Obama Honors Jesse Jackson at His Funeral: ‘Rose Above Despair and Kept That Righteous Flame Alive’

Former President Barack Obama honored the late Reverend Jesse Jackson at his Chicago funeral on Friday, emphasizing that during the civil rights movement, Jackson was someone who “rose above despair and kept that righteous flame alive.”

Jackson, the longtime civil rights leader, two-time presidential candidate, and protégé of Martin Luther King Jr., died at the age of 84 on Feb. 17 after decades as one of the most recognizable figures in American activism and politics.

Along with Obama, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Joe Biden, former First Lady Jill Biden, and former Vice President Kamala Harris were in attendance for Jackson’s Friday funeral.

“When the optimism of the early movement had begun to fade, and leadership had begun to fracture, and when the country seemed to have grown bored, gotten weary of the idea of justice and equality, and moved on to other concerns,” Obama said, “Reverend Jackson rose above despair, and kept that righteous flame alive.”

Speaking of Jackson’s campaigns for president and specifically, the 1984 Democratic presidential candidates debate, Obama said, “I remember how at the time, plenty of people, including — I’m sorry — plenty of black folks, were dismissing Jesse’s chances. Suggesting, ‘He just wants attention,’ ‘He can only get black votes’ … In his ideas, in his platform, in his analysis, in his intelligence, in his insight, Jesse hadn’t just held his own — he had owned that stage.”

“He wasn’t an intruder. He wasn’t a pretender. He belonged on that stage,” underscored the former president, before speaking of the inspiration he felt as a fresh college graduate watching that debate in 1984. “The message he sent to a 22-year-old child of a single mother with a funny name — an outsider — was that maybe there wasn’t any place, any room where we didn’t belong.”

Watch the clip above via MS NOW.

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