JESSE JACKSON CAME TO THE END of his prepared speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago last week and decided to keep on talking. Veering from the text, Jackson launched without warning into an account of his father’s brushes with racism during the Second World War. In Jackson’s telling, Charles Jackson was forced to depart a troop ship from a blacks-only ladder in New York harbor and to sit behind “Nazi war criminals because they were white” on a train trip through the Jim Crow South. Perhaps most poignantly, Jackson told the crowd, upon his return to Greenville, S.C., from the war in Europe, his father found that his next-door neighbor was of all things a German, complete with a heavy accent. “We fought to help free that country,” Charles Jackson told his son, his eyes filling with tears, “and now he can go downtown and work and can vote and I can’t.”

It was without question the most moving part of Jackson’s speech. It was also the most baffling, not least because Jackson never explained how his South Carolina neighborhood suddenly had become racially integrated during the few years his father was away at war. Perhaps Jackson will work out that detail in future speeches. The German-next-door story is, after all, a relatively new addition to the Jesse Jackson creation myth. Conspicuously absent from Marshall Frady’s recent, definitive biography of Jackson, as well as from all available newspaper and magazine accounts of his life, the story has not yet lost its rough, inconvenient edges. But give it time. Jesse Jackson’s past is nothing if not a work in progress.