I covered the Rev. Jesse Jackson from the mid 1970’s, when I was a scruffy underground press reporter, and he was the young minister who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and was there when Dr. King was assassinated.
He was matchlessly eloquent and compelling, but he had his critics, both political and personal. Politics in Chicago can be fierce and fractious.
I went down to Mississippi in 1984 to cover his first campaign for president; by then I was working for NPR. At a press conference at a school in Jackson, another reporter from Chicago and I noticed the watch on Jackson’s wrist. It was gold, thick, and bejeweled…