Jesse Jackson tells black teens: "Nobody can save us but us
An imposing man with the build of a football player and the command of a general strides onstage in the high school auditorium. Immediately, the audience falls silent. He captures the students expertly, first soothing them with his soft, sensuous voice, then whipping them into a frenzy with a quickening cadence. "We can be as good in academics as in athletics," he shouts, "but we've got to believe we are somebody. Repeat after me, "I am somebody.' " Hundreds of teenagers rise to their feet, chanting, "I may be poor, but I am somebody. I may be on welfare, but I am somebody. Nobody can save us, for us, but us." He calls the captain of the basketball team to the stage.
"If you're behind in the game, what do you do?" he asks. "Try harder," declares the hoopster. "Say amen!" yells the preacher. A chorus booms back.
The pep rally is in a Chicago ghetto school; the cheerleader is none other than the Rev. Jesse Jackson (he was ordained as a Baptist minister). His style is a combination of razzle-dazzle and Southern revival meeting. But the message is a very basic version of the old Protestant work ethic: work hard and aim high. In corridors where punks push dope, Jackson pushes hope. Project EXCEL, a tough self-help regimen for students and parents alike, which reached 21 schools in Chicago, Los Angeles and Kansas City during this past school year, is turning the old ghetto battle cry of "Burn, baby, burn!" into "Work, brother, work!"
Like most other civil rights leaders in the U.S., Jackson criticized last week's Supreme Court decision admitting Allan Bakke to a University of California medical school on the ground that affirmative action programs may be harmed.
Yet his message to underclass blacks is that they must learn not to rely on help from the outside, that they must take responsibility for their own upward mobility and the quality of their lives. "Too many of our schools are infested with a steady diet of violence, vandalism, drugs, intercourse without discourse, alcohol and television addiction," says he. "The result has been to breed a passive and superficial generation."
Constantly on the road speaking to teen-age groups, the National P.T.A.
Convention, the National Baptist Convention and, this week, to the National Education Association convention in Dallas, Jackson misses no opportunity to argue the need for a return to traditional values. "Only by re-establishing moral authority—that is, our believability, our trustworthiness, our caring—can we demand discipline and have it perceived as therapy and not punishment," declares Jackson.