RIP, Jesse Jackson
He was literally a towering figure in politics
Civil rights leader, preacher and political figure Jesse Jackson has passed away at the age of 84. I met Jackson in the summer of 1988 while I was a young whippersnapper working as a staff artist at the Atlanta Constitution. It was during the Democratic National Convention when he visited the newsroom after an editorial board meeting and it was a very brief encounter. But we spoke and I shook his hand. I remember being struck by how physically large he was. I’m a fairly big guy, but he seemed taller than me, even though I looked it up and we’re the same height, 6’ 3”. When I shook his hand, it was huge, like grabbing a bunch of bananas. He was also huge on the political stage, coming in second in the primaries and stealing the spotlight away from the relatively boring Dukakis, who won the nomination, but lost the election. That was captured so brilliantly by two-time Pulitzer Prize- winning Miami News cartoonist Don Wright, who used my Atlanta office and desk as his base of operations while he was in town drawing cartoons about the convention, back when newspapers had cartoonists and sent them to do such things. I was a huge fan of Wright’s and I consider him a huge influence on my work, so it was a thrill to meet him in person. I think I fished this cartoon out of the trash.
Jackson was notorious for popping up in front of a microphone and camera whenever anything newsworthy happened anywhere and I reference that in this full-page cartoon I drew for The Augusta Chronicle in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election debacle:
Later, he had less-than-kind things to say in a couple of hot mic moments about rival Barack Obama, who was a presidential candidate at the time.
Jackson had a way of speaking in a sort of sing-song, sometimes rhyming, delivery that could be both inspirational and nonsensical, as summed up in this SNL skit:
He was a character when times were less polarized and being on the other side of the political aisle didn’t automatically make you the enemy who must be destroyed at all costs. Back then, we could all laugh at ourselves a little bit. May he rest in peace.