Having covered the Rev. Jesse Jackson for more than a half-century, I have an insider’s understanding of why thousands of people lined up to wait patiently last week in Chicago to pay their final respects to the departed civil rights icon.

Jackson knew when and how to defy power, but he also knew how to cajole the powerful to make room at the table for the excluded.

Of all the memories I have gathered in the past 50 years, one stood out on this solemn occasion: Black Expo, an annual convention put on by Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s to showcase Black businesses as well as music, arts and other endeavors.

Black Expos were held in Chicago until 1976, and other cities put them on as well, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Atlanta. But the one that stands out in my mind was in Chicago in 1971.

My fellow young reporters and I were amused to see Mayor Richard J. Daley pictured on the front page of the Tribune with his hand clasped with Jackson’s in a classic “grip-and-grin” shot.

But with a difference.

“Look at their hands,” a friend pointed out. Indeed, this was not a traditional handshake.

As the camera flashed, Jackson had hooked his thumb with Daley’s into what had been popularized by my generation as a the “Black Power” handshake.

Whether Daley noticed, it didn’t seem to matter. As a practiced politician, he was not about to let a good........

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