The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights icon who died Tuesday, stumped in Pittsburgh during his presidential runs in 1984 and 1988, and returned a generation later to rally the city behind President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.
But one retired city police officer remembered Jackson for a far more humble and low-profile encounter involving a sliver of bacon.
When Jackson arrived in Pittsburgh about 30 years ago to attend a breakfast meeting at a Hill District church, Brenda Tate helped guard him as a Pittsburgh police officer on the bureau’s dignitary protection unit.
Volunteers in white aprons were frying bacon and eggs when Jackson entered the kitchen.
“It smelled so good — and Jesse Jackson just came in, reached over and grabbed a piece of bacon,” Tate, 77, of the Hill District, told TribLive on Tuesday.
“One of the sisters slapped his hand and said, ‘We don’t do that here!’ ” Tate added, with a laugh. “I don’t think she knew who he was.”
But many Pittsburghers did know Jackson — and several said he spoke in a way that made them feel heard and empowered.
“In many ways, Jesse Jackson was both a transitional and transformational leader in the Black community,” said the Rev. Ricky Burgess, a Baptist pastor and former city councilman who first met Jackson in 1984. “He really was the bridge between the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and Black political power.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the first of Jackson’s estimated half-dozen visits to southwestern Pennsylvania. But Heinz History Center archives show the civil rights leader who marched alongside King was here at least 50 years ago.
In 1973, Jackson spoke at a community event in the city’s Northview Heights neighborhood, the history center’s records show.
A decade later, he came to Pittsburgh looking to drum up votes as a presidential hopeful.
Burgess met the civil rights leader at a church event around that time. It was hard then and also hard now not to use bold pronouncements when talking about Jackson, he said.
“He was an electric personality, both on and off camera — you sensed greatness when you were in his presence,” said Burgess, 69, of North Point Breeze.
Nearly a quarter-million Pennsylvanians — 16% of those voting — cast their ballots for Jackson in the Democratic Party’s 1984 presidential primary, media reports from that year show.
Four years later, nearly 7 million Americans voted nationwide for Jackson, who won 13 primaries and caucuses — from Alabama and Georgia to Delaware and Michigan.
Rick Adams led Jackson’s 1988 campaign in Western Pennsylvania. Like Burgess, he felt Jackson was “electrifying.”
During the 1988 campaign, Adams took Jackson to speak with students at high schools in the city’s Homewood neighborhood and in Duquesne. He watched throngs of supporters cheer him on from a stage near what was then the Civic Arena near Downtown. Adams marched with Jackson in one of Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parades.
“Some folks dismissed Jesse running in the very beginning,” said Adams, 74, of Pittsburgh’s East End. “He was a civil rights leader, a Baptist minister … but he also was someone people knew. And that was his currency.”
‘Two old dudes’ talking
As a police officer, Tate stressed she was not allowed to initiate conversation with those she protected — from Jackson to three U.S. presidents to the Dalai Lama. But Jackson occasionally would speak with her.
“He had this kind of charisma — I felt really comfortable around him,” she said.
About 30 years ago, Tate was riding alone in the elevator of a Downtown hotel with Jackson when then-President Bill Clinton called Jackson on an early-model cellphone.
“He’s on the phone talking to Bill Clinton and I’m standing there, just trying not to be shocked,” Tate said. “They were talking like two old dudes together.”
Laying the foundation for Obama
Jackson returned to Pittsburgh in 2003 to attend a National Urban League conference and deliver a sermon at Macedonia Baptist Church in the Hill District.
In 2011, he visited again, focusing urging progressives to win a “tug of war over the soul of America” with conservatives. The next year, he spoke at a rally in Downtown’s Market Square to mark National Hunger Awareness Day.
Samuel W. Black, the director of the Museum of African American History at the Heinz History Center, said many politicians owe their careers to Jackson. Black, however, never met Jackson on his trips to Pittsburgh or elsewhere.
“When Obama came around 20 years after Jesse’s last run for the presidency, he inherited this playing field that was totally different,” Black, 65, said Tuesday. “Yes, it was a different political landscape. But Obama took advantage of what Jesse had laid. The game plan was what what Jesse built.”
Obama agreed. The former president posted to Facebook around noon Tuesday that he was saddened “to hear about the passing of a true giant.”
“Rev. Jackson helped lead some of the most significant movements for change in human history,” Obama wrote. “Rev. Jackson also created opportunities for generations of African Americans. … And in his two historic runs for president, he laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land.”
“We stood on his shoulders,” the former president added.
‘Keep fighting’
When Pittsburgh Councilman Khari Mosley helped launch Obama’s first presidential campaign in Pennsylvania in 2007, he said Jackson’s legacy clearly loomed large.
“Everywhere we went (with the Obama campaign), there was someone talking Jesse Jackson and his campaigns, both in ‘84 and ‘88,” Mosley, 49, who later met Jackson, said. “There’s a huge spiritual connection there.”
Mosley, of North Point Breeze, said there also was a distinction between Jackson and other Black political trailblazers like Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and a presidential candidate in 1972, or Adam Clayton Powell, the Baptist minister who went on to represent Harlem in Washington, D.C.
“Even though Jesse Jackson never held elected office, running for president and having a viable campaign … really represented that keystone moment,” Mosley said. It showed “African-American candidates can run in jurisdictions that weren’t majority-African-American — and win.”
Jacqueline Hill, president of Pittsburgh’s NAACP chapter, said Tuesday the nation had lost “a profound moral voice who framed poverty, racism and war as moral issues.”
“For older generations, it’s personal grief — they remember Jackson walking with Dr. King,” said Hill, 75, of the Hill District. “But his motto, ‘Keep hope alive,” should become a charge to the new generation. We shouldn’t just mourn him — but keep fighting.”