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called an emergency black caucus meeting to repair the damage done to their solidarity. But when Coretta King rose to demand an apology to Young, she was booed also. Young slipped away, out the back of the stage. A young black delegate standing next to me shouted at Mrs. King, “That was yesterday. What have you done for us today?” A panicky call went out to Jesse Jackson. When he arrived, he stormed onto the stage next to Mrs. King and gave the assembled young delegates a tongue-lashing. “How dare you show disrespect to this woman, whose husband was killed, whose children were threatened, working for the rights of blacks?” After he had silenced the flashy young delegates, he called many onto the stage to lock arms and sing “We Shall Overcome.” No other leader had, at that time, the credentials with young blacks to pull off that act of reconciliation.
    I saw Jackson’s approach to the young when I went with him, during that exploratory campaign, to see his son Jesse Jr. play football at St. Albans prep school in the District of Columbia. Jackson was up and down the sidelines cheering his son on, and Jesse Jr. ran well, but not well enough for his team to win. The other side had an even better black runner. At the end of the game, Jackson raced over to the other side to talk with the young star. “You’re a great runner. What’s your time in the hundred-yard dash?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, “but I’m fast.” “What about the grades?” “Not so good.” “Well, you know, there will be a time when you aren’t so fast anymore. Then you’ll wish you had studied more, to be good in other ways.” The boy said he would try. As we walked away, Jackson chortled to me, “Don’t you love it? ‘I’m fast.’ ” He was taking great pride in the kid’s pride.
    Jackson impressed on his own son the need for study. When Jesse Jr. entered Congress, he took his oath of office in Spanish. When a journalist asked him why, the new representative said, “My father told me he was embarrassed to travel the world and be unable to speak any language but English. He had studied French in college, but not enough to command the language. He made me promise I would learn at least one other language.” I remembered the teacher who had told me her students studied harder after Jackson warmed up her classroom with the chant “I am—somebody !” The country is full of people who stood a little taller in their youth because of Jesse Jackson.

3
    Dallas

    O vid Demaris said that he never saw me looking more out of place than when I sat on the floor of a stripper’s changing room, under a rack of scanty clothes, while “Tami True” came offstage and threw a robe over her pasties. We were soon joined by Bill Willis, who had been underlining Tami’s bumps and grinds with his drums. Tami pouted that Bill “takes limits,” which meant he forgot his rhythms while composing plays in his head. We were in Barney Weinstein’s Theater Lounge, one of the rivals to Jack Ruby’s Carousel strip joint, and Weinstein had inherited Tami and Bill, with other entertainers, after the police closed the Carousel. These Carousel veterans loved to tell Jack Ruby stories—he was a clumsy but lovable clown in their eyes. He was too impulsive and undisciplined to be a trustworthy member of any conspiracy.
    Bill Willis, a bodybuilder who won the title Mr. Texas, was supposed to be a bouncer as well as the club’s drummer, but he said that Jack often got to a troublemaker and threw him out before Bill could get off the stage and do the job. Ruby cultivated the police, haunted their headquarters, taking them coffee, giving them free tickets to his club. He often carried a gun because he took the money from the club to the bank every day. My friend Ovid, who was in Dallas writing about organized