By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country. – John 4:44 (New International Version)
Among the tributes at Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.’s funeral, James Zogby—an Arab American political organizer, not a preacher—spoke the deepest truth.
Zogby described how, in the early 1980s, Arab Americans were systematically excluded from the Democratic Party. Candidates returned their money; endorsements were refused; staffers were fired for their ethnicity. At the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington, a delegation was asked to leave because some objected to Arabs marching. But one man fought to keep them in, saying ‘Arab American’ in rooms where the phrase had never been spoken with dignity.
Zogby’s words served as both eulogy and indictment: the world saw something in Jesse Jackson that America refused to see. What the world saw, Scripture had already named: He was received as a prophet everywhere he went — except in his home country.
Jesus named this dynamic in all four Gospels. Those who knew the carpenter’s son—or thought they did — could not receive the prophet; their prior category was too fixed. Familiarity had hardened into blindness.
Yet those with no preloaded image — or label handed down by those with reasons to manipulate the narrative — saw him clearly. Jesse Jackson lived out that text for 6 decades across multiple continents.
Whenever Jackson entered places where people had no previously manufactured portrait of him, they saw him exactly as he was. And what they saw, they could not resist.
Zogby recounted traveling with Jackson through Cairo, Hebron and Jerusalem—streets where Jackson was as comfortable as in Chicago. Everywhere, the reception was, in Zogby’s word, stunning. Two sources gave Jackson this power, he explained.
First, the pain of his people’s history. Instead of making him bitter, the experience forged him in a different way. Somewhere along the way, tribulation became testimony, and the pain transformed into power, Zogby noted. Second, Jackson carried that testimony across borders most American politicians never dared cross. He understood his people’s freedom was not just a domestic matter but a human one.
For example, in Jerusalem in 1994, when notable Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin’s government surrounded his hotel with troops, prohibiting meetings with Palestinians, Jackson declared, ‘We’re marching through the troops.’ Young Israeli soldiers spontaneously broke ranks. They wanted pictures with him. They wanted to be near him, and the blockade built to contain him simply dissolved at Jackson’s presence.
Yet America responded to that same magnetism and power through systematic silencing. Isolation came first: his influence was confined to the Black community, the coalition his political campaigns proved possible was refused, and his extensive policy agenda was absorbed into mainstream politics without his name publicly attached to any of it.
They discredited him by affixing the Hymietown remark to his identity with permanence, deliberately keeping the wound open because an undamaged testimony was too costly to permit. Five decades of activism brought weariness: chronic opposition, institutional indignity, and managed marginalization, all designed to make bearing testimony too exhaustive to continue.
Shame also arrived as a persistent cultural message—his ambition too visible or self-serving, the media relentlessly hammered; Yet, the reality is that his claims were too large for the space a Black man in America was permitted to occupy without penalty.
Lastly, what outlasted all the direct attacks was a subtle but oppressive cultural verdict that his voice had already delivered its essential content. In other words, if they couldn’t shut him up, they just needed people to stop listening. And America, including many in the Black community, drank the Kool-Aid that Jackson was yesterday’s news. You do not need to remove a testimony by force if you can simply convince the people who need it that it no longer applies to them.
But the world that received Jackson kept its own account: Arab Americans energized by the simple act of being seen. Palestinian communities that invited him back when no American politician would come. Syrian officials who released a downed American pilot that the State Department’s conventional channels could not retrieve, because Reverend Jackson understood that once he was in the room, there was no way they would not be with him. The prior categories that produced American blindness did not exist there because they saw him as what he was.
Zogby closed with a distinction worth preaching: “Transactional power uses people to maintain itself. Power for others grows as it is given away — because the people who receive it know it is genuinely with them, for them, and of them,” he insisted.
America spent six decades attempting to silence a testimony it didn’t want to hear. Yet, the world that gathered at Jackson’s funeral was evidence of its failure.
The testimony is never finished until God says it is finished. And Jesse Jackson’s testimony — received everywhere the American blindness could not reach — is still speaking.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org