And so, as Barack Obama heads for the brilliant new sunlight of Washington, D.C., the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrives in the eternal shadows of West Baltimore. They are men passing between dawn and dusk, future and past. Jackson is the man who might have been Barack Obama, if only.
If only America had been ready.
If only Jackson hadn’t gotten in his own way so many times.
If only the lofty rhetoric hadn’t been undone by so many problems beyond Jackson’s grasp, or anyone else’s.
He was the man so transparently hungry for television cameras and microphones over so many years that we were left with conflicting images of him, even as we watched him on election night in Chicago with abundant tears running down his cheeks: Who is this man, really?
Is he the impassioned minister-cum-political savior, trying to stir our souls? Or a tireless media hustler so overexposed on camera that, inevitably, the lens caught him when he was being small, or smarmy, or undignified, the way it caught him when he was belittling Obama in the midst of this summer’s race to the White House?
Both, actually, and therein lies the public remains of the man once considered the great spiritual heir to Dr. Martin Luther King.
Barack Obama goes to Washington for a bright new America, and Jesse Jackson goes to West Baltimore where the shadows continue to lengthen.
When last seen by the full America, there was Jackson on election night, his face raw and convulsed. The cynics would say he wept for himself, for his own lost potential, for realizing that his grandest hours and his brand of political theater had finally moved off stage-center.
The cynics would be wrong.
This is a man who was driven by grand instincts, all right: The hunger for racial justice, and for decent housing, and for children growing up with the same kind of hopes no matter the legacy handed down to them across generations.
When he wept on election night, surely it came with memories of Dr. King dying on that hotel balcony, with memories of Selma and Montgomery and billy clubs on heads. But, just as they were now vanishing into the American past, so was Jackson’s own hour.
Midnight struck in July, on Fox television, when Jackson thought his microphone was off. He turned to another talk show guest and muttered that Obama had been “talking down to black people.” Then he made a slicing gesture with his right hand and said, “I want to cut his —- out.”
The whole country heard it, or else heard it later on every network, and it felt like a kind of final curtain for Jackson. He apologized, and Obama accepted, but the truth is his time was past already.
Obama goes to Washington and Jackson gets an hour at West Baltimore’s Bethel AME Church, where he was greeted by hundreds of the great church’s parishioners and, inevitably, television cameras.
He said all the right things – in a general kind of way. He talked about “the joy of the moment” when Obama appeared in Grant Park. He talked about the miserable national economy, and the need for parents to raise their children properly. He decried the bailouts for banks while nobody bails out the unemployed or those who are losing their homes.
He came here because Bethel’s pastor, the Rev. Frank M. Reid III, invited him. But sometimes Jackson invites himself places, and finds the nearest TV cameras, and delivers the pitch of the moment and then goes away.
His appearance on Sunday reminded some of us of another Jackson moment here, when he got everything wrong. It was 1992, Opening Day at Oriole Park. Jackson showed up to give all the TV stations something to cover besides baseball. They could cover him.
He said he wished to make a statement. He called the front office integration of baseball one of the most pressing problems facing black America.
He was utterly out of his league.
For there, just a few blocks from the ballpark, was Martin Luther King Boulevard, and beyond it was the housing complex known as Lexington Terrace and Poe Homes, where the concentration of poverty, and drug abuse, and family breakdown, was as dreadful as any place in the state.
And Jackson wanted to talk about millionaire baseball executives.
The moment came back this weekend because, in the places such as West Baltimore, so little has changed. Still the poverty, still the drug traffic built on despair, still the children yearning for homes with both a mother and father – or either of the two.
Barack Obama goes to sunlit Washington, and Jesse Jackson arrives in the shadows of West Baltimore. We know the political future. But which is the future of America, sunlight or shadow?
