On November 4th, 2008, a 67-year-old preacher stood in a massive crowd in a park in Chicago and

wept.

Hello, Chicago!

America had just elected Barack Obama as its first black president.

That was a big deal.

And I wish that Dr. King, or Meg Gepers, could have been there just for 30 seconds to see

the fruit of their labors, and I thought about them and I just wept. It was tears of joy. That preacher, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, wasn't just witnessing history. He had paved the way for it. After a childhood in segregated South Carolina, Jackson joined the civil rights movement. He became a protege of Martin Luther King, Jr. He witnessed his assassination in Memphis in 1968.

You couldn't tell it was a shock. He didn't get a shot. No, until it hit his face. It sounded like a stick of dynamite on a large firecracker.

After King's death, Jackson went on to become a giant in the civil rights movement in his own right. With his Rainbow Push Coalition, he worked to unite poor and working-class Americans of all races in a fight for economic empowerment.

You can hear it in his signature chant, heard here on his spoken word album, The Country Preacher.

I may be uneducated, but I am.

Somebody.

I may be in jail, but I am, somebody. Eventually, Jackson tried to harness that coalition for his own run for office. In 1984 and again in 1988, Jackson sought the

Democratic presidential nomination. He lost both times, but in 1988, he won multiple state primaries and some seven million votes,

nearly a third of the ballots cast.

His speech at that year's Democratic National Convention imagined America as his grandmother's patchwork quilt.

She took pieces of old claw.

Patches, wool, silk, gabardine, croakersack, only patches.

Barely good enough to wipe off his shoes with.

But they didn't stay that way very long.

To stir their hands on a strong cord, she sold them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture.

The fight for a better future would take more than any one group, Jackson argued.

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