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Jackson is well-acquainted with the problems of poor blacks. He was born in Greenville, S.C. where his father was a cotton grader who lived next door to his mother but was married to someone else. The fact that other black kids with "socalled legitimate beginnings" teased him. Jackson recalls, made him determined to succeed. His mother later married a janitor, and young Jesse often accompanied him on his night duties. One office his stepfather cleaned belonged to a Greenville lawyer named Clement Haynsworth.
From his house, Jesse recalls, he could look down one street and watch gamblers and bootleggers running from cops. "Firemen, rent collectors, store owners, police—these were my symbols of white authority, and we hid from all of them." He could look in another direction and see symbols of black respectability: a neatly kept house containing a family with three well-educated schoolteachers. He could also see a white school, but instead of attending it he had to walk five miles to reach his black school. He experienced cruder prejudice early. At the age of six, he rushed happily into a store, whistled innocently for service—and saw the white shopkeeper point a gun at him. What later bothered him most was that no black adults in the store said anything.
Jackson's early self-confidence was developed largely through high school athletics. He quarterbacked the football team, starred in basketball, pitched baseball—and won an athletic scholarship from the University of Illinois.
But Jackson was shaken by the separatism then imposed on black athletes at Illinois. "While the white guys were out there partying with girls on weekends, the blacks sat in their dorm drinking Coke and playing cards." He quit in disgust at the end of his freshman year and secured a scholarship to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, an all-black school in Greensboro. N.C. There he excelled as a football star, an honor student majoring in sociology-economics and student body president—and he moved, almost automatically, into civil rights activism. He had organized a sit-in at his home-town library when he became infuriated to find that he could not even use reference books that he needed for his college studies. In Greensboro he found himself leading sit-ins at lunch counters and protest parades through town.
Jackson's personal commitment was sealed in the summer of 1963, when he led a demonstration at the Greensboro jail. There some 400 black protesters were crowded into cells designed to confine only half that number. "It was hot. Those blacks were hanging on, suffocating, passing out. I began crying. It threw me into a whole new psychic pattern. It became a commitment for life." He also became adept at a kind of psychological warfare with the dominant whites. He discovered that when black demonstrators broke into the national anthem, puzzled cops stopped and took oft their hats; when blacks knelt in prayer, no one attacked them.
Thoroughly fatigued by the struggles in Greensboro and convinced that activism also required expertise, Jackson