Although Jackson never won the Democratic presidential nomination, his enterprise was not in vain. Some Scholars believe his voter registration efforts during that time changed the face of the American political landscape.

Frady claims that if it weren't for Jackson's registration of over three million voters, most of them black, America might have elected a very different brand of leader in the 1980s.

David Duke, he suggests, would have become governor in Louisiana, and countless politicians friendly to the civil rights movement would not have been swept into office.

"He effectively changed the leadership in the Senate," Frady says.

But the most important aspect of Jackson's campaigns may be the precedent he has set. Jackson forced America to consider the possibility of electing a black man to the highest office in the country.

"He's broken that great attitudinal barrier that no black can hold office on that kind of level," Frady says.

A Higher Office

While Jackson's presidential campaign was successful, Jackson himself was not the most successful candidate.

Despite Jackson's forays into the political arena, his strengths, it appears, may lie elsewhere. His potency as a leader has always stemmed from the force of his vision, which he brings to the table at full gallop, knocking detractors aside.

And while Jackson's moral tenacity is the very thing that makes him so inspiring as a leader, it also makes political maneuvering--which often requires compromise and pragmatism--difficult.

"Jackson brings a moral vision to what is most commonly conducted as an amoral commerce," Frady says. "His tactics are outside the operational radar screen of the political community."

It seems that Jackson--now host to his own talk show on CNN, "Both Sides with Jesse Jackson"--may have realized that his calling, while firmly planted within the political arena, does not necessarily require political office itself.

"I don't think that Jackson ever truly imagined himself in the Oval Office, except as a visitor," wrote DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a 1995 New Yorker article.

After falling short of the Democratic nomination twice, Jackson dropped out of the Democratic primary in 1992, and has given no indication that he will campaign for the nomination in 2000.

Jackson's career, then, has come full circle. He began it as a proponent of King's "gospel populism,"--as Frady refers to the spiritual message of the civil rights movement--and then attempted to transform that vision into a political message.

He has now returned to a position that draws its power not by seeking political office, but from the ability to lead and inspire a community to action.

After decades at the forefront of political life, Jackson now may actually be what he anointed himself as in the days after King's assassination.

"Never mind the delegate count," Gates wrote in The New Yorker, "in 1988, Jesse Jackson was elected President of black America."