{"id":17973,"date":"2025-12-11T18:39:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T18:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/?p=17973"},"modified":"2025-12-11T18:40:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T18:40:17","slug":"praying-for-hope-the-leadership-lessons-jesse-jackson-has-given-us-are-not-poetic-they-are-practical-hard-won-and-urgently-needed-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/11\/praying-for-hope-the-leadership-lessons-jesse-jackson-has-given-us-are-not-poetic-they-are-practical-hard-won-and-urgently-needed-now\/","title":{"rendered":"PRAYING FOR HOPE The leadership lessons Jesse Jackson has given us are not poetic\u2014they are practical, hard-won and urgently needed now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"By Ben Jealous<\/em>
\nNews of the Reverend Jesse Jackson\u2019s health struggles has stirred many. It has me praying. And it has me remembering the hard lessons he taught, shaped in the trenches of our people\u2019s ongoing fight for freedom.
\nLook around the world, and it is easy to find charismatic voices rising amid liberation move-ments. Black America has been blessed with such figures across generations\u2014perhaps because we have been cursed with a freedom struggle that never really ends.
\nThrough all that pain and hope, for nearly half a century, our most conse-quential and transformative leader has been the Reverend Jesse Louis Jack-son, Sr. Some dismiss his leadership as style over substance. \u201cKeep Hope Alive!\u201d they say. Sometimes with reverence. Sometimes half-mockingly.
\nWhen I hear that latter tone, I\u2019m reminded how privileged a life one must lead to think hope is just a slogan and not sacred labor. They don\u2019t under-stand the discipline it takes to help a people\u2014or a nation\u2014maintain hope in the face of adversity.<\/p>\n

Last summer, at the Democratic National Con-vention in Chicago, Reverend Jackson invited me to join him and his family in their box. I sat beside my old mentor and friend, holding his hand as Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the nomination for president.
\nThe symbolism of the location for the night was unmistakable. We were in the city that sent Barack Obama to the White House. But we were also in the city that decades before that empowered Jesse Jack- Rev. Jesse Jackson son to show America the question was no longer whether it would elect a Black president\u2014but when.
\nHe demonstrated that truth not only through his presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988\u2014campaigns that broke ceilings and forged coalitions\u2014but through the generations of leaders he encouraged and inspired.
\nThe year after his last presidential run, Virginia elected its first Black gov-ernor, L. Douglas Wilder. New York elected its first Black mayor, David Dinkins. Both publicly named Jackson as someone who helped make their possibilities real.
\nAnd just this past January, at Chicago\u2019s Martin Luther King Day celebra-tion, his impact was visible from City Hall to the state Capitol\u2014a reminder that his legacy is not nostalgia, but political infrastructure.
\nA decade earlier, I was one of the few Black partners at any Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. I was told there had only been 36 Black men to hold such positions in the history of the Valley. Then Reverend Jackson showed up.
\nHe stood before the boards of some of the largest technology companies in the world and told them plainly they needed to open their doors\u2014not be-cause it was charity, but because it was smart business. Firms that had never once hired African-American investors began doing so soon after.
\nI asked one top executive if Jackson\u2019s public and private confrontations of their leaders had influenced that shift. He didn\u2019t hesitate: \u201cHe\u2019s right. We need to change.\u201d
\nThat\u2019s the core of Jackson\u2019s leadership\u2014not just breaking barriers himself, but inspiring others to do so. He helped ordinary people see themselves as leaders and compelled those with resources to recognize their responsibility. In doing so, he became a beacon of hope and taught others to be beacons themselves. He continues to model that courageous hope even now. His lead-ership lessons still empower others to help transform our world for the better.
\nIn 2010, Reverend Jackson and I led a delegation of African American lead-ers to Senegal to mark the 50th anniversary of its independence. Nearly every head of state on the continent was present\u2014including some notorious for hu-man rights abuses. I froze, unsure how to engage them. Jackson did not.
\nHe walked forward, shaking their hands and hugging each with warmth. Later I pulled him aside. \u201cI don\u2019t see how I can do that,\u201d I told him. He looked me in the eye. \u201cSomeday somebody\u2019s parent or wife will call me,\u201d he said. \u201cA soldier. A missionary. A businessperson. And they will want help getting their loved one free. How will I be able to convince that president to free them if he doesn\u2019t know that I love and respect him as my brother?\u201d
\nIt was a lesson in diplomacy that changed everything for me. But it was more than diplomacy. It was a Christian pastor living out Jesus\u2019s command-ment to \u201clove your neighbor as yourself.\u201d This wasn\u2019t sentimentality. It was strategy. Integrity. Faith turned into action.
\nI stepped back into that room and greeted every leader there\u2014without judgment, without reservation. Not because each had earned it, but because transformation requires it. Because hope demands it. Because, as Jackson taught, the work is helping each other become our best\u2014and never giving up on the faith that each of us can do better tomorrow than we did yesterday.
\nAs Reverend Jackson fights to regain his strength in Chicago, his lesson stands: hope is not a feeling you wait for. It is a discipline you practice. And he is still teaching us\u2014by living it\u2014that no matter how dark the moment may be, we must keep hope alive by continuing to fight for a better day.
\nBen Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and a former national president and CEO of the NAACP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ben Jealous News of the Reverend Jesse Jackson\u2019s health struggles has stirred many. It has me praying. And it has me remembering the hard lessons he taught, shaped in the trenches of our people\u2019s ongoing fight for freedom. Look around the world, and it is easy to find charismatic voices rising amid liberation move-ments. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,252],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[324],"class_list":["post-17973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-opinion","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17973"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17976,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17973\/revisions\/17976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17973"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=17973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}