“Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” with an introduction by Al Sharpton, c.2026, Melville House Publishing, $20.99, 175 pages
Even as a young man, the Rev. Jesse Jackson was “a force of nature,” according to “Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview and Other Conversations,” the newest title in the Melville House Publishing anthology series that compiles and curates interviews with historic figures.
Jackson, a native of South Carolina, was a gifted speaker even at a young age, commanding crowds with his voice alone.
He built Operation Breadbasket in Chicago for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to raise funds and recruit volunteers for the economic arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He later founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), now Rainbow/PUSH, holding Saturday morning rallies on Chicago’s South Side to mobilize the Black community.
A mentor and a man of God, he was willing to take on any injustice he saw.
And he became an in-demand interviewee in the years following Dr. King’s assassination in 1968 when he stood alongside the civil rights icon on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where a sniper’s bullet took Dr. King’s life.
The anthology’s introduction by the Rev. Al Sharpton, head of the National Action Network and MSNOW host, underscores the importance of Jackson’s activism and his groundbreaking work for civil rights over the years. Readers will marvel at the reflective and insightful discussions in this compilation of Jackson’s interviews and appearances about race relations, politics and social justice in America.
In November 1969, he spoke to Playboy magazine, criticizing the elimination of Black studies in colleges and universities and the government’s “lack of understanding” of problems facing Black businesses. He also told writer Arthur Kretchmer that a “war” was being waged between Black America and white America, and that this country seemed to operate as a “police state” targeting Black men.
“The perverted idea of manhood coming from the barrel of a gun is what keeps people from understanding nonviolence,” Jackson said at the time.
Jackson’s prognostications sound strikingly familiar, like they were torn from the headlines just yesterday, casting him as a visionary who anticipated future sociopolitical issues and offered a path forward.
In a January 1975 interview with legendary journalist Tony Brown and award-winning actress Diahann Carroll for the PBS public affairs television program “Black Journal,” Jackson blamed America’s economic woes on “the superrich not being taxed properly” and the monopolies created by the absence of equitable taxation.
In 1983, he told Ronald Smothers of The New York Times that “the Justice Department is not committed to justice.”
For 1989’s “Eyes on the Prize II,” he talked about the real possibility that we “will have an African American as nominee of a party, indeed, as president of the United States of America …” after his own 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the nation’s highest elected office.
The trailblazing civil rights activist’s analyses of the social struggles inherent in American life in “Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” give reaffirming energy to an old adage: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
