When Jesse Jackson declared “I Am Somebody,” it was not performance. It was insurgent dignity. Those words were forged in the architecture of American segregation — in the humiliations of Jim Crow, in laws designed to codify inferiority, in a social order that denied Black citizenship. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson rose through faith, scholarship, and organizing. Working alongside Martin Luther King Jr., he absorbed the theology and discipline of nonviolent resistance. He endured arrests, surveillance, political isolation, and internal criticism. Yet resilience became his defining trait. ALSO READ: Jesse Jackson: American civil rights activist dies at 84 Through Operation PUSH and later the Rainbow Coalition, he broadened civil rights into a multiracial political project rooted in economic justice and voter inclusion. His presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 did not secure the White House, but they recalibrated who could credibly pursue it. He expanded the American political imagination. His advocacy was never confined to U.S. borders. Jackson viewed dignity as indivisible — linking domestic civil rights to global struggles against apartheid, inequality, and political exclusion. In 1998, I arrived in Chicago as an international student. Rwanda was four years removed from the Genocide against the Tutsi — rebuilding institutions, reconstructing identity, navigating the fragile architecture of reconciliation. We were a nation in disciplined recovery. My international student advisor — a politically animated Kenyan intellectual who remains a dear friend — gathered fifteen of us African students from our South Loop dormitories and walked us two blocks to the stately Harold Washington Library Center. “You are about to witness history,” he said. The hall filled. Then Reverend Jackson took the podium. His voice was anchored, deliberate, commanding. With preacherly cadence and strategic precision, he introduced a relatively unknown state legislator with language so expansive that the room shifted. The applause was seismic. That legislator was Barack Obama. Ten years later, he was elected President of the US. In that moment, I understood that political breakthroughs are cumulative. They rest on decades of groundwork laid by those who refused erasure. Jackson did not create Obama. But he enlarged the civic imagination that made an Obama possible. In 2011, Jackson was an honoured guest at Rwanda Day in Chicago, a gathering that convened Rwandans from across North America to reflect on national progress and diaspora responsibility. At that event, he publicly affirmed Rwanda’s trajectory of reconstruction and emphasized the moral necessity of unity, economic participation, and dignity for African nations emerging from trauma. His presence signalled solidarity — a civil rights elder acknowledging an African nation rebuilding itself. That solidarity became tangible in 2016, when Jackson led a delegation to Rwanda and visited Kigali Genocide Memorial. There, he laid wreaths honouring victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and reflected on Rwanda’s journey from devastation to stability. His remarks underscored reconciliation, vigilance against hate, and the shared global responsibility to safeguard human dignity. It was not diplomacy. It was moral witness. After genocide, asserting “I am somebody” is not rhetorical — it is restorative. It is the reclamation of personhood after systematic dehumanization. It is a nation reasserting visibility in the aftermath of attempted erasure. Jackson’s life demonstrates that resilience is strategic persistence. He absorbed defeats, health challenges, scrutiny — yet his through-line remained: affirm the humanity of the marginalized and insist on their political inclusion. “I Am Somebody” was never individualistic. It was collective. It belonged to sanitation workers in Memphis. It belonged to immigrant families in Chicago. It belonged to post-conflict nations rebuilding civic trust. It belonged to Rwandan students in a great American hall watching possibility expand. Reverend Jesse Jackson bridged Selma to Chicago, Chicago to Kigali, civil rights to global human rights. Resilience built that bridge. And in the echo of his voice — whether in a Chicago library or at a memorial in Kigali — those words endure: I am somebody. Laura Noella Rwiliriza is a communication specialist who continues to work across both the private and public sectors.
