Reverend Jesse Jackson

Twenty years ago, in the midsummer of 1963, the President of the United States and his advisers were greatly disturbed whenever they looked at the calendar and saw the date August 28. It was a day chosen by black leaders, by the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, more than any other, on which to stage a mass rally of blacks in Washington. It was intended to protest against the fact, nine years after the Supreme Court had abolished the segregation of the races and declared that the constitution was colour-blind, the fact that most Negroes – we were just beginning, at their insistence, to call them blacks – were still being treated as second-class citizens.

The response to this call from blacks across the 3,000 miles of the United States, while no doubt it was heartening to black people themselves, was alarming to the government and to the police of Washington. The first rough estimate of the numbers who might gather in the long rectangular lawn that runs up to the Lincoln Memorial ran as high as 100,000. The president then was John F. Kennedy and though he'd been seen as friendly to blacks; indeed, he was a firm integrationist who'd been put in the White House by an overwhelming black vote, or let's say that he'd just managed to squeak into the White House by a tiny majority thanks to the overwhelming black preference for him over Richard Nixon.

Nevertheless, during the previous administration, President Eisenhower had had to call out federal troops to protect the right of qualified black students to enter Southern colleges and in most places where blacks tried to claim their rights under the new Supreme Court rulings in schools, restaurants, on trains, buses and the like, there'd been much tension at best and riots at worst; nothing as bad as the general explosion of rioting, burning and looting that was to come and that turned 1968 into 'the black year' in literally dozens of cities.

Nobody in the White House, or outside it, in 1963 could foresee those days and nights of mass violence. Still, it was obvious even before it happened that the 1963 rally, advertised with the menacing title of 'The March on Washington' was going to produce a congregation of blacks in the heart of the capital like nothing that anyone could remember.

One or two oldsters close to Kennedy recalled the last so-called 'March on Washington' – the famous, or infamous, bonus march 30 years before. A march of old soldiers from the First World War who'd arrived from all over the country and tented down on the flats outside the capital to protest the government's defaulting – it was in the pit of the Depression – defaulting on the promised payment of a veterans' bonus. There were no more than a thousand men there but, after a few nights and days, they grew tired and angry and began to make threatening sounds as they surged around the steps of the Houses of Congress.

The president, Herbert Hoover, made what is now thought to have been a very rash decision. He called out a detachment of the army and they took a stand with fixed bayonets facing the restless mob. And in a murky and never well-explained incident, the commanding officer ordered his men to fire. There was a moment of dumb disbelief. An army officer firing on old soldiers! There was a brief riot, a couple of wounded and the bonus army retreated in helpless outrage.

The public memento of this lamentable incident is a photograph carried by every newspaper at the time of the commanding officer, a Roman figure with arms akimbo, standing on the steps of the Capitol surveying the scruffy scene while his aide-de-camp stood at a short, but respectful distance behind him. The commanding officer was Major General Douglas MacArthur, the aide was Major Dwight D. Eisenhower.

One of Kennedy's presidential cronies told me once that at the time of the promised or threatened black march on Washington, the bonus march was recalled and there was a nervous discussion in the White House about whether or not troops should be on hand in case of an uprising. Evidently, nobody was for it. The president was dead against it. Of course, a contingency plan is always in the works. If the worst happened, yes, but Kennedy decided to leave it to the city of Washington and its police. Even then, Washington was over 60 per cent black and blacks were well represented on the police force.

Well, the estimate of a hundred thousand marchers was wrong; 250,000 people, mostly black, gathered in and about that long green rectangle and sang the battle hymn of the republic and listened to the soaring eloquence of Martin Luther King and his, 'I have a dream' speech which has passed into the national memory as vividly as the Gettysburg address.

These quarter-million ended the rally with the thundering chorus of the civil rights' hymn, 'We shall overcome!' Then they dispersed in high spirits and good order. There was no violence, no riot, not even a scuffle.

This rally, more massive than any ever recorded in the history of the republic, did perhaps more than any subsequent law or the letter of the Supreme Court ruling to impress the general public with the need for change and the fitness of it and I suspect that millions of whites heaved vast sighs of relief. Many people I knew said, 'You see? Blacks will move up the ladder quietly, slowly of course, and thank God peaceably.'

Well, it was not to be, as the history of the next seven or eight years was to show. There were three or four years of bitter protest and occasional rioting. Three months after the marvellous peaceful march on Washington, John Kennedy was dead in Dallas. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis and on the weekend after the funeral, Baltimore caught fire and army tanks patrolled the streets of burning Washington. Mobs went on the loose and burned down poor, mostly black, sections of Newark in New Jersey, of Detroit and half a dozen other cities.

During the 15 years since then I think it's fair to say there have been no sizeable race riots except in the Cuban and black neighbourhoods of Miami. You would have to be blind or uncommonly bigoted not to admit that, today, the colour picture of American society has radically changed. Not radically enough for some black leaders or for the young blacks whose unemployment rate is double that of whites, but in the towns and cities of the South, where we always lazily assumed discrimination was most callous and brutal, there are three times as many black sheriffs as in the cities and towns of the north.

Blacks are just as eligible for seniority as whites in a score of trades and professions. Black railway porters, the famous Red Caps, have been abolished. Blacks are as visible in offices as executives as once they were as messenger boys. My bank manager is a young black woman. So is the floor manager, the captain of my television crew. Ivy League colleges – Harvard, Yale, Princeton – that once had tacit quotas for Jews, now have black men and women students in very much more than token numbers. At least a third of the pupils at Julliard's School of Music in New York are blacks. Some of the great cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Atlanta – have or have had black mayors.

Throughout the 1970s the most prominent black leaders who followed in the wake and under the inspiration of Martin Luther King came to the conclusion that to seek national leadership in politics was unrealistic. They went back to their own towns and state capitals and worked for their people in local or state politics. There was and there is, however, one man who has come to feel that the time is ripe for an assertion of black national leadership.

He's a young protégé of Martin Luther King, he was close by him during the bad night in Memphis. He is the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He was the star performer at last week's 20th anniversary black rally where, again, a quarter of a million people sang and exalted without any violence or disorder. Jackson is 41, the illegitimate son of a high school student in South Carolina. He went through his own schooldays being taunted by schoolmates as 'Young Jesse who has no daddy'. He once said that in those days he felt that the odds against his survival in this society were heavier than against most other blacks, but he was an outstanding student and a whiz of a footballer. He got a football scholarship to the University of Illinois.

There, he found the racial slurs too much to take. He left and he went to a predominantly black college in North Carolina. And from there he spent three years at Chicago's Theological Seminary. He never graduated, not because he was incompetent – far from it – he saw the television coverage of the ferocious beatings of blacks in Selma, Alabama, that was in 1965, delayed his ordination as a Baptist minister (that came later) and joined the staff of Martin Luther King.

The murder of King was the crucial turning point in Jesse Jackson's life and his mission. He joined various black reform organisations, quarrelled with them about tactics, set up his own outfit and more or less anointed himself as the only true successor to Martin Luther King. His attractiveness, his God-given gift for a passionate but thoughtful variation on old-time revival rhetoric has made most black people, I should say, grant him his claim to be King's rightful heir.

He's now announced an ambition that would have been undreamed of 20 years ago. He's decided it is time for a black presidential candidate and he is not a diffident man; he has decided that he is it. You may have seen that he's going to run against former Vice President Mondale who, at the moment, has the inside track for the Democratic nomination, against Senator John Glenn and the three other Democratic hopefuls.

What should be said, at once, is that he does not mean to fight the chosen Democratic candidate for the presidency or run as an independent, he is going to fight them for the Democratic nomination – with not a prayer of winning it. But the winner, whoever he is, cannot take the black vote without Jesse Jackson's support and blessing and it is doubtful whether any Democrat can win the presidency without the greatly increased numbers of registered black voters.

So, more than any other man in the United States, the Reverend Jesse Jackson has become THE man that any Democrat must woo and win if he wants in 1985 to be called Mr President.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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