There is a moment in every young person’s life when they encounter someone who makes them believe that the world can be different—that they can be different—and nothing is ever the same again. For me, that moment came because of my mother. I was twelve years old when my mother brought me to Reverend William Augustus Jones, the great pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Brooklyn.
Reverend Jones was one of the towering figures of the Black church in New York—a prophetic voice, a man of scripture and struggle. My mother saw something in me that she wanted shaped by serious men. Reverend Jones saw it too.
And so, he did what serious men of God do when they recognize a spark: he passed it along. He introduced me to Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. Jesse Jackson was already a force of nature.
He was young himself, by the standards of movement leadership, but he carried himself with a gravitas that seemed ancient, as if he had been forged in some furnace the rest of us hadn’t yet been near. He spoke, and you did not merely hear words. You felt the architecture of history rearranging itself.
I remember standing in that room thinking: This is what a leader sounds like. This is what it looks like when a man has decided, without reservation or apology, that his people’s liberation is worth everything he has. Jesse had already shown me what it looked like to stand somewhere you were not invited, to refuse the limits other people set for you.
I became the youth director of Operation Breadbasket in New York not long after that. Jesse had built Operation Breadbasket as the economic arm of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
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