Big ideas that changed the world - Jesse Jackson, Tuesday 3 April: 19.15–20.00

Beginning tonight is a new second series of the documentary strand that explores some of the world’s most influential ideas. Written and presented by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, this programme looks at the issue of equality, and examines the centuries-old struggle of black people in America, from the days of slavery right up to the present day.

Working alongside Martin Luther King Jr, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was one of the most important voices in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In the 1980s, he twice ran for president, and has spent his life fighting for equal rights, justice and peace. Although the world has come a lot closer to egalitarianism since he began his quest, he still feels there is a long way to go.

For Jackson, egalitarianism is “one of the most noble ideas humans can aspire to.” It was Jesus Christ who fuelled Jackson’s lifelong passion for equality with his teaching that all men are equal in the eyes of God. However, as Jackson casts his eye over American history, he sees that Jesus’s words have been forgotten. After the slave trade, which saw hundreds of thousands of slaves die on the transatlantic crossing and over 200 years of enforced labour and brutality, Abraham Lincoln promised emancipation in the wake of the Civil War. Not only were slaves to walk free, but they would be able to vote, own land and marry.

However, when Jackson was born in 1941, not much had changed for black people in America. There was enforced segregation in public places in a heavily white-dominated society, not to mention the terrifying presence of the Ku Klux Klan who instigated a campaign of fear and intimidation across the southern states. Jackson remembers being treated as a second-class citizen in his home town of Greenville, South Carolina, where he was forbidden from using the same municipal facilities as the white population such as buses, water fountains and libraries. This overtly racist culture inspired Jackson to take part in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. “When we fought for equality, we had to unlearn the laws of inferiority,” he asserts.

The Civil Rights movement was inspired by two key events in the 1950s: the brutal murder of black teenager Emmett Till by a gang of white men, and the now infamous refusal of black woman Rosa Parks to give up her bus seat for a white man. These events “galvanised a generation”, and Jackson was soon to work alongside Martin Luther King, who delivered his iconic “I have a dream” speech at the Civil Rights March in Washington DC, 1963. According to Jackson, there was an “abounding sense of hope in the atmosphere.”

Jackson was with King when he was assassinated in 1968. “[He] changed the world,” says Jackson. “He changed the way we saw ourselves and the way America sees us.” Despite the strides made by the world towards egalitarianism since King, Jackson believes America took a step backwards with the election of George W Bush. Jackson refers to the 2000 election as “the first organised theft of a national election in history.” He also feels that the US government abandoned the black population in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

Despite all this, Jackson remains positive about his lifelong dream of egalitarianism, but knows that there will always be a struggle. “Equality is always attainable, but you’re always fighting tyrants and oppressors,” he explains. “Those in power always work out a have/have not system.”