by Jelani Favors
When Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson arrived in Greensboro to enroll at North Carolina A&T State University, a historically Black college and university (HBCU) in 1961, he was 19 years old. He was a transfer student, having first attended the University of Illinois during his freshman year.
As a star football player from South Carolina, Jackson was “taunted by racial slurs” on campus in Illinois and limited in what he could do and be on the field of play as an athlete. In an interview in 2006, Jackson recalled, “We were not expected to be student body presidents. We were not expected to live beyond certain areas of the town, and we were conditioned to live under the constraints of racial segregation.”
The hostilities that Jackson was exposed to as a student-athlete prompted his desire to alter his setting. During a train ride home from his first year in college, Jackson saw the camaraderie and love shared between HBCU students up close as they boarded the segregated railway cars and he made the call to North Carolina A&T Coach Bert Piggot with the request to transfer. A&T became a space where Jackson flourished. As a 1964 graduate, Jackson’s character and unshakeable belief that he too was “somebody” was forged in the classrooms and campus grounds of the nation’s largest Black college, as the modern civil rights movement unfolded in America.
In my multi-award-winning book entitled Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism, I argue that generations of Black college students were exposed to the same environment that welcomed Jackson upon his arrival in Greensboro – one that promoted idealism and granted a safe space that upheld their dignity and sense of humanity. I refer to this pedagogy and ethos as the “second curriculum.” Beyond equipping students at HBCUs with the primary skills and knowledge found within various academic fields, Black colleges served as one of the most important spaces in the country that armed their students with the intellectual tools to identify and deconstruct bigotry and systemic racism.
Upon his arrival at A&T, a new reality opened to Jackson that cultivated the importance of character, civic engagement, service and one that was underscored by a community core belief in stimulating self-love among African American youth. “There was just a whole new world,” declared Jackson. “It was a complete reversal. It was all the things that Blacks can do. Can be. There was nothing a Black could not be.”
Jackson’s penchant for poetic and rhetorical flourishes that framed the freedom struggle was also nurtured at A&T. He recalled being mentored under renowned theologian and former A&T president Samuel Dewitt Proctor when he was a student and being spellbound by his oratory. “Our president could rap,” remembered Jackson in a 2006 interview. He was not just a typical president reading from some dry script. I mean he could articulate the issues of our time.
When Proctor delivered the keynote for the school’s fall convocation in 1963, he provided time for Jackson, as student body leader to address his peers – a gesture that continued building Jackson’s character and providing him with critical tools for leadership and service. The student newspaper reported that Jackson’s speech acknowledged that a “social revolution for justice to all Americans was in progress.” He closed his address to the students by declaring “We must endure and be vigilant until victory is won.”
Jackson’s college experience reinforces the idea that leaders and public servants are not born — they are created. Black colleges continue to “punch above their weight” and have played an outsized role in producing transformative and innovative industry leaders and serving as economic engines for their communities. Yet arguably, their most significant role has been as incubators of leaders and movements that championed moral clarity when our nation needed it the most. Jesse Jackson’s evolution as a scholar and a campus leader at North Carolina A&T reflects that tradition.
Historically Black colleges and universities have remained among the most fertile grounds for instilling youth with self-love, an obligation of service and character.
Jelani Favors is vice president of the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute at UNCF. Dr. Favors is a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history at North Carolina A&T State University. He holds a master’s degree in African American studies and a Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University.
