Tuesday
Over the weekend, as I was listening to Clock It–MS Now’s new and very entertaining podcast hosted by Symone Townsend-Sanders and Eugene Robinson—I was reminded of the late Jesse Jackson’s immense contributions to Black advancement in the United States. Without Jackson, Townsend-Sanders noted, we wouldn’t have had Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Al Sharpton, or the many African American figures that have become an integral part of American political life (including Townsend-Sanders and Robinson themselves).
One of my most vivid memories of Jackson was seeing him in tears in Chicago’s Grant Park as Obama addressed the crowd after hearing he had won the 2008 election. I wondered whether Jackson ever thought he would live to see this day.
Jackson was one of Martin Luther King’s youngest advisors although he would later split with the Southern Leadership Conference. Eventually, as the organizer of the Rainbow Coalition and Operation Push, he worked tirelessly on behalf of the marginalized. He was an early advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and in his speech before the 1984 Democratic National Convention he compared America to a quilt:
America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.
Jackson went on to observe that, while we “have proven that we can survive without each other,… we have not proven that we can win and make progress without each other. We must come together.” It’s a message we desperately need today.
I love what Jackson used to do with Black children, turning his poem “I am Somebody” into a call and response affair. He would say, “I am,” and they would enthusiastically complete the sentence:
I am Somebody!
I am Somebody!
I may be poor,
But I am Somebody.
I may be young,
But I am Somebody.
I may be on welfare,
But I am Somebody.
I may be small,
But I am Somebody.
I may have made mistakes,
But I am Somebody.
My clothes are different,
My face is different,
My hair is different,
But I am Somebody.
I am black,
Brown, or white.
I speak a different language
But I must be respected,
Protected,
Never rejected.
I am God’s child!
Revisiting that outreach, I am reminded of how, years before, Lucille Clifton made the same theme central to her poetry. Clifton eschews capitalization in her verse, a strategy that can capture feelings of smallness, which she then turns into defiant self proclamations. In “homage to my hips,” the speaker refuses to be defensive about her large hips, reporting,
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
In “what the mirror said,” meanwhile, a large-bodied woman—one whom others see as “a noplace anonymous girl”–looks at her reflection and gives her own version of “I am Somebody”:
what the mirror said
By Lucille Clifton
listen,
you a wonder.
you a city
of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
he got his hands on
some
damn
body!
To be clear about the body aesthetic that has led to the woman’s low esteem, here’s Clifton’s “my dream about being white”:
hey music and
me
only white,
hair a flutter of
fall leaves
circling my perfect
line of a nose,
no lips,
no behind, hey
white me
and i’m wearing
white history
but there’s no future
in those clothes
so i take them off and
wake up
dancing
Much of Clifton’s power lies in the confidence of her declarations. The same was true of Jackson.
