Growing up with 'Ebony.'

Ebony, Nov, 1995 by Jesse Jackson

I was four years old when Ebony was born, and my first recollection as a young boy living on Haynie Street in Greenville, S.C., was being awakened by my mother, Helen Jackson, who showed me a picture of my father in a soldier's uniform and told me that he would be coming home soon.

That image is burned indelibly in my mind, and I can see my father now, 50 years later, walking up University Ridge, coming over the hill, his head held high in pride--and disappointment--and how he told us later that Black soldiers had to sit behind Nazi war criminals on the train and that the White soldiers felt more kinship with the Nazi war criminals than with the Black soldiers who defended the flag at their side.

I grew up with, I was born into, that contradiction, and I learned early on to turn pain into power.

There was a lot of pain--and potential power--in Greenville, S.C., which was, like Atlanta, like Chicago, a segregated town with segregated schools, segregated hospitals and segregated churches. The handful of Blacks with money lived on streets with well-kept houses and yards, but most Blacks lived in small, often run-down, shot-gun houses left over from slavery days. Most Blacks worked from sunup to sundown for indecent wages. Most lived in houses with no running water. Most were destined to die at an early age.

This was the South, this was America, this was Jesse Jackson, this was Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson in 1945, nine years before Brown v. Board of Education, ten years before Emmett Till, when a new magazine named Ebony was born.

Two years after the magazine was launched, Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color line, one of the great psychological boosts of my young life. The new magazine covered that story for us, which was a good thing, because the hometown paper never carried positive stories about Blacks. There was never a picture of a Black wedding, never a story about a local Black businessmen, never even a decent obituary. We lived and died in a night of whiteness, without positive images or words to guide our spirits. What we got instead were demeaning stories on Black men in chains and Black men getting picked up for vagrancy or gambling on the weekends. Now we've come full circle, and politicians are again clamoring for "the good old days" of chain gangs and prison labor, and newspapers and TV stations are again using images of crime and disorganization to gild the chains of the oppressed.

How and why did we survive? We survived because we were a community and because Black people, all Black people, spoke to all Black people and assumed responsibility for all Black people and all Black children. We survived because of the Black Church and Black lodges and fish fries. We survived because of great Black preachers, like Benjamin E. Mays and Mordecai Johnson, and great Black leaders, like Pullman Porters President Asa Philip Randolph and Pullman Porter E.D. Nixon, the mentor of Rosa Parks. And it is important to remember today that the Black community of the '40s and '50s was poor in material things but rich in spirit.

This was the old world, before Ebony. This was also the segregated world that Rosa Parks doomed by refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery. Ebony covered that story, too, telling us about her courage, about the leadership of a young preacher named Martin King, about the organizing skills of Ralph Abernathy. I was in high school at the time, experiencing racism directly, and I remember that each tremor in Montgomery reverberated in South Carolina and shook something deep within me.

It was in this situation, in a climate of rising hope and rising expectations, that I spent my apprenticeship. I grew up on University Ridge, the site of Furman University. My grandma washed clothes and baby-sat for Furman students. But I couldn't go there, even though the nearest Black colleges were over 100 miles away. Bob Jones University, a Christian college, was located in my hometown, but I couldn't go there, even though I wanted to study religion. So at age 18, I went off to the University of Illinois.

But I was a Movement youth, even then. And when four Black students started the Sit-in Movement in Greensboro, N.C., I returned to the South and enrolled in North Carolina A&T, where I became student body president. In 1963, the year of the great March on Washington, tired of being denied the use of the city library, I led a student demonstration. Although I was jailed, we won the fight and desegregated the books, and I have always remembered with pride that I started my career fighting for the right to read and the right to excel.

Young America was alive, and active, and Ebony and I were both in the struggle.

Throughout these years, Ebony was a beacon in the night, giving us hope in the midst of despair, showing us images of triumph, and teaching us lessons about odds-defying successes. Ebony covered Jackie Robinson and his family, taught us about Thurgood Marshall, introduced us to heroes like State Senator LeRoy Johnson of Georgia, the first Black state senator in the modem South, and the man who helped Muhammad Ali return to the ring. The magazine brought us stories about Black celebrities, talented beyond description, whom we might never see on TV. From Nkrumah to Mandela, Ebony was a source of inspiration in our collective struggle and in my personal struggle.