photos from the edge 27 - JESSE JACKSON, PRESENTE!
Photographs by David Bacon
For a while it seemed like Jesse was everywhere. In the last years I worked as an organizer he ran for President, and the first picture I took of him was speaking at a Labor Day picnic - all the big labor leaders behind him - Jimmy Herman, then president of the ILWU, Jack Henning, our rebellious leader of the state labor federation, and others. We organized our labor committee of the Rainbow Coalition, and it was not hard to convince our unions that he was the one. The idea of running for president by bringing in the excluded, enfranchising the disenfranchised, was our touchstone from then on.
But I remember him best because he came out for workers again and again, long after he wasn't running for anything anymore. I'm sure it's the workers who remember him best, because the photographs show it. The nurses with Rose Ann De Moro at Summit Hospital, the members of my own union, the then-Northern California Newspaper Guild and the other unions of our conference facing the Chronicle, and the farmworkers in that huge march in Watsonville. You can see the way the hotel workers look at him, during the lockout of Local 2. Barbara Lee, then Congresswoman (the only one with the courage to vote against the Iraq war) and now Oakland Mayor, is there with him fighting for the workers in the nursing homes.
He didn't come just for labor, of course. He came for the students, battling the University of California to keep affirmative action. He walked with the women at the head of the National March to Fight the Radical Right. And amidst it all, I sometimes found a man lost in his thoughts, perhaps grateful for a moment out of the crowd.
You were there for us, Jesse.
