Do Not Be Cynical About Jesse Jackson

When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, many businesses proudly kept in their windows signs from Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and ’88 presidential runs. He was a revered figure, someone people in D.C. were deeply thankful for.

“Nothing will ever again be what it was before,” the writer James Baldwin said after Jackson’s ’84 Democratic National Convention speech.

“It changes the way the boy on the street and the boy on Death Row and his mother and his father and his sweetheart and his sister think about themselves.