Anyone who was on the floor of Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum on July 19, 1988, for the second night of the Democratic National Convention bore witness to an hour they would remember for the rest of their days.
Jesse Jackson, the preacher who learned his craft at the feet of Martin Luther King Jr., may have finished second to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who won the presidential nomination, but he was first in the hearts of of the delegates and guests who packed the arena to the rafters.
They sat in wonder, many of them in tears, as they listened intently to the man who had fought so hard that year to become the first Black candidate for president to be taken seriously as a contender.
The man who was the son of a teenaged mother, reared in poverty, bared his soul that night.
“I understand what it is like when nobody knows your name,” Jackson said.
“I was born in a three-room house,” Jackson said of his South Carolina boyhood home. “The bathroom was the backyard. A slop bucket next to the bed. I know; I understand.
“I know abandonment and people being mean to you, saying you are nothing and nobody and can never be anything. I understand.”
“I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me.”
Jackson died Tuesday. He was 84.
In the Baptist preacher style, he built his speech to a joyous, hopeful crescendo which lifted the souls of all those who heard it.
“We must never surrender. America will get better! Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive!”
The crowd erupted in a joyful celebration that went on and on and on.
I was on the convention floor, covering it all for the Cincinnati Enquirer, having wrangled a floor pass. After Jackson’s speech, the convention session adjourned for the night, and the delegates and guests started streaming out of the arena to catch a shuttle back to the delegation hotels.
I hopped on a bus bound for the Ohio delegation’s hotel in downtown Atlanta. The mood among the delegates was electric; everyone was on a buzz carried over into the hotel bars until the wee hours of the morning.
For me, the Jackson speech was sort of a fare-thee-well benediction on the considerable amount of time I had spent covering his campaign in New Hampshire in both 1984 and 1988, and our long bus trip around Ohio in April 1988 as Jackson tried to catch up with Dukakis in the May Ohio primary. Covering Jackson on the campaign trail was as exhausting as it was entertaining.
Physicists might tell you that a perpetual motion machine is impossible. But they have not seen Jessie Jackson running for president.
One day you might be with Jackson as he led a parade of students from the Manchester campus of the University of New Hampshire through the streets of town, like a Pied Piper, to the local elections board where he got them all registered to vote in the February presidential primary.
The next day you might find yourself in the banquet room of a Nashua motor lodge at a ham-and-eggs Rotary Club breakfast talking to an all white, all male audience, most of whom were attracted by the novelty of seeing a Black man running for president.
Blacks were few and far between in New Hampshire in those days. Census numbers show that in the years 2023 to 2025, the Black population in the Granite State ranged from 1.5% to 2.1%.
It was even lower during the years Jackson campaigned there.
The Rotarians marched out of the banquet room into the cold and snowy landscape having heard Jackson’s classic “Keep hope alive” stump speech, but there is little chance they actually voted for Jackson.
In 1984, Jackson finished fourth in a crowded field of Democratic candidates with 5.2% of the vote. Four years later, he finished fourth in the New Hampshire vote with 7.8%.
But before Jackson stepped on that Atlanta coliseum stage in July 1988, he had won an impressive string of state presidential primaries across the South — Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, along with caucus wins in South Carolina and Michigan.
In the summer of 1988, Jesse Jackson could say it with conviction:
I am somebody.
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