Jackson’s Next Challenge : The Down-and-Out Hear Him, but He Must Deliver the Goods

We know that more than 7 million Americans--by far the majority, black--voted for Jesse Jackson in this year’s Democratic primaries.

His message this time around was in the populist tradition--criticism of those who have a lot, and appeal on behalf of those who have nothing, or next to nothing, or who are barely getting by. As I heard people responding to him I began to realize that Jackson had his eager listeners, all right, but that there are many who have not the slightest interest in paying attention to him. Among the latter are blacks as well as whites.

Over the years I have worked in one of Boston’s black ghettos. After the Democratic convention was over I went there to talk with some young people and with those who try to be of help to them as teachers, as doctors. No question, a good number of the children I knew had sat spellbound, listening to Jackson speak in Atlanta, no matter the late hour. He meant everything to them, as they took pains to let me know: “He’s the one! You look at him up there, and you think: He’s our guy, and he’s telling the whole world what’s right and what’s wrong, and they better pay attention or they’ll have to win some other way--not with our votes.”

I tried to get a more specific and detailed account of the significance of Jackson from other teen-agers, like the young man quoted, who were in a summer education program. A young woman offered this comment: “When I see him on television, and hear him talking, I think: He’s right; what he says will come about. We won’t always be down on the bottom. We’ll climb up the ladder. I’ll climb up the ladder! There will be days when I feel low, real low. I’m ready to give up. That’s when I think of Jesse; I can hear him telling us: Never lose hope, never surrender. So I don’t!”

But she was quick, a half-hour later, to remind me that there are plenty of black children or youths who have no great interest in Jesse Jackson, who are as distrustful of him for their own reasons as many white people are for theirs: “Down the street, where they hang out (members of a gang), Jesse is no big deal. They don’t pay him the least notice. They laugh at him: He’s doing ‘the man’s’ tricks. They’ve got their own tricks, and they don’t sit up waiting for Jesse to show up on the television. I asked a kid I knew when we were both in the fourth grade (one who has now dropped out of school) what he thinks of Jesse, and he said he don’t think anything of him--don’t care, one way or the other. If you listen to Jesse, you’re already halfway out of here, that’s what our minister said, and he’s right.”

By no means is political indifference a mental attitude that is peculiar to ghetto life. Half the people in America regularly shun elections, even presidential ones. I have worked with children who live in fancy neighborhoods who also are strikingly ignorant about the people who govern us. Such young Americans know less about George Bush than the fourth-grade classmate of my informant knows about Jesse Jackson. Still, that young Jackson fan was reminding me that her candidate, like any candidate, influences only certain individuals.

As with whites, many blacks don’t vote. And they care little about politicians, Jackson included. Moreover, a substantial number of black youths are sadly beyond the reach even of Jackson, as he well knows--hence his constant appeal to them, that they not be overcome by despair. He is a powerfully compelling speaker, but he inspires those ready and willing and able to attend his words, his moral message, his version of the social gospel, his populist exhortation.

Yet even Jesse Jackson’s urgent, passionate oratory--so appealing aesthetically to certain liberal whites, a kind of music to their ears--won’t be enough to sustain many black youths as they struggle with the immediate hardships that fate has settled on them.

“I get all excited by him,” a black youth recently told me as he thought back to a Jackson speech that he’d heard. But then he offered this afterthought: “An hour later, though, he is out of my head, because I am trying to get through a day here, and be alive at the end of it.”

So it goes for many Americans who listen carefully and with pride to Jackson but know that no one person can rescue them from the circumstances that every day determine the nature of their lives. Jackson is heard carefully and with eager enthusiasm by those who are down-and-out but still “in there fighting,” as one of the youths quoted above described her situation. We are lucky as a nation that a leading politician has the ear of such youths. But in future years, as he becomes more and more influential politically, Jesse Jackson will have to deliver certain goods or become increasingly ignored by more and more of those who now heed his every word.