by Cal Harris
On June 24, 2023, I drove down I‑94 to Chicago with my son to visit friends—brothers, really—who had seen me grow from a precocious teen with too much ambition into a father of a precocious toddler. One of my buddies lived in a beautiful Hyde Park apartment, with a doorman and real plants spread throughout the light-filled lobby. As we stepped into the elevator, he said casually, “You know Jesse Jackson lives on the top floor?”
Without thinking, I pressed the button. He laughed; he knew I would. I had always been bold like that. But I respected the boundary. My friend had never approached Jesse—never knocked on his door, never waved—believing that after decades on the front lines, a man deserved peace in his own building. And so I obliged. Reluctantly.
Jesse was my father’s hero, which made him my hero. But I grew to love and admire him for making politics feel like a moral profession. He urged America to heed the call of consciousness, and campaigned as if speaking up for the voiceless and defending the rights of the poor were a legislative agenda.
I rehearsed excuses for why I might see him: borrow a cup of sugar, deliver the wrong package, pretend I was lost. I even contemplated leaving a note under his door.
Ultimately, fate delivered.
We ran into Jesse in the lobby after his afternoon walk. He was smaller, frailer than the giant from my father’s stories. Parkinson’s slowed his movements. Gone was the handsome, six-foot-three, broad-shouldered athlete my relatives in South Carolina had revered. The campus leader, the preacher, the young man who once turned ideas into missions now appeared mortal.
I glanced at my friend for permission before hurrying over and introducing my son.
“This is Carter.”
Jesse nodded toward him pastorally, as if blessing a congregation of one. And then, unexpectedly, he gave us over thirty minutes of his time.
Carter, curious and shy, leaned against my leg, his attention wandered off and returned. Jesse did not rush him. He asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and his favorite subject in school. He listened as if the answers were policy proposals, as if a child’s imagination were a party platform. Patient and gentle, Jesse made love conversational.
I knelt beside his motorized wheelchair and looked up at him from the same angle I had once looked up at him on television. I tried, but couldn’t hold back emotions from behind my eyes. In reverent awe, humbled in a way I hadn’t expected, I wept as I shared what he had meant to me. Without realizing it, I eulogized him. With a dinosaur backpack sagging against my shoulders and a restless and unaware child tugging at my shorts. We could have stayed longer, but I wanted to be respectful. After thanking Jesse, I expressed appreciation to his team. His handler smiled and surprisingly thanked me.
“This made his day,” he said. “These moments don’t happen as often as they should.”
My father had introduced me to Jesse when I was a child. He volunteered on the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, kept the posters in the basement long after the primaries, stored the buttons in a small tin, and held the 1988 Democratic National Convention speech on VHS. We watched it at least a dozen times. The tape always began with snow. Then gravity shifted toward Atlanta: a podium. A red tie.
My father leaned forward, elbows on his knees, as if the television were giving instructions. Jesse started by invoking the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing: All of us who are seated are really standing on someone’s shoulders.
As a child, this was the first time I recognized the body—shoulders, back—as a bridge or altar, spiritual Legos. When Rosa Parks appeared, my father whispered her name like scripture.
Jesse spoke about compassion for AIDS patients and gay rights at a time when others, at least in my corner of the world, preferred not to. He explained the Rainbow Coalition: Black, yellow, red, and white—we are all precious in God’s sight. I didn’t understand all the politics, but I understood the truth of it: belonging, inclusion, moral courage.
Jesse broke it down simply: The only reason to look down at someone is to lift them up.
Dad rarely cried. But he cried when Jesse spoke.
I sat on the carpet with my action figures, unaware that history—as well as an outline for a hopeful future—flickered across the screen. I didn’t grasp delegate math or platform fights, but I understood my father’s posture. I understood that something inside him was affirmed—that a Black man on a national stage could speak in a deep Southern drawl and not apologize for it. Could shift the mood across time and place away by saying, “I am somebody,” and meaning all of us.
And when the chant began—“Keep hope alive”—he joined, nodding his head as if he had waited his whole life to hear someone say it aloud. At the time, I didn’t know what hope cost, only that it was something you keep and hold on to.
Jesse inspired my father. For days afterward, he stood taller, bolder in his own skin and frequently called me Black man:
Keep your head up, Black man.
You can make it, Black man.
I’m proud of you, Black man.
This expression of Blackness initially felt radical and defiant. Only when I arrived at Morehouse did I recognize it as confidence and pride that would guide me through manhood and on to fatherhood. My father passed away in 1998, but I found myself replaying those tapes. The quality was grainy. Colors bled. The sound wobbled. But the message remained intact.
It took days to parse through my grief of losing Jesse. This is the curtain call of an era when words had the power to bend history, and hope could be recorded on VHS with the label Jesse ‘88 written in my father’s handwriting.
There has been a quiet erasure of Jesse’s political significance. People forget that before Barack Obama, there was a man who built the runway. Millions were registered under the banner of a Rainbow Coalition. White farmers stood beside Black church mothers at rallies. In 1988, as Abby Phillip recounts, Jesse won primaries and delegates many believed impossible. Writers like Joan Didion recognized it clearly. He disrupted the choreography of insider politics; he didn’t sound like a politician, and that authenticity unsettled the establishment. His campaign was a bomb thrown into polite rooms, exposing strategy memos and electability arguments as veils for racism. My father did not live to see a Black president. But he did live to witness a Black candidate stand unapologetically, proclaiming, “I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me.” He got chills because he knew the words were real—and that Jesse saw him, and truly understood him.
Now my son watches an old clip of Jesse on Sesame Street, his afro bouncing as he tells children they are somebody. And my son is reminded that a public figure understood him too, and once spent unhurried minutes listening to his dreams.
Cal Harris is a writer based in Brooklyn. Currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at New York University, his work focuses on memory, racial identity, generational inheritance.
January House Literary Journal 
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