‘I am somebody,’ Jackson said. He was right

Executive editor, Guardian Opinion

To meet the Rev Jesse Jackson was to meet a colossus. He was big in aura and grand in stature. Something radiated from him like a sheen: a drive, a self assurance, a fixity of purpose. He had vision, sharp intelligence and he had craft. Oh boy, did he have craft.

There was an elongated moment in a long interview I did with him in 2007, after a day of watching him talk and meet people during a visit to the UK, when I looked down at my notepad, listening all the while to his sonorous voice. It was his private voice, quieter, shorn of the performative element that marked him in public. I looked up and saw his eyes were shut, his head had lolled: he was pretty much asleep. He knew the message he wanted to send and how to impart it. He was literally doing it in his sleep.

For those of us for whom Martin Luther King and his lieutenants were heroic figures from literary and TV history, a visit from a titan of the US civil rights movement was akin to touching the hem of a guru’s garment. He came and spoke at an all-seats-taken, queue-around-the-block event organised by Operation Black Vote. And after 10 minutes of his address, part lectern exposition, part cadence-littered sermon, the reason for much of the fuss and awe became apparent.

“I am somebody.” Shorn of context, the sentence sounds self evident, perhaps trite. Adapted from a 1950s poem by Rev William Holmes Borders Sr, Jackson made it his mantra.

When he led that chant, as he often did, in front of thousands of........

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