I am somebody': the cultural magnitude of Jesse Jackson's Sesame Street episode

"In a 1972 episode of Sesame Street, Jesse Jackson, then 31, is standing against a stoop on the soundstage modelled after an urban neighborhood block. He's wearing a purple, white, and black striped shirt, accented with a gold medallion featuring Martin Luther King Jr's profile. The camera cuts to reveal a group of kids, the embodiment of Jackson's Rainbow Coalition children under the age of 10 from every ethnicity and racial group. He leads them in a call-and-response of his famous liberatory chant: I am somebody."

"The adorable, cherub-cheeked kids light up the camera with their enthusiasm as they repeat the same words back to him. They are fidgety, giggly and powerful when they respond to Jackson in a cacophonous and slightly out-of-sync roar: I am somebody. The call-and-response is a wall of activating, energetic sound. If you pay close attention, you can hear a smile behind every word Jackson speaks and feel the shared energy between him and the kids."

"It is an incredible artifact of a time when the United States teetered on the precipice of a different world order in the wake of the civil rights era and the waning years of the Black Power movement. The episode is a document that demonstrated to Americans the possibility of what a beloved community could look like, integrated and brimming with youthful promise."

Jesse Jackson, at age 31, appears on a 1972 episode of Sesame Street, standing against a stoop on a soundstage modeled after an urban neighborhood. He wears a purple, white, and black striped shirt with a gold medallion bearing Martin Luther King Jr.'s profile. Jackson leads a multiracial group of children under age 10—embodying his Rainbow Coalition—in a call-and-response of his liberatory chant, "I am somebody." The children respond with energetic, slightly out-of-sync enthusiasm that creates a wall of activating sound. The clip captures a moment of youthful promise and suggests the possibility of an integrated beloved community. The footage functions as a memento mori and a touchstone of Jackson's legacy expanding rights for Black Americans and dispossessed peoples.

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