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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
OKLAHOMA CITY — Like so many of my journalism colleagues, I crossed paths with the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
My main reporting on the civil rights icon — a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a two-time Democratic presidential candidate — came 25 years ago.
Jackson, who died Tuesday at age 84, came to Oklahoma in January 2001 during my time as a state reporter for The Oklahoman.
As I noted in a Plug-in column last month, Jackson led protests — including an anti-death penalty march — against the execution of Wanda Jean Allen, a Black woman convicted of two murders. I served as a media witness for Allen’s lethal injection, Oklahoma’s first execution of a woman since becoming the nation’s 46th state in 1907.
In my story on the march, I quoted Jackson as saying Oklahoma was “running dangerously close to being No. 1 in football and No. 1 in executions per capita.”
The quip was timely, given that the Oklahoma Sooners had defeated the Florida State Seminoles, 13-2, in the Orange Bowl earlier that month to win the national championship.
In a Chicago Sun-Times piece this week, journalist Monroe Anderson reflected on covering Jackson for 50 years.
“For a third of the 20th century and more than a decade of this 21st one, the civil rights activist, politician and ordained Baptist minister was camera ready, omnipresent and imminently quotable,” Anderson said.
Amen, said all the journalists — myself included — who never found Jackson at a loss for soundbites.
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
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