There was an instant a few minutes before Jesse Jackson began speaking that Tuesday night when everything he was, is and would be was thick in the air at the Democratic National Convention.
Thousands of people had crammed into the hall, and there were thousands more outside who couldn`t get in. A national television audience of millions awaited his address.
Atlanta, a city more symbolic than anyplace else in America of the tumultuous change wrought by the civil rights era, a testament to the strength of black voting power, baked at the end of a brutal summer day.
There he stood, cause and candidate wrapped up in one hot package, presented to Atlanta by a movement that began long before Jackson could ever have imagined his own candidacy. His race was what made him important as a candidate, and his backers made him important as the product of a cause.
Never in history had a black man carried so much power, and so much symbolism, to the floor of a Democratic convention. It was the ultimate sign that a people disenfranchised for centuries had moved closer than ever to the heart of the American political process.
And of all the young activists who had surrounded Martin Luther King Jr. early in the civil rights movement, Jackson was perhaps the least likely to make the shift into mainstream politics.
How that happened is the story of his own maturing, his strategic skill and a persistence that pushed him along when all the others were satisfied with lesser roles, or unwilling to take the biggest risk of all for a black politican.
It was Jackson`s moment, but he was not alone. He could not be separated from the hopes of his constituency, the memories of King, the sense that his presence represented an important change in the way the nation conducts its politics.
It took 30 years, some of them bloody and bitter, for black voting power to reach the point at which it could transcend traditional politics and deliver a serious presidential candidate to the podium.
Few who heard Jackson`s speech will forget it, particularly the tribute it paid to the people killed in the battle that ultimately provided Jackson with his political base.
”My right and my privilege to stand here before you has been won, in my lifetime, by the blood and the sweat of the innocent. . . . Many were lost in the struggle for the right to vote. . . . They died that we might have a right to live,” he said.
To Tom Mann, the lone black state senator from Iowa who describes himself as ”the Iowa Black Caucus,” the address carried a personal message.
”I stood there on that floor, watching and listening, and I felt that he was talking personally to me. He was expressing my hopes and aspirations,”
Mann said.
”His history is my history. Living in a shack where wallpaper was used to keep wind out. . . . He was the best reflection of what has happened in the political process. I think it marked the ending of an era and the beginning of a new era. . . . It marked the ending of the activist phase of the civil rights era and the beginning of a new era of political involvement.”
Jackson had fought his way to Atlanta. His candidacy threatened more than once to smash the party into fragments, but he never set up a confrontation he couldn`t resolve. The tension he created kept the party`s focus locked on black voters and what they represented.
For days, the question of whether the party would be able to present a unified image hung on how Jackson would handle a slight-Michael Dukakis`
decision not to telephone a black preacher, South Carolina-born but schooled in politics in Chicago, to tell him who his running mate would be.
A black had never commanded that kind of attention from the party before. But then, a black had never before constructed a campaign that was so critical to the party`s chances for success.
In losing his bid for the nomination, Jackson crafted a presidential effort with an element lacking in the other also-rans. He refused to quit, and he never stopped reminding the party of the forces he represented.
Long after it became apparent that Dukakis was going to be the Democratic nominee, Jackson pushed on, building the leverage and the constituency he would need to negotiate-a situation that other politicians have carried into a convention, but power never before delivered by a black.
He was criticized for that, but he was actually using a time-tested tool. Conflict defines the history of American political conventions, particularly some recent ones.
In 1956, the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson but watched John Kennedy, Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver battle it out for the vice presidential spot, ultimately taken by Kefauver.
In 1968, Eugene McCarthy brought a powerful antiwar movement to Chicago and confronted a party already bloodied by Vietnam. In 1972, bickering over the vice presidency kept George McGovern waiting until 3 a.m. to make his acceptance address.
Sen. Edward Kennedy brought his own army to challenge incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, a battle that left the party crippled and confused.
But the Democrats have never had to contend with the kind of pressure they faced in 1988. It was the first time in history that a black man carried enough power to demand concessions, and that was what separated the convention in Atlanta from all its predecessors.
The other candidates who ran in the 1988 primaries were all but invisible in Atlanta, playing subservient roles as Dukakis prepared to accept his party`s nomination.
Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. had trouble getting into the hall when he forgot his credentials. Gary Hart, forced from the race twice, went as a columnist. Paul Simon, Richard Gephardt and Bruce Babbitt were all buried within the delegations from their states and all but lost in the crush.
That Jackson kept pressure on the party until the last possible minute, the point at which California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, his campaign chairman, delivered Jackson`s delegates to the Dukakis cause Wednesday night, was no coincidence.
It was the same strategy he had pursued throughout the campaign, an idea born much earlier in the decade in Chicago, when it became apparent that it was time for black Democrats to find a new role for themselves, a role that would play greatly to Jackson`s skills as a politician and orator.
Jackson`s march to Atlanta began in Chicago, in what now seems a different era, though it was only a few years ago. The strategy he pursued at the convention was dictated as much by that history as by the events on the convention floor.
If Jackson won a place in history in 1988, it was only an extension of his own history, and that of the people who gave him the power of their votes.
