What do you think?
Rate this book
Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson
Raised in the segregated South, out of abject beginnings in South Carolina poverty and illegitimacy, heir apparent to Martin Luther King, Jr., twice a presidential candidate, recognized on the streets of South Central L.A., Ghana, Armenia, and Damascus, Jesse Jackson is a figure unique not only in American politics, but in American history. As James Baldwin noted during Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign, "His presence presents the American Republic with questions and choices it has spent all its history until this hour trying to avoid...And nothing will ever again be what it was before."
Marshall Frady has been given closer access to Jackson and his family for a more sustained period of time than any previous writer. He has traveled with Jackson in the U.S., Africa, Russia, and the Middle East, and has conducted countless interviews with his colleagues and rivals of the last thirty years. The result is the most astute and compelling portrait of the man we are ever likely to have. Jesse is an enthralling journey that reveals the nonstop demands of character and sets them against the fundamental, dividing prism of race in America.
Marshall Frady has been given closer access to Jackson and his family for a more sustained period of time than any previous writer. He has traveled with Jackson in the U.S., Africa, Russia, and the Middle East, and has conducted countless interviews with his colleagues and rivals of the last thirty years. The result is the most astute and compelling portrait of the man we are ever likely to have. Jesse is an enthralling journey that reveals the nonstop demands of character and sets them against the fundamental, dividing prism of race in America.
552 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
About the author
Marshall Frady
25 books15 followersA native of South Carolina, Marshall Frady was a journalist for more than twenty-five years, writing for Newsweek, Life, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, The Sunday Times of London, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He was a correspondent on Nightline; chief writer and host of ABC News' Closeup, for which he won two Emmys and the duPont-Columbia Award; and the author of six books.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 17, 2024
AN EXCELLENT BIOGRAPHY OF AN EXCEPTIONAL AND INFLUENTIAL FIGURE
Marshall Bolton Frady (1940-2004) was an American journalist and author particularly known for his work on the civil rights movement in the American South. He explains in this 1996 book, “In a certain sense, most of Jackson’s life has been occupied in a labor to deploy that gift to get inside. And over the course of that exertion, few have managed to rise quite so high from so far outside the main society of America… That extraordinary undertaking of Jackson’s is what this story is about. It’s not often one encounters a figure who, from such meager beginnings, has so consciously set about constructing himself to such a grandiose measure… But his compulsion to cast himself as the central player in some unfolding historical moral saga can at times approach a high reel of hubris… Absent the great moral dramaturgy of [Martin Luther] King’s day, Jackson was left to struggle in the vague spiritual flats of a more prosaic and middling season to find his apotheosis… he finally resorted to the expedient of seeking his fulfillment as a prophetic successor to King, not outside the system… but inside it, as a contended in the processes of political power itself—a prospect that much more riskily seductive for someone with Jackson’s huge hunger to belong.” (Pg. 13-14)
He observes, “That he has continued to identify so passionately with the pains of the black past in America has had mixed effects. On the one hand, it has brought him the mass black support that has served as his one great unchallengeable strength… But…the fervent racial identification that bonded Jackson to black America… produced a kind of schizophrenia. He seemed unable to disenthrall himself from the racial pains of his own past, and reluctant to rick any disenchantment among the black constituency that was his one great asset, to stretch himself enough to truly embrace the wider popular coalition he hoped to form.” (Pg. 31-32)
He asserts, “it finally remains something of a mystery exactly how Jackson, an illegitimate, poor black youth in Greenville’s racial caste system, came to contract his sense of some special portent, which eventually magnified into a compulsion to re-create himself on a scale answering that early sense of his auspicious but balked possibilities. It became the ultimate dream for the outsider of making himself into nothing less than a moral hero in the society where he and his people had long been scorned. The very size of that ambition was, in a way, a measure of the emptiness he felt in his life.” (Pg. 111)
He points out, “Jackson began to acquire a canniness for a certain situation jujitsu---deftly developing a combination of concurrent threats and options to a converging critical point, which he would then used to leverage the whole conflict to a stage beyond all prior expectations---an intricate counterplay that was a greatly serve his progress through the years ahead. At rallies, he would bawl forth … baleful forecasts… Having conjured these dire prospects, he would then nimbly step in to act as a mediator between the students and Greenboro’s white power system to avert what he had invoked, with a settlement advancing the matter further than more had thought possible.” (Pg. 176)
He recounts, “Shortly after accomplishing his introductory conference with [Martin Luther] King, though, and before the Selma March itself set out, Jackson, bleary now with a low-fever flu, left with the other CTS [Chicago Theological Seminary] students to drive back to Chicago, and so missed that epic processional… his encounter with King in Selma had left him ‘overwhelmed. As of that day, it changed his life. All he wanted to do now was to work closely with Dr. King.” (Pg. 193-194)
He states, “Despite his claims of repeated hankerings… he seemed inherently given to action over intellection, the experiential over the cerebral, always impatient to rush into that ultimate definition only found, he sensed, in the welter and heat of actual events… His professors at CTS would later recollect him as dazzlingly quick to apprehend and assimilate the broad strokes and spirit of an idea… Yet proved rather haphazard and cursory in his actual studies… In one course on Christian ethics, he elected not to write any papers, declaring that he would ‘speak’ his examinations… He also missed to many classes that the faculty deliberated asking him to withdraw from the school… Jackson, leaning in the doorway of [a] professor’s office, serenely appraised him, ‘You have to understand. I’m special.’” (Pg. 204-205)
He says, “King. On one of his scouting trips to Chicago, finally took Jackson aside and proposed, as Jackson recounts his words, ‘Come on with me full time, and you’ll learn more theology in six months than you would in six years at the seminary.’… Coming from someone who had so diligently fortified himself with scholarship as had King, it seemed a peculiar proposition, but it may have been prompted by the fact that Jackson was already so clearly restless about the relevance of his seminary studies… only six months away from graduation, he forsook the seminary to heave himself completely into the civil rights movement at last---at the side of its most fabled and auspicious figure.” (Pg. 207) He adds, “he regarded King with an almost abject adoration and awe…But there’s little question that King became for Jackson something like the miraculous appearance at least of his own spirit’s true, heroic father---a figure in whom he perceived a realization of the grand scale of his own dreams of what he wanted to become, to mean.” (Pg. 209)
But he adds, “Before long, King also developed an uneasiness about Jackson’s undisguisable, hugely beating ambition, his proclivity for theatrical posturing… if he had misgivings about the capacity of a temperament like Jackson’s to resist the blandishments of pride and glory, it owed not a little to the fact that those beguilements were profoundly familiar to King himself.” (Pg. 217)
After King’s assassination, “Jackson’s own first reactions were to become a subject of furious dispute that would harry him through the following years… The next morning, he appeared on the Today show… he delivered these remarks while still wearing… the olive turtleneck sweater from the night before, only it was not blotted with blood that he declared was King’s… had had also by now, in random brushes with the press, indicated that he was the last person King had spoken to, and once even… that he had actually held King as he was dying… ‘I asked him, ‘Dr. King, do you hear me?...” And he didn’t say anything. And I tried to---to hold his head. But by then…’” (Pg. 228-229)
He explains, “That term which Jackson had come to apply to his political movement, ‘Rainbow Coalition,’ happened to be only one of the phrases and concepts he would appropriate from elsewhere over his labor of self-enlargement in Memphis. The name Rainbow Coalition was first sounded in the announcements in 1968 of the Poor People’s Campaign to characterize the multiethnic mass constituency it hoped to convoke.” (Pg. 240)
He observes, “with Jackson---after Greenboro, after Selma, after his time with King, after what he had already remarkably wrought with Breadbasket, all of which had confirmed for him what he had sensed he held within him … it was the desperation of a constitutional outsider to have his true import register in the general public eye. It did not exactly moderate his excitement about his own possible impending apotheosis that, following King’s death and the dissolution of the Poor People’s Campaign, he found himself the subject of flashes of attention from the press… But even if Jackson seemed then a bombastic but lesser version of King, the speculation of many was that he could become a kind of bridging figure from king to the new generation’s stormier romance of black power and black nationalism.” (Pg. 247-248)
He points out, “Jackson himself buoyantly observes, ‘There’re all kind of by-products for the great servants. People WANT you to stay in a comfortable house, want you to wear nice clothes, have a car of your choice---with bulletproof windows’… If this … left Jackson living in circumstances not exactly as modest as those of King, what were temptations to King would have been outright appetites left in Jackson from his far grimmer origins.” (Pg. 270)
He recounts, “His crusade for economic racial equity continued to produce ‘covenants,’ now increasingly national in effect, with corporations like Coca-Cola and Heublein, franchises like Burger Kind and 7Eleven… in the course of extracting these agreements, Jackson also continued to compile from their beneficiaries a growing legion of indebted backers, from whom he not incidentally expected a ‘tithe’ back into the organization [PUSH] that had gained them admittance into the corporate firmament… Along with exacting that return, a number of the corporations also agreed ‘to build us into their budgets,’ as he phrases it. He would up, then, from this economic ministry, drawing a double tithe.” (Pg. 279-280)
He acknowledges, “there was another liability left from his freestyle past that had also been a concern … the widely distributed stories of his exuberant romantic corsairing… Jackson himself was not abashed about advertising, ‘… When I see a beautiful woman with a miniskirt on, my eyes get big as teacups. Oh, yeah, I ain’t gonna be lyin’. They swell up because I’m young and healthy!’” (Pg. 327)
During the 1984 Presidential campaign, ‘he was chatting with two black reporters … when he shifted to a more confidential tone---‘Let’s talk black talk.’---and in a casual patter about New York City’s Jewish constituency, used [offensive terms] … In interviews immediately afterward, Jackson… bumblingly denied he had ever uttered the words, then claimed, ‘I have no recollection of it.’ But what was particularly nightmarish for him, as he watched his grand movement into a presidential campaign apparently collapsing around him, was that it was happening on the most squalid moral count: his own purported racism… At the same time, though, he began to brood that he had been blindsided---that because of a carelessly coarse utterance, he was not subject to something like an ongoing mass public mugging… Finally, though… he undertook to explain and entreat forgiveness in a couple of appearances before Jewish gatherings.” (Pg. 343-344)
He notes, “when Jackson announced his presidential candidacy, [Louis] Farrakhan, despite the Muslim doctrine of total separation from the nation’s political order, registered to vote for the first time in his life, and urged his followers to do the same. Jackson, for his part, was much taken with how Farrakhan’s Muslims, with their austere ethic of discipline and pride and their abjuration of drugs, were countering the depredations in the black community… But Farrakhan himself… had long been regarded as a malignant figure, not only by Jews… but by whites generally… But … Jackson seemed to fall into a curious, passively acceptive thrall… to Farrakhan’s shrill defenses of him… Jackson at length stirred himself to declare that, while he deplored the intemperance of Farrakhan’s message, he would not allow himself to be harried into an outright condemnation of Farrakhan personally.” (Pg. 349-350)
In his riveting speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention, “He soon had the hall aroar with successive, exploding ovations… ‘…If, in my high moments, I have done some good, offered some service… or stirred someone from apathy and indifference, or in any way along the way helped somebody, then this campaign has not been in vain… If, in my low moments… I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain, or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self… [‘Please forgive me!’] …. I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet!’” (Pg. 366-367)
In the 1988 campaign, “he was headed now for the convention in Atlanta with more than twelve hundred delegates, eight hundred short of the majority needed for nomination, but almost a third of the total. And at this auspicious moment, the old urgency… which had always been the more questionable part of this temptation to move his social apostleship into a contest for the highest political consequence, at last blurted forth in fulness---the hope and hunger to come in from the outside to belong.” (Pg. 401)
He summarized, “Only in his mid-fifties in 1995, Jackson was, of course, still very much an unfinished man, his still an unfinished life… after the 1988 campaign, it was already evident enough the Jackson had been left profoundly displaced and directionless… there are some melancholies among his early enthusiasts about what has happened with him… Jackson himself had come to seem uneasy at times that, in his political beguilements, he might have somehow lost his way… Now, in what seemed the equally dim tunnel into which his meaning and prospects had wandered by the end of 1995, he still had not lost his own impulsion to realize himself as some form of prophet-hero of his time.” (Pg. 498-501)
This is an excellent biography (if at times meandering, and confusingly non-chronological), that will be “must reading” for those wanting to study Jackson’s life and influence.
Marshall Bolton Frady (1940-2004) was an American journalist and author particularly known for his work on the civil rights movement in the American South. He explains in this 1996 book, “In a certain sense, most of Jackson’s life has been occupied in a labor to deploy that gift to get inside. And over the course of that exertion, few have managed to rise quite so high from so far outside the main society of America… That extraordinary undertaking of Jackson’s is what this story is about. It’s not often one encounters a figure who, from such meager beginnings, has so consciously set about constructing himself to such a grandiose measure… But his compulsion to cast himself as the central player in some unfolding historical moral saga can at times approach a high reel of hubris… Absent the great moral dramaturgy of [Martin Luther] King’s day, Jackson was left to struggle in the vague spiritual flats of a more prosaic and middling season to find his apotheosis… he finally resorted to the expedient of seeking his fulfillment as a prophetic successor to King, not outside the system… but inside it, as a contended in the processes of political power itself—a prospect that much more riskily seductive for someone with Jackson’s huge hunger to belong.” (Pg. 13-14)
He observes, “That he has continued to identify so passionately with the pains of the black past in America has had mixed effects. On the one hand, it has brought him the mass black support that has served as his one great unchallengeable strength… But…the fervent racial identification that bonded Jackson to black America… produced a kind of schizophrenia. He seemed unable to disenthrall himself from the racial pains of his own past, and reluctant to rick any disenchantment among the black constituency that was his one great asset, to stretch himself enough to truly embrace the wider popular coalition he hoped to form.” (Pg. 31-32)
He asserts, “it finally remains something of a mystery exactly how Jackson, an illegitimate, poor black youth in Greenville’s racial caste system, came to contract his sense of some special portent, which eventually magnified into a compulsion to re-create himself on a scale answering that early sense of his auspicious but balked possibilities. It became the ultimate dream for the outsider of making himself into nothing less than a moral hero in the society where he and his people had long been scorned. The very size of that ambition was, in a way, a measure of the emptiness he felt in his life.” (Pg. 111)
He points out, “Jackson began to acquire a canniness for a certain situation jujitsu---deftly developing a combination of concurrent threats and options to a converging critical point, which he would then used to leverage the whole conflict to a stage beyond all prior expectations---an intricate counterplay that was a greatly serve his progress through the years ahead. At rallies, he would bawl forth … baleful forecasts… Having conjured these dire prospects, he would then nimbly step in to act as a mediator between the students and Greenboro’s white power system to avert what he had invoked, with a settlement advancing the matter further than more had thought possible.” (Pg. 176)
He recounts, “Shortly after accomplishing his introductory conference with [Martin Luther] King, though, and before the Selma March itself set out, Jackson, bleary now with a low-fever flu, left with the other CTS [Chicago Theological Seminary] students to drive back to Chicago, and so missed that epic processional… his encounter with King in Selma had left him ‘overwhelmed. As of that day, it changed his life. All he wanted to do now was to work closely with Dr. King.” (Pg. 193-194)
He states, “Despite his claims of repeated hankerings… he seemed inherently given to action over intellection, the experiential over the cerebral, always impatient to rush into that ultimate definition only found, he sensed, in the welter and heat of actual events… His professors at CTS would later recollect him as dazzlingly quick to apprehend and assimilate the broad strokes and spirit of an idea… Yet proved rather haphazard and cursory in his actual studies… In one course on Christian ethics, he elected not to write any papers, declaring that he would ‘speak’ his examinations… He also missed to many classes that the faculty deliberated asking him to withdraw from the school… Jackson, leaning in the doorway of [a] professor’s office, serenely appraised him, ‘You have to understand. I’m special.’” (Pg. 204-205)
He says, “King. On one of his scouting trips to Chicago, finally took Jackson aside and proposed, as Jackson recounts his words, ‘Come on with me full time, and you’ll learn more theology in six months than you would in six years at the seminary.’… Coming from someone who had so diligently fortified himself with scholarship as had King, it seemed a peculiar proposition, but it may have been prompted by the fact that Jackson was already so clearly restless about the relevance of his seminary studies… only six months away from graduation, he forsook the seminary to heave himself completely into the civil rights movement at last---at the side of its most fabled and auspicious figure.” (Pg. 207) He adds, “he regarded King with an almost abject adoration and awe…But there’s little question that King became for Jackson something like the miraculous appearance at least of his own spirit’s true, heroic father---a figure in whom he perceived a realization of the grand scale of his own dreams of what he wanted to become, to mean.” (Pg. 209)
But he adds, “Before long, King also developed an uneasiness about Jackson’s undisguisable, hugely beating ambition, his proclivity for theatrical posturing… if he had misgivings about the capacity of a temperament like Jackson’s to resist the blandishments of pride and glory, it owed not a little to the fact that those beguilements were profoundly familiar to King himself.” (Pg. 217)
After King’s assassination, “Jackson’s own first reactions were to become a subject of furious dispute that would harry him through the following years… The next morning, he appeared on the Today show… he delivered these remarks while still wearing… the olive turtleneck sweater from the night before, only it was not blotted with blood that he declared was King’s… had had also by now, in random brushes with the press, indicated that he was the last person King had spoken to, and once even… that he had actually held King as he was dying… ‘I asked him, ‘Dr. King, do you hear me?...” And he didn’t say anything. And I tried to---to hold his head. But by then…’” (Pg. 228-229)
He explains, “That term which Jackson had come to apply to his political movement, ‘Rainbow Coalition,’ happened to be only one of the phrases and concepts he would appropriate from elsewhere over his labor of self-enlargement in Memphis. The name Rainbow Coalition was first sounded in the announcements in 1968 of the Poor People’s Campaign to characterize the multiethnic mass constituency it hoped to convoke.” (Pg. 240)
He observes, “with Jackson---after Greenboro, after Selma, after his time with King, after what he had already remarkably wrought with Breadbasket, all of which had confirmed for him what he had sensed he held within him … it was the desperation of a constitutional outsider to have his true import register in the general public eye. It did not exactly moderate his excitement about his own possible impending apotheosis that, following King’s death and the dissolution of the Poor People’s Campaign, he found himself the subject of flashes of attention from the press… But even if Jackson seemed then a bombastic but lesser version of King, the speculation of many was that he could become a kind of bridging figure from king to the new generation’s stormier romance of black power and black nationalism.” (Pg. 247-248)
He points out, “Jackson himself buoyantly observes, ‘There’re all kind of by-products for the great servants. People WANT you to stay in a comfortable house, want you to wear nice clothes, have a car of your choice---with bulletproof windows’… If this … left Jackson living in circumstances not exactly as modest as those of King, what were temptations to King would have been outright appetites left in Jackson from his far grimmer origins.” (Pg. 270)
He recounts, “His crusade for economic racial equity continued to produce ‘covenants,’ now increasingly national in effect, with corporations like Coca-Cola and Heublein, franchises like Burger Kind and 7Eleven… in the course of extracting these agreements, Jackson also continued to compile from their beneficiaries a growing legion of indebted backers, from whom he not incidentally expected a ‘tithe’ back into the organization [PUSH] that had gained them admittance into the corporate firmament… Along with exacting that return, a number of the corporations also agreed ‘to build us into their budgets,’ as he phrases it. He would up, then, from this economic ministry, drawing a double tithe.” (Pg. 279-280)
He acknowledges, “there was another liability left from his freestyle past that had also been a concern … the widely distributed stories of his exuberant romantic corsairing… Jackson himself was not abashed about advertising, ‘… When I see a beautiful woman with a miniskirt on, my eyes get big as teacups. Oh, yeah, I ain’t gonna be lyin’. They swell up because I’m young and healthy!’” (Pg. 327)
During the 1984 Presidential campaign, ‘he was chatting with two black reporters … when he shifted to a more confidential tone---‘Let’s talk black talk.’---and in a casual patter about New York City’s Jewish constituency, used [offensive terms] … In interviews immediately afterward, Jackson… bumblingly denied he had ever uttered the words, then claimed, ‘I have no recollection of it.’ But what was particularly nightmarish for him, as he watched his grand movement into a presidential campaign apparently collapsing around him, was that it was happening on the most squalid moral count: his own purported racism… At the same time, though, he began to brood that he had been blindsided---that because of a carelessly coarse utterance, he was not subject to something like an ongoing mass public mugging… Finally, though… he undertook to explain and entreat forgiveness in a couple of appearances before Jewish gatherings.” (Pg. 343-344)
He notes, “when Jackson announced his presidential candidacy, [Louis] Farrakhan, despite the Muslim doctrine of total separation from the nation’s political order, registered to vote for the first time in his life, and urged his followers to do the same. Jackson, for his part, was much taken with how Farrakhan’s Muslims, with their austere ethic of discipline and pride and their abjuration of drugs, were countering the depredations in the black community… But Farrakhan himself… had long been regarded as a malignant figure, not only by Jews… but by whites generally… But … Jackson seemed to fall into a curious, passively acceptive thrall… to Farrakhan’s shrill defenses of him… Jackson at length stirred himself to declare that, while he deplored the intemperance of Farrakhan’s message, he would not allow himself to be harried into an outright condemnation of Farrakhan personally.” (Pg. 349-350)
In his riveting speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention, “He soon had the hall aroar with successive, exploding ovations… ‘…If, in my high moments, I have done some good, offered some service… or stirred someone from apathy and indifference, or in any way along the way helped somebody, then this campaign has not been in vain… If, in my low moments… I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain, or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self… [‘Please forgive me!’] …. I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet!’” (Pg. 366-367)
In the 1988 campaign, “he was headed now for the convention in Atlanta with more than twelve hundred delegates, eight hundred short of the majority needed for nomination, but almost a third of the total. And at this auspicious moment, the old urgency… which had always been the more questionable part of this temptation to move his social apostleship into a contest for the highest political consequence, at last blurted forth in fulness---the hope and hunger to come in from the outside to belong.” (Pg. 401)
He summarized, “Only in his mid-fifties in 1995, Jackson was, of course, still very much an unfinished man, his still an unfinished life… after the 1988 campaign, it was already evident enough the Jackson had been left profoundly displaced and directionless… there are some melancholies among his early enthusiasts about what has happened with him… Jackson himself had come to seem uneasy at times that, in his political beguilements, he might have somehow lost his way… Now, in what seemed the equally dim tunnel into which his meaning and prospects had wandered by the end of 1995, he still had not lost his own impulsion to realize himself as some form of prophet-hero of his time.” (Pg. 498-501)
This is an excellent biography (if at times meandering, and confusingly non-chronological), that will be “must reading” for those wanting to study Jackson’s life and influence.
April 19, 2017
A great book about a great man. It's that simple.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews