I Am Jesse Jackson – Dr. James Peterson

February 19, 2026

Photo by Eric Draper. Credit: LBJ Library from Austin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When I was little, my parents told me I would be the first Black president of the United States.

Being that young and impressionable, I believed them. What I did not yet understand was the architecture of possibility. I did not grasp the mathematics of improbability, the long odds, the history, the resistance. I did not know what it would require for such a thing to come to pass.

Then I bore witness to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Democratic National Convention speech.

That speech did something to me. It rearranged the molecules of my imagination. I cried during it, through it, and after it. I saw in Rev. Jackson a man who had already broken through the membrane of the impossible. He stood before America not as an abstraction, not as a symbol, but as proof. Proof that the sons of maids and ministers, the children of segregation and struggle, could stand at the podium of history and bend it.

Years later, the world would watch him cry in the audience during President Barack Obama’s victory speech in 2008. Those tears — tender, historic, generational — were the tears of a man who had run so that someone else could finish. They were not tears of surrender; they were tears of fulfillment.

And yet, those same tears can never obscure his so-called “hot mic” moment — when he critiqued the man who would become the first Black president for language that he believed talked down to Black people. So many misunderstood his fire. But history has a way of clarifying conviction. Rev. Jackson’s critique was not betrayal. It was fidelity. Fidelity to a people he loved too much to flatter.

Rev. Jesse Jackson was somebody.

And he imbued the concept of being somebody with eternal and existential power; the power to be singular and collective at the same time. His “somebody-ness” was never small. It was cosmic and cosmopolitan all at once. He believed in coalition building across race, class, culture, region, and religion. He believed in solidarity as a moral technology.

In this reductive and toxic political moment, his politics may seem naïve to some. He may appear, to those with short memories, like a relic of another era. But that is because we have grown accustomed to cynicism masquerading as realism. Rev. Jackson insisted on imagination. He insisted on moral audacity.

His somebody-ness is a bat signal for political solidarity.

His passing demands not despair, but reflection and recommitment. From grassroots organizing in Chicago to the global stage, Reverend Jackson held multi-billion-dollar corporations accountable to Black communities. He traveled to the Middle East, sat with sultans, and helped bring American hostages home. He stood in factory towns and on picket lines. He stood in pulpits and in prisons.

He committed his life to the idea that justice was not a metaphor.

On a personal level, when I had dinner with him, I noticed that his charismatic presence was overwhelming. His love for Black people was irresistible. His dedication to humanity was palpable. He leaned in when he spoke, and when he listened. He made you feel as though history itself was eavesdropping on the conversation.

Whenever I spoke with him on the phone, his enthusiasm for what was possible for all of us was like a contagion. I never left any conversation or contact with Rev. Jackson that didn’t make me feel more alive. He made me feel like we could achieve human civility and civic equity through our cultural and political imaginations.

He believed we could level the playing field.

He often spoke in the language of sport, a metaphor he loved. Imagine, he would say, a playing field that is level. Imagine a scoreboard that everyone can see. Imagine referees who enforce the rules fairly. When governance is clean and transparent, when the rules are visible and just, everyone has a fair shake.

Rev. Jackson understood that the ascension of Black athletes in American sports was not just about talent. It was about access, opportunity and fairness. And if fairness could exist in one arena, it could exist in another.

He was somebody’s son. Somebody’s father. Somebody’s brother. Somebody’s mentor. Somebody’s life partner. Somebody’s leader.

He was, in many ways, the embodiment of my parents’ dreams for me. And for us.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson was all of us. And I am him.

Not in stature. Not in sacrifice. But in inheritance.

His life reminds us that political power in the Black community is not accidental. It is organized, imagined, and fought for. It is prayed over and planned. It is born in kitchens and churches and union halls. It is cultivated in conversation and in courage.

Reverend Jesse Jackson was somebody.

I am somebody.

We are somebody.

Rest in power, Reverend, Brother, Father, Leader.

We love you.