I didn’t ask Jesse Jackson for his autograph. But I got one anyway.
In 2016, while writing a book about Muhammad Ali, I interviewed Jackson at his Operation PUSH office on Chicago’s South Side. Before I left, he asked his secretary to bring him a few 8×10 glossy photos that showed Jackson and Ali together. She also brought him a picture of Jackson with Martin Luther King Jr. He inscribed them to me, added the message “Peace,” and signed his name.
It struck me as a very Jesse Jackson thing—and a wonderful thing—to do.
I went on to meet him four more times over the next decade, and I never felt like he was anything but himself. I mean that as the highest form of praise. Whether he was poking fun at Muhammad Ali or lecturing me on the difference between integration and desegregation, Jackson, who died Tuesday at the age of 84, seemed to me a straight shooter—which is an extraordinary thing to say about a man with a career as complicated as his.
