By Alexis Taylor
AFRO Managing Editor
I never imagined Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. would pick up the phone.
It was 2012.
On June 14 of that year, Adidas, the international shoe and sports apparel company, boldly unveiled a pair of sneakers that came complete with a pair of orange, plastic ankle bracelets. After public backlash to their audacity, the company canceled the release of the footwear.
A fresh-faced AFRO staff writer at the time, I received the go-ahead to do the article and immediately began searching for voices to speak in the piece. I was eager to deliver the best work possible to my editor at the time, the Rev. Dorothy Scott Boulware. Six months into my role, I had my usual tried and true voices I could reach out to, but, on whim, I decided to call the Rainbow PUSH Coalition (RPC) and ask for comment.
What happened next I will remember for a lifetime.
I dialed the numbers to the RPC headquarters.
After a few rings…an answer from an oddly familiar voice.
To my absolute disbelief, the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. had answered his own phone line.
We had a brief conversation about the shoes and the larger conversation sparked. Jackson had been instrumental in getting NBA players and officials involved in cancelling the release of the sneakers.
“Shackles were used in slavery times for 246 years and used on chain gangs. It conjures up the images of our misery that are too serious to be trivialized and too painful to be trivialized,” Jackson told me. “One would not casually put a shoe with a swastika on it to be suggestive of such a painful period in Jewish history, so advertisements must be sensitive to the subliminal messages that they send.”
Before ending the conversation, he encouraged consumers to learn the implications behind the term “chain gang” before buying into the shoe’s hype.
The AFRO published the article and the daily grind of the news business moved on, but for me, those few fleeting moments stick to this day.
Interns will forever hear the story of how one summer day in June, a civil rights icon answered the phone for a budding journalist seeking to record just a bit of his legacy into the annals of time. That conversation has served as a reminder to always go the extra mile, take chances and dare to go straight to the top when seeking an answer.
That call flooded back to me years later, when I had the opportunity to be in the same room as Jackson. It was Feb. 28, 2022. While attending my first White House event, a Black History Month celebration, I tried my best to calm my nerves and take in the scene. In a room packed with notables from around the country, one figure stood out to me. There, in the East Room, as a crowd buzzed around him, Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. sat quietly. I watched as different figure heads came up to shake his hand, speak and move along. Though I didn’t dare lose my spot in the press section, I knew it was likely the first and last time I would have the honor of being in such close proximity to the man who had significantly impacted the freedoms and rights I have enjoyed as an African American.
On Feb. 17 the world woke up to news that one of the leading civil rights activists of the 20th and 21st Centuriers was gone. Though the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. died at age 84, surrounded by his loved ones, his spirit and the breadth of his work live on through the AFRO Archives, where Black reporters, photographers, editors and publishers have ensured his legacy.
This week, I thank the AFRO News and Afro Charities team for such a beautiful Black History Month edition and invite all to take a walk through history and remember the contributions of the great Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., the South Carolina-born boy who grew into a courageous international leader.
Take a look at A7 of this week’s edition for an overview of what’s inside the AFRO Archives for Rev. Jesse Jackson.
