Jesse Jackson showed us how love can always be a potent force in public life | Reverend William Barber

Before 5am on Tuesday, Jesse Jackson Jr called to tell me his father and my friend, the Rev Jesse Louis Jackson, had died at 84 years old. I shared a prayer with the family and listened to Jesse Jr talk about how he had heard his father breathe his last breath in the middle of the night. When he called his mother to the room, he told me, she reached toward his father and said: “A mighty lion has fallen.”

In Africa’s savannas, the lion is respected because he has a power that all the other animals recognize, even if they do not understand it. The responses to Jackson’s death have proven him to be a lion in this sense – remembered with respect by people from every walk of life, even those who did not understand him. Though Donald Trump has built a political career by opposing almost every policy Jackson worked for in public life, he recalled Jackson as a “force of nature”. Trump recognized his power, even if he didn’t understand it. Anyone who wants to help reconstruct the America that Jackson worked for should take time to understand the source of this mighty lion’s strength.

Born poor and Black in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson heard an empowering truth in Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s message of nonviolence. “I am somebody” became Jackson’s personal mantra long before it was a call-and-response line in his stump speech. If broken systems or imperfect people treated him as less than a beloved child of God, that did nothing to diminish the fact that the source of all life had loved him into existence. Jackson internalized the message shared by gospel preachers and practitioners of nonviolence: love is the most potent force in the universe, not least because it is an unlimited resource. He was relentless in finding ways to unleash the power of love through collective action.

“Direct action” was a nonviolent tactic Jackson learned from the civil rights movement’s sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration efforts, but he was constantly innovating new tactics to understand how love could unite people to uplift all of humanity. When corporate greed was the obvious obstacle to human flourishing, he organized boycotts that exposed companies’ need for brand loyalty and forced them to the negotiating table. When division among poor people prevented them from owning their collective power, he built rainbow coalitions to tap into the political power of fusion. When religion was distorted to incite fear and division, he exhibited a moral leadership that appealed to the best of people’s values – from Iowa farm country to the Mississippi Delta – to grow a moral movement. Jackson showed us how love can always be a potent force in public life.

I first met Jackson when I was president of the student government association at my alma mater in North Carolina, during his presidential campaign in 1984. As students, my classmates and I saw in his campaign the issues that mattered and the energy that was needed to bring new voters into politics. It wasn’t about Democrat or Republican. We were thinking about how people could have enough to survive and thrive in this society – and what we could do to make that more possible.

Most of us had come from poor eastern North Carolina. We knew what it was like for people not to have living wages and health insurance. And here came this figure, rising to reignite the ending of the Second Reconstruction and maybe even bring us toward the promise of a Third Reconstruction.

When I was a young man volunteering on his campaign, Jackson could make me so angry. I will never forget the time when, after five days of non-stop campaigning, I messed up the facts in a presentation. He made me stay up all night to study and show him I could get it right. “I am somebody” wasn’t just an inspirational slogan. It was a faith that demanded the best from people. He showed us that love wasn’t soft, but when put into action it could register millions of new voters and transform American politics. “My constituency is the damned, disinherited, disrespected, despised,” Jackson said. “They are restless and seek relief. They voted in record numbers, they have invested faith, hope and trust in the US”

When American voters repudiated the politics of fear and division after Trump’s first term, during a global pandemic, Trump lied and said the 2020 election was a fraud. Everyone knew he was lying, but Trump made acceptance of the big lie a loyalty test for Republicans across the country. In Texas in 2021, the Republican-controlled legislature gerrymandered the voting maps to dilute the power of the fusion coalitions that Jackson spent his whole life building.

I went to Texas with my organization Repairers of the Breach to lead a walk to the state capitol that summer. On that hot asphalt under the Texas sun, I remember looking up and seeing Jackson, whose disease was already advanced, sweat dripping down his face. “You don’t have to be out here,” I told him, but he shushed me. “Champions run through the tape,” Jackson said. While his physical strength was diminished, his love for the people and for justice was stronger than ever. Jackson showed us how a mighty lion of love can grow stronger with age.

I got the call that Jackson had finished his work on this earth just after finishing another march, this time across North Carolina to challenge the gerrymander Trump ordered here to try to hold control of the House in this year’s midterms. In this hour when the promise of a multi-ethnic democracy is imperiled, we need the witness of this lion of love more than ever.

Jackson’s life is a testimony that love is stronger than the strongest strongman because any strongman can only keep as many people down as his limited resources will allow him to coerce or deceive. But love can rise up from within each of us. Love can keep you alive when all the world is fashioned against you. Love can unite us across every line that’s drawn to divide, every dollar that’s spent to fuel hate, every piece of propaganda that plays to pit us against one another. And love can grow stronger even as our physical strength is diminished. May we honor the Rev Jesse Jackson’s legacy by coming together in the power of love to become the America we’ve never yet been.