There are people whose stature and legacy loom so large that their name instantly conjures a powerful image in the minds of the public. The Rev. Jesse Jackson evokes many such images, all of historic import.
But one holds a personal connection to my family and me: a photograph taken on April 3, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel. In it, Jackson stands on the second-floor balcony with the Rev. Hosea Williams, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. The group seems to be on the move, pausing only briefly as Jackson takes a place at King’s right hand. One day later, Jackson would again meet these men on that balcony in the wake of the unutterable tragedy that was King’s murder. It was in this context that my father, undercover Memphis police officer Marrell McCollough, would appear on the same balcony in a different but hauntingly similar photograph taken in the moments after the assassination.
Some images sear our collective memory not only because of who and what they depict, but also what they represent. In the April 3 photograph, we see Jackson at age 26 — only a couple of years older than my father. He’s smiling, confident and relaxed among the more senior and subdued civil rights leaders. Jackson had joined them in Memphis to lend critical aid to the city’s striking sanitation workers and their fight for equitable treatment, a living wage and other rights essential to living and working with dignity. He was a rising star, handpicked by King to lead Operation Breadbasket, an effort to help apply economic and social pressure in support of Black financial empowerment. The photograph hints at the forward-thinking leadership that lay ahead for Jackson and the hope he would keep alive.
I wasn’t yet born when these events unfolded. By the time I saw the April 3 photograph with Jackson and the one with my father taken the following day, they already had more than a decade of commentary and interpretation attached to them. But in no way did I miss the chance to witness Jackson continue his history-making work. Like the generation before mine, I got a front row seat — and the chance to define for myself what it meant.
I was a child growing up in 1980s Memphis when that opportunity arose. In some important ways, the city hadn’t changed all that much since the sanitation strike two decades earlier. This was especially true when it came to economic hardship. In 1970, the overall poverty rate for Shelby County was 20.6%, but the rate for Black residents was 42%. (No figure was published for white residents that year.) By 1990, the overall poverty rate had edged down to 18.3%, while that for Black residents had decreased to 33.6%. And now there was a figure for white residents. Their poverty rate stood at 6.5%. As always, financial precarity and race went hand-in-hand.
I knew nothing of these statistics as a child, but I knew what they looked like in the world around me — up and down sidewalks, at school, and on downcast faces. Children were, and still are, overrepresented among the poor. Poverty and powerlessness are a package deal, and children have the least power of all. This world has innumerable ways of telling a child, implicitly or even explicitly, “You don’t matter.”
Throughout most of the ’80s, my little brother and I sat on our grandparents’ living room shag carpet and faithfully watched the network news often enough to know that while some people were getting rich, others were struggling. Every week, it seemed there was a big story about a social program people relied on for a basic need, and without fail, the report ended with the anchor saying something like, “This program is being cut by the Reagan administration.”
It wasn’t all bad news, though. In 1984, a brother with a mustache started appearing all over the news because he was running for president, and he stood for pretty much the opposite of what the Reagan administration was doing. That alone was enough to make us fans. But this was bigger than that, because he was Black, and it had never occurred to me that someone who was Black like us could run for president. Of course, he wasn’t the first Black candidate to appear on a major party ticket — that honor belonged to Shirley Chisolm — but I had never seen it.Plus, we knew this man. How could we forget seeing him on Sesame Street teaching us to say, “I am somebody.” And he said in a loud voice, like he meant it, “I may be poor, but I am somebody.” He listed other things that didn’t stop you from being somebody, like being young and small, making mistakes, looking different or speaking a different language. “But I must be respected, protected, never rejected,” he said. We were supposed to repeat after him.
That segment was from the 1970s, when people wore big afros and mutton-chop sideburns. Now Jackson’s hair was cropped lower, and the sideburns were gone. A new era had dawned, and he was running for the highest office in the land. That meant he might be able to do anything, and maybe our people could, too.
These images of Jackson — from Sesame Street through his first presidential campaign — unlocked something in me. His words and actions helped me understand who I am and why I matter. He labored to make the phrase “I am somebody” concrete for everyone, fighting to create the conditions in which we could all experience freedom, dignity and community.
And he challenged us to repeat after him.
Leta McCollough Seletzky is director of the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She is the author of “The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”
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