been disappointed by the way he felt Dukakis’s campaign team had ignored him and his supporters. There had been a peace meeting between the two men the previous day, but there were still doubts in many people’s minds about how strongly Jackson would support Dukakis and his running mate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas. In another few minutes, the crowd in the Omni Coliseum, and the rest of America watching the convention on television, would know where Jesse Jackson stood.
The first Jackson to step out on the speaker’s rostrum, however, was neither the candidate nor his wife, but their five children. They spoke passionately about their father and his achievements. After a brief film about the candidate was shown, Jesse Jr., Jackson’s eldest son, introduced “a man who fights against the odds, who lives against the odds, our dad, Jesse Jackson.”
Thunderous applause and cheering erupted throughout the hall as the six-foot-two, 200-pound candidate strode up to the rostrum. With his neat moustache, dark, piercing eyes, and strikingly handsome features, the 46-year-old Jackson looked as much a movie star as a presidential candidate. Chants of “Jesse! Jesse! Jesse!” filled the air. As the band played “America the Beautiful” and then “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the tall black man mounted the podium and pumped his fist three times for victory.
Minutes passed before the crowd quieted down. Then Jesse Jackson did a gracious thing. Instead of launching into his speech, he introduced a frail, elderly black woman seated in the stands. She was Rosa Parks, and Jackson called her “the mother of the Civil-Rights Movement.” Some thirty years earlier, Rosa Parks had earned that title when she took a seat in the front of a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to move when the bus driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white person. She was arrested for breaking a local law that required blacks to sit in the back of public buses. Her arrest led to a yearlong boycott of Montgomery buses led by the then unknown Martin Luther King, Jr. King went on to become the leader of America’s Civil-Rights Movement. He was assassinated in 1968.
Mrs. Parks stood and acknowledged the crowd’s ovation. After she sat down again, Jesse began to speak to the delegates in loud, ringing words. “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lies only a few miles from us tonight,” he began. “Tonight he must feel good as he looks down upon us. We sit here together, a rainbow coalition—the sons and daughters of slave-masters, and the sons and daughters of slaves—sitting together around a common table, to decide the direction of our party and our country.
“Common ground!” he exclaimed. “That’s the challenge of our party tonight.” Jackson spoke of unity not just within the Democratic party, but among all Americans, regardless of creed and color. Then he saluted Dukakis, the man who had beat him for the nomination. “His foreparents came to America on immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America on slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are in the same boat tonight.
“America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth,” he told his audience. He spoke of his childhood in Greenville, South Carolina, and how his grandmother made a patchwork quilt to keep him warm, because she couldn’t afford a blanket.
“With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture,” he explained. “Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt.”
One by one, he addressed the special interest groups of America—farmers, workers, women, students, blacks, Hispanics, conservatives, and liberals. He told each of them that “your patch is not big enough … your point of view is not enough. But don’t despair. Be as wise as my grandma. Pull the patches and pieces together, bound by a common thread. When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground … we the people can win.”
Jackson’s speech, full of power and conviction, lasted for fifty-one minutes. When he drew toward the end he looked directly into the television cameras and addressed one constituency in particular. It was the one he had fought for and served long before he ever thought of running for president—the poor.
“Wherever you are tonight, you can make it,” he told them. “Hold your head high. Stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint.… Keep hope alive!”
Jesse then left the podium and made his way through a sea of people. The convention hall resounded with cheers and applause. Those who weren’t cheering or yelling were crying, for Jackson had moved them deeply with a speech that many were already calling one of the greatest in American political history. Former President Jimmy Carter later told a reporter that it was the best speech ever given at a convention, “certainly in my lifetime.” Grown men were seen choking back tears. One white delegate from Mississippi had his arms around his black friend, the state delegate chairman. “When a man like Jesse speaks out for you,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes, “you really believe you can achieve something.”
Jesse knew of what he spoke. Everyone could achieve something, be somebody, no matter who they were. Jackson believed it, because he had lived it. The speech had been an eloquent summing up of not just his beliefs, but of his entire life. The journey he had made from a rickety house in Greenville, South Carolina, to the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, Georgia, had been a long and difficult one. But for Jesse Jackson it had been a worthy struggle, one that had shaped him into a man who could aspire to be president of the United States.