Remembering Jesse Jackson; Veteran Reporter Looks Back

I walked in the footsteps of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and almost lost my balance, sinking 2 inches into the most sumptuous Persian rug ever to be stepped on. It covered the floor of the office of the president of the Coca-Cola Company (Atlanta headquarters)—an inner sanctum of corporate power that Jackson had entered, sure footed and unblinking, in the early 1980s.

By then he had emerged from the long shadow of his assassinated mentor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The world no longer saw Jackson as the young lieutenant from the movement’s crucible, but as a global figure in his own right — an activist, diplomat and moral provocateur whose voice carried far beyond the communities that first lifted him up.

My own reference points for him, before I began reporting on his economic justice campaign, were twofold. One was the iconic photograph from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968: three arms extended, Jackson’s among them, pointing toward the flight path of the assassin’s bullet. The other was his adaptation of the poem “I Am Somebody,” which remains for me one of the clearest expressions of humanism to emerge from the modern Civil Rights Movement.

When I began reporting the story for The Wall Street Journal in spring 1982, I was five years into my journalism career, but only months on the staff of the business newspaper of record. It became only my second front page story, and my first to lead the paper. I spent a month or so tracing the full reach of Jackson’s campaign — at Operation PUSH headquarters on Chicago’s South Side, in Atlanta and in Cambridge, where he delivered an address at Harvard.

Jackson had spent at least a decade pressing Corporate America to “renegotiate” its relationship with Black America, choosing his targets with the precision of someone who understood consumer behavior as intuitively as any Madison Avenue strategist. The beverage and fast food industries were not just convenient symbols; they were daily presences in Black neighborhoods—Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, PepsiCo., Heublein (a bygone spirits company and then owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken). The flavored soda makers whose products filled refrigerators and corner store coolers.

Jackson’s pressure produced results. Company after company signed voluntary agreements to increase Black employment, expand their use of minority-owned vendors and invest in the communities that had long helped fuel their profits. In retrospect, his pressure on these giants was also laying the groundwork for the national platform he would carry into his first presidential campaign in 1984, bolstering his economic justice credentials long before the race began.

Of the thousands of stories I would write over a 35-year career, I still consider this one of the most important—not because my byline was on it, but because the Journal’s audience included the people Jackson most wanted to reach: the country’s economic decision makers. Jackson understood them better than they understood him. Had he chosen a different path, he could have been one of the most successful consumer marketers of his generation. Instead, he used that instinct to challenge the very companies that defined American consumption, insisting they reckon with the communities that helped build their fortunes.

It was a long way from the lunch counter sit-ins of Greensboro, North Carolina, where Jackson emerged as a student leader at North Carolina A&T State University in the early 1960s, to the polished corridors of a global behemoth. But Jackson walked those corridors with the same moral clarity he carried into the streets.

Looking back now, what stands out is how far ahead of the curve Jackson really was. Long before today’s debates about corporate responsibility, racial wealth gaps or who benefits from the American economy, he was pressing the country’s biggest brands to answer for the communities that sustained them. The language has changed, the frameworks have evolved, but the questions he forced into the national conversation are the same ones we’re still wrestling with.

Re-reading my story repeatedly since news of his death, I wish I’d quoted him more. Even more, I wish I could unearth the interview notes buried in my bottomless yellowed files of yesteryear. But the truth is, the notes would only confirm what time has already made plain: Jesse Jackson’s impact is written far more clearly in the world he helped shape than in this reporter’s shorthand.

Johnnie L. Roberts is a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a former senior writer for Newsweek.