Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview – Book Review

“Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” with an introduction by Al Sharpton

c.2026, Melville House Publishing           $20.99 175 pages

Business as usual.

Nothing new here. Same old, same old. Yeah, sometimes, the status quo is good: an even-keel feels safe, even relaxing, smooth as glass. Ten again, there’s no forward movement on a calm river. You need a little shaking-up, as in the new book “Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview” with an introduction by Al Sharpton, or nothing ever changes.

Even as a young man, Jesse Jackson was “a force of nature.”

He was a speaker at a young age, and could command crowds with his voice alone. He built Operation Breadbasket for Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conerence, to organize funds and volunteers. Later, he took Operation PUSH to Chicago, and held rallies on Saturday mornings to mobilize the Black community there. He was a mentor, a man of God, and he was willing to take on any injustice he saw.

He was also an in-demand interviewee in the years after Dr. King’s assassination.

In November 1969, he spoke to Arthur Kretchmer for Playboy magazine. He said then that there was a “war” between Black America and white America, and that this country seemed to be under a “police state” for Black men. He spoke against the elimination of Black studies in colleges and universities, and he railed against a governmental “lack of understanding” of problems facing Black businesses. 

“The perverted idea of manhood coming from the barrel of a gun,” Jackson said, “is what keeps people from understanding nonviolence.”

In an interview with Tony Brown and Diahann Carroll for Black Journal in January 1975, Jackson blamed America’s economic woes on “the superrich not being taxes properly” and the “monopolies” created by it.

In 1983, he told Ronald Smothers of The New York Times that “the Justice Department is not committed to justice.” In 1989’s Eyes on the Prize II, he talked about the real possibility that we “will have an African American as nominee of a party, indeed, as president of the United States of America…”

Do all these things sound familiar, like they were torn from the headlines just yesterday?  That deja vu feeling will hit again and again as you read “Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview.”

It helps, for further clarification and framing, to refer to the introduction by the Reverend Al Sharpton. There, Sharpton writes about the day he met Jackson, and the many times their lives and work intersected. He underscores the importance of Jackson’s activism and his work for Civil Rights over the years – and that’s where this book becomes amazing. 

Jackson’s words, as gathered here, make him seem like a man with a crystal ball, peering at the problems of the future, to offer guidelines for them. Readers may be astounded that the old saw is correct: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

This slender collection may make you look for more of Jackson’s interviews, so hone your search skills and get to work. In the meantime, “Jesse Jackson: The Last Interview” is a most unusual book.