By Babafemi Ojudu
News of the death of Jesse Jackson has prompted a flood of tributes across the world. Many of them rightly celebrate a man who stood, for decades, at the barricades of the struggle for civil rights in the United States, marching, organizing, speaking, and insisting that Black lives carried the same dignity as any other.
He helped change the moral vocabulary of a nation. That much is beyond dispute.
But as we mourn him, it may also be time to remember a truth we often resist: heroes are not saints. We are too quick to polish the memory of great men until it gleams without blemish. We prefer marble statues to living flesh, myths to men. Yet history is more honest and more instructive when we allow greatness and frailty to coexist.
I learned this lesson in a very personal way.
In 1995, I was on a fellowship at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Nigeria was then under the suffocating grip of General Sani Abacha. Journalists were being jailed, newspapers shut down, dissent crushed with ruthless efficiency. Many of us had been driven into exile, and wherever we found ourselves, we spoke at conferences, on campuses, in the media, determined that the world would not look away.
At some point, two colleagues and I were invited to appear on a television program associated with Jesse Jackson. We were elated. Here was a chance to speak about Nigeria’s ordeal, and to meet a man we had admired from afar.
What happened instead stunned us. For reasons never fully explained, we were turned away from the studio. We left bewildered, disappointed, and deeply hurt.
Not long afterward, reports began to circulate that Jesse Jackson was engaging with the Abacha regime. He would later lead a delegation of African-American public officialsm including Senator Carol Moseley Braun, then the first African-American woman in the U.S. Senate—on a visit to Nigeria. That trip drew sharp criticism from pro-democracy activists who believed the regime was being granted a legitimacy it did not deserve.
For those of us who had seen friends imprisoned, tortured, or silenced, it was difficult to understand. Yet time has a way of tempering judgment. Age and reflection teach us what youth often resists: human beings are complicated. A man may be heroic in one chapter of his life and flawed in another. The two truths can exist together without cancelling each other.
Jesse Jackson was not a saint. But he was a consequential man. He helped expand the space of freedom in the world, and millions walked through doors he helped open. That is no small legacy. And perhaps that is the larger lesson for all of us.
Do not worship your heroes. Admire them, yes. Learn from them, certainly. Be inspired by their courage and achievements. But never forget that they are human beings, subject to the same weaknesses, misjudgments, and contradictions that mark us all.
When we demand perfection from our heroes, we set ourselves up for disappointment. But when we accept their humanity, we gain something more valuable than illusion: we gain wisdom.
Jesse Jackson’s life, taken as a whole, reminds us of both the power of one individual to move history, and the enduring truth that even those who shape the world remain, in the end, only men.
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