Jesse Jackson (center) on the North Carolina A&T football team. (Photo via NC A&T)
Jesse Jackson saw football as a way out of the South. It ended up being his ticket back.
Jackson had played quarterback at Sterling High School in Greenville, South Carolina. At 195 pounds, he had both speed and size, which was good enough for him to become a part of the football team at the University of Illinois in 1959, and his coaches decided to try him out at halfback and end during his freshman year. But life on campus wasn’t all that different than life in the South. Jackson would later say that he knew he had to leave Illinois when it became apparent that his coaches wouldn’t start a Black quarterback. That ignored the fact that Illinois had started a Black quarterback for most of the 1959 season named Mel Meyers (who was so proud of his position that he used the nickname “Quarterback” for the rest of his life). Jackson had never heard anyone directly call him the n-word in the South, but people had said it to him on campus in the North. Black athletes were largely cordoned off from the rest of the students, and told to stay away from white women. “It was the same thing as South Carolina,” he later said, “just way off somewhere else.” After two semesters at Illinois, the stress mounted, and Jackson was on academic probation.
He decided to transfer to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, which had been his mother’s first choice for him. At first, the registrar didn’t want to let him enroll. But later, the campus PR man, who’d just met Jesse earlier in the day, convinced the campus president to let him in. His personality was magnetic. He could be a football star, and potentially so much more.
It’s worth talking about the short football career of Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leaders and two-time presidential candidate who died last week at age 84. He wasn’t a breakout football star per se, but the sport was one of the things that helped him transition into the civil rights leader he would become. Jackson was also a pitcher on the A&T baseball team, a leader in the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, a Sunday school teacher, and an honor student who played Mahalia Jackson gospel records in his dorm room. He could always talk, and usually became the center of attention. One childhood friend said Jackson “could talk a hole through a billy goat.” His high school English teacher noted that “he thought a whole lot of himself right off the bat.”
Jackson was not the center of attention when he showed up in fall of 1960 on a historically Black campus, which today is the largest HBCU in the country. As a member of the Aggie football team, Jackson didn’t play much at first, and had to take time off for knee surgery in 1961. The next year he started to make an impact, lining up at both defensive end and fullback. He caught a fairly important touchdown pass during a October 1962 game against Winston-Salem State at Bowman Gray Stadium. A newspaper account called him “reliable.”
Then in 1963, having bulked up by 20 pounds since his Illinois days, Jackson moved to quarterback for his senior year and helped lead the Aggies to a 6-3 record. Even then, he wasn’t always the starter, and shared playing time with Cornell Gordon, who would go on to have a Super Bowl-winning career over eight seasons with the New York Jets and Denver Broncos.
Jackson shared the spotlight on the football field, but became an outright leader on campus. That, too, took time to develop. He showed up at A&T in 1960, just months after four other A&T students sat at a whites-only Greensboro lunch counter and refused to get up. Early on, Jackson was interested in what was happening in Greensboro, but wasn’t taking part in the rising number of demonstrations across town. He’d gotten married on New Year’s Eve 1962 to Jackie, a fellow student, and their daughter was due to be born over the summer of 1963. He had dipped his toe into civil rights groups on campus, including the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), which had been organizing student integration protests across Greensboro. He showed up for the March on Washington in 1963. But he preferred to criticize, not demonstrate. “They were determined to get me to be a part of the demonstrations, kept challenging me” Jackson would later tell biographer Marshall Frady. “But I expressed absolutely no interest in that business. I just wasn’t into what they were into. Said, ‘Point isn’t sitting in, it’s standing up.’ I kept criticizing the movement from a distance like that.”
Jesse Jackson as a senior at North Carolina A&T (Photo via the Ayantee Yearbook)
Then, in May 1963, Jackson had a change of heart. That month, he turned his popularity on campus into a leadership position, and won an election to become A&T’s student body president (taking over for one of the Greensboro Four, Ezell Blair Jr.). Campus protest leaders, aware of Jackson’s personality, had been worried that if they recruited Jackson that the movement would become his. But they needed a spark, with one student recalling that “we needed Jesse as a football player the girls loved, the president of the student council.” A few days after he became student body president, Jackson found himself at a church, where more than a thousand students had gathered with a decision to make. Earlier in the day, a campus administrator had shared that lawmakers in Raleigh had threatened to pull A&T’s accreditation if the student demonstrations continued. The massed students had to decide: Do we march, or do we go home?
Jackson spoke last. “I knew, just as a quarterback, you can never choose the path of having no confidence,” he later recalled. “Came my time to speak, I said, ‘History is upon us. This generation’s judgment is upon us. Demonstrations without hesitation! Jail without bail! Let’s go forward!’ And we moved on out.”
It was the first time that he’d seen the power of his public speaking. He, quickly, became the leader of non-violent mass marches in Greensboro, and was savvy about how to use prayer and patriotism to force police into tough positions. At one march, when police started to close in, Jackson told the crowd to drop to the ground in prayer. Officers bowed their heads and backed off. A few minutes later, police had to stop again when Jackson instructed the crowd to sing The Star Spangled Banner. Officers decided they couldn’t arrest people who were belting out the national anthem. A few even sang along, putting their hands over their hearts. “We were touching something bigger, see, that we both respected,” Jackson recalled. “Opening up the moral terms of the situation.” As in football, the strategy was as important as strength.
Police eventually arrested hundreds of protesting students, and even that was part of the plan. There wasn’t enough room in the jail, and the city had to re-open an abandoned polio hospital to hold them all. The cost of keeping all of those students behind bars quickly became a big issue for the city.
The remains of the old polio hospital in Greensboro, which once held hundreds of arrested students during civil rights protests.
Jackson led a march to the facility, which today sits abandoned off of Wendover Avenue in Greensboro. From the outside, he heard the noise of four hundred students crammed inside, some gasping for air. It was then that Jackson launched into an impromptu speech. A friend later recalled the scene in this passage from Marshall Frady’s biography:
“It was a tremendous speech. It wasn’t a tirade about the harshness of being in prison without soap and toothpaste and all that. He was talking about the suffering of those inside in the larger context of justice, and what this movement meant in terms of a turning point in the history of the nation. It flowed without forethought. It was poetic. Those of us who were listening, we said, ‘My God, this is comparable to Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham jail!’ ” When Jackson had finished, both [his friend] Stanley and a white friend with him were so awed that “we agreed it needed to be in print, that he must say it again so we could transcribe it and publish it.” But when the two of them rushed over to Jackson and told him it was imperative he repeat the speech into a tape recorder as soon as one could be fetched, he only gazed back at them, remembers Stanley, “with a kind of nonplussed amazement. He said, ‘What did I say?’ He had absolutely no recall of what he had said.” It was as if, Stanley suggests, some other force, “some voice and authority beyond himself,” even what some might term the Holy Spirit of the original Pentecost, had descended on him and taken him over. In retrospect, Stanley considers it “probably his inaugural speech in getting on to the business of his life.”
Thus, Jackson found his voice. He would be arrested himself in Greensboro, although the charges didn’t stick. He would later travel to Raleigh to protest, and made such an impression on governor Terry Sanford that he appointed Jackson to the North Carolina Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights, a move that helped jump start Jackson’s career in Democratic politics. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in sociology, and earned a fellowship to study at Duke Divinity School, but ultimately chose to attend seminary in Chicago, a city that would remain his home for the rest of his life.
Even so, Jackson had strong ties to North Carolina. In 1987 announced his second presidential campaign in Raleigh. He came back to North Carolina A&T often, to encourage students to vote, to deliver a commencement speech, to attend homecoming, and to serve as a trustee. He even showed off his Aggie pride by wearing an A&T sweatshirt on an episode of “A Different World.”
Jackson during an appearance on “A Different World” in 1989.
Jackson was inducted into the A&T Sports Hall of Fame in 1984, which today seems like a small footnote that harkened back to the beginning of a much bigger life. “I’m not going to suggest to you that he was the greatest football player ever,” his wife Jackie later recalled. “But you could not find a football player who had as much excitement, as much desire, as Jesse Jackson did.”