Magic Moments : Jesse Jackson Urges Students to Heed Tragedy With Change in Lifestyle

Launching a crusade that he said would take him to high schools throughout the nation, Jesse Jackson this week exhorted Inglewood High School students to turn Magic Johnson’s personal tragedy into a public triumph by rejecting a lifestyle that has put a generation of young blacks at risk.

The assembly for the school’s 1,000 students also included an announcement by district Trustee Lois Hill-Hale that she will ask the Inglewood Unified School District board to name the high school’s gymnasium in honor of Johnson. The basketball star, who announced last week that he is infected with the virus that causes AIDS, frequently practiced there with his Los Angeles Lakers teammates.

In addition to basketball practice, Johnson visited the high school often to urge students to study and stay away from drugs, and District Supt. George J. McKenna spoke affectionately of him.

Although the illnesses of other celebrities have focused attention on AIDS, McKenna said, “This one is different because it’s a homeboy.”

Jackson told the students Tuesday that lifestyle, not unsafe sex, is the deeper issue facing them. It is unsafe guns, unsafe drugs, poor study habits and a lack of family values that threaten society today, said the two-time presidential candidate.

Jackson said that Johnson, by telling the world that he is infected with the HIV virus, has “suggested we need to reassess the lifestyle.”

He urged the students to reject values that prompt teen-agers to kill one another over $150 tennis shoes, to long for expensive cars and to have “sex without love, making unwanted and unloved babies.”

Urging them to seize the moment in history that Johnson has created, Jackson told the students to strive for a safer, more productive lifestyle and to demand that Congress and President Bush increase funding for AIDS research, testing and medical care.

McKenna, stressing the bottom line in the Johnson tragedy, told the students that there is no doubt that the HIV virus is fatal.

“Unless a cure is found, you will live longer than (Johnson) will,” McKenna said.

But it will be doctors and scientists, people highly motivated to get an education, who will find the cure and be the eventual heroes, McKenna said.

Andre Pimienta, a junior at the high school, said Jackson’s message made him wonder about the wisdom of having sex at all right now, let alone safe sex. Pimienta, who plans to major in architecture in college, also said Jackson’s message made him think about studying more.

Ninth-grader David Winston said hearing Jackson made him think he ought to study more to raise his C average. “I’m going to do it, ‘cause I’ve got to get better grades,” Winston said.

Brian Whitaker, 16, said the assembly drove home that “if we want a cure for AIDS, we have to study.”