I didn’t grow up knowing that anyone could run for President. 

In South Stockton, survival felt more urgent than symbolism. We weren’t debating electoral strategy at the dinner table. We were figuring out how to stretch groceries.  We were learning–early–how fragile stability could be.

But even in that fragility, there were flashes of possibility.

I remember seeing Rev. Jesse L. Jackson on video–the cadence in his voice, the urgency in his eyes, the way he said, “Keep hope alive,” like it wasn’t a suggestion but a responsibility. I didn’t fully understand politics. I didn’t know the details of platforms or primaries.

But I understood what it meant to see someone who looked like you command a national stage.

He ran.

And in running, he stretched the country’s imagination.

Before it was fashionable. Before it was safe. Before anyone could point backward and call it inevitable. Rev. Jackson stepped forward and insisted that the people America had learned to overlook were not invisible.

He centered the poor.

He centered the excluded.

He centered those who had been told to wait their turn.

That mattered to a boy like me more than I realized at the time.

Growing up, my Nana taught me that faith was not passive. It wasn’t about retreating from the world. It was about engaging it. If God gave you something–a mind, a voice, an opportunity–you were accountable for how you used it.

Leadership wasn’t about status.

It was about stewardship.

Rev. Jackson embodied that theology in public life. His politics were inseparable from his belief that every human being carries divine worth. That exclusion is not just inefficient–it is unjust. That poverty is not a personal failure–it is a societal one.

Years later, when I ran for mayor of Stockton at 26, people called it bold. Some called it naïve. Some said it was too soon.

But it didn’t feel like boldness to me.

It felt like obedience.

Obedience to the idea that if you see something broken and believe you can help mend it, you step forward. Even when the odds are long. Even when the path is unclear.  Even when no one in the history of the city who held that office looked like me.

Rev. Jackson had already shown us that you don’t wait for comfort to align with conviction.

You move anyway.

Public life, I’ve learned, carries weight. There are moments when your intentions are questioned. When your work is reduced to headlines. When your mistakes are magnified and your motives misinterpreted. There are nights when the noise feels louder than the purpose.

In those moments, I’ve thought about what it must have required to run in 1984. To build a Rainbow Coalition before the country had language for multiracial solidarity at that scale. To stitch together Black voters, Latino organizers, labor unions, students, rural communities–and declare that they belonged in the same political vision.

To endure caricature.

To endure dismissal.

To endure doubt.

And to keep going anyway.

That perseverance wasn’t branding.

It was discipline.

It was the discipline of believing that hope is not naïve. Hope is resistance.

When we launched a guaranteed income pilot in Stockton, I heard the same critiques that trail every effort to expand dignity. Too ambitious. Too idealistic. Too unrealistic.

But I also saw parents breathe easier. I saw stability where there had been scarcity. I saw children with their basic needs finally met.  I saw policy become personal.

Rev. Jackson taught us that the margins are not peripheral to democracy–they are its moral center.

His campaigns weren’t just about winning votes. They were about widening belonging.

That is his inheritance.

And inheritance carries responsibility.

Each generation receives a mantle and must decide whether to carry it lightly or carry it fully. To treat it as history or as obligation.

For me, carrying that mantle means remembering that leadership is not performance. It is service. It means refusing to let cynicism define the horizon of what we attempt. It means building coalitions even when it is uncomfortable. Especially when it is uncomfortable.

It means believing that people who have been counted out still count.

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson expanded the political imagination of this country. He made it possible for a kid from South Stockton– raised by a single teenage mother with an incarcerated father–to believe that leadership is not reserved for someone else.  

Belief changes trajectories. Belief turns children into candidates. Organizers into mayors.  Movements into mandates.

But belief alone is not enough.

It must be paired with courage.

The courage to run.

The courage to lose and keep organizing.

The courage to stand in rooms that were not designed for you and declare–not arrogantly, but faithfully–that you belong.

Rev. Jackson did that.

And because he did, so many of us walk through doors that once seemed permanently closed.

Rev. Jackson, thank you for widening the path before many of us ever knew we would need it. Thank you for showing us that faith and justice belong in the same sentence. Thank you for proving that coalition is stronger than division and that dignity is always worth fighting for.

May we honor your life, not only with memory, but with movement.

Rest in peace.