"[They] see me running for the White House," he said, "they don't see the house I'm running from. [When I was born,] my mama was not supposed to make it, and I was not supposed to make it. You see, I was born of a teen-age mother, who was born of a teen-age mother."

But Jackson's humble origins are more than a connection to his constituents--they are a source of his staggering ambition. Jackson, according to one of his biographers, Marshall Frady, has spent most of his life with his childhood yapping at his heels, and he is driven by an insatiable need to be acknowledged and appreciated as a leader.

"The sense of dispossession [that resulted from his illegitimate birth] left a hole in his psyche that he has forever after been trying to fill," Frady says.

Despite his modest beginnings, Jackson has always had lofty aspirations.

"I was born in the slum," Jackson said in his 1988 convention speech, "but the slum was not born in me."

Jackson attended the University of Illinois for one year on a football scholarship before he transferred to the predominantly black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina.

After college, Jackson decided to enter the ministry, the vocation of most of the black leaders of the time. He began postgraduate work at the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1966 and was ordained a Baptist minister two years later.

While he was still in college, Jackson became involved in King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization instrumental in organizing the 1963 Civil Rights march on Washington, D.C.

After graduating from college, Jackson spearheaded Operation Breadbasket, a branch of SCLC based in Chicago that was devoted to economic justice for American blacks.

Shakedown Artist

Following King's assassination in 1968, Jackson grew dissatisfied with the SCLC leadership, and in 1971, he formed his own splinter group similar to Breadbasket--People United to Save Humanity (PUSH).

In 1996, PUSH merged with the National Rainbow Coalition, a social justice organization Jackson founded in 1984, to form the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, of which Jackson is now president.

During his early years at PUSH, Jackson's leadership abilities shined through, and he was able to mobilize the Chicago black community so that it would respond quickly and decisively to his calls for action.

But something else came through as well--Jackson's discomfiting and often confrontational manner of conducting business.

As president of PUSH, Jackson targeted businesses that profited from, but did not re-invest in, the black community in Chicago.