This was a man focused on rights and rainbows

The offices of the Des Moines Register’s opinion staff were mostly empty when my telephone rang late one afternoon about 15 years ago.

The guard at the lobby security desk said two men were there and hoped I had time to meet with them. I said sure and invited them up to our office on the fourth floor.

Within minutes, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his driver emerged from the elevator. They were on their way to Waterloo. But Jackson wanted to detour to the Register, just to talk about some concerns on his mind.

That conversation — it lasted about an hour — came to mind Friday as I watched the funeral for one of the nation’s notable civil rights freedom fighters.

Jackson’s death leaves Andrew Young as the most prominent living survivor of those tumultuous years that seared into America’s memory places like Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Memphis and Washington, D.C.

Jackson’s soaring voice, in harmony with civil rights leaders from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lewis, from Thurgood Marshall to Rosa Parks, and from Fannie Lou Hamer to the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, amplified the concerns of Americans who felt unseen, unheard and overlooked for generations.

But on that afternoon in Des Moines, in the conference room steps from my office, where governors, presidents and presidential candidates regularly met with the newspaper’s reporters and editors, Jesse Jackson’s voice needed no amplification.

The cadence mirrored that we heard in news clips about his death. Even so, the imposing figure seated across the table was a softer spoken, more gentle version. 

There sat the son of a poor, single mother from South Carolina talking with the son of blue-collar parents from southern Iowa. We discussed poverty, economic disparity and the role of the United States government to ensure the have-nots, as well as the haves, receive the same treatment and opportunities.

The message my guest delivered that afternoon was vintage Jackson. He made it clear where he stood. But there also was a give-and-take. He spoke — and he listened. 

There were observations about Iowa that were informed by his many trips to the state during two campaigns for president and his leadership of what became the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

His message was clear: Americans needed to hear the voices of those without big megaphones, the men and women who constitute the “working poor” in our nation.

On the campaign trail he often told audiences: “Most poor folks are not on welfare. They work every day. They catch the early bus. They clean the streets. They cut the grass. They rake the leaves. They raise other people’s children. They work in hospitals. They mop the floors and clean up the germs. The wipe the bodies of those who are sick. They clean the commodes.”

At the events in Waterloo that brought him to Iowa that day 15 years ago, Jackson made the point that even amid budget concerns and the size of the national debt, leaders and citizens must not forget the price of poverty and the economic pain those who are less fortunate experience. 

The United States, Jackson said, must not allow the nation’s safety net to unravel — especially to bankroll tax cuts for wealthy Americans or to fight wars in foreign lands.

He told his Waterloo audience, “That is our mission now, to build a safety net beneath which America will not fall. We cannot let Social Security recipients and Medicaid and Medicare recipients fall through that crack.”

Jackson’s message back then about protecting America’s safety net seems especially prescient today. 

Sitting in the Register’s conference room that afternoon, he worried the United States was backsliding from the progress made during the 1960s’ civil rights struggles. He voiced anxiety about debates over immigration, voting rights and economic opportunities. He foresaw those issues as threats that could erode the legacy of Dr. King and his generation’s civil rights leaders.

As he told that Waterloo audience later, “Now we are more free, but we are less equal. The gap between the have and the have-nots is getting much wider.”

That was then. Now is now. But the concerns are the same.

The Rev. Wendell Anthony told the Detroit Free Press upon learning of his friend’s death on February 17 at age 84, “One thing he taught all of us was to keep hope alive, even in the midst of all this madness we have to deal with now.”

As for me, I am glad I did not let that telephone call roll to voice mail on that distant afternoon. Little did I know that I would learn about the past — and the future — from a man who always saw, and always sought, a better life for all Americans.