Atlanta as Instruction: In Honour of the Example of Rev. Jesse Jackson
How Proximity Quietly Shapes Possibility
Author’s Note
This reflection is not intended as a historical assessment of a public figure, nor as a political statement. It is a personal acknowledgement of developmental influence—the kind that occurs before one possesses the vocabulary to explain it.
There are individuals whose significance lies less in agreement with every position they hold and more in the example they provide of inhabiting conviction in public space. Observing such a posture early in life quietly reshapes one’s understanding of agency, voice, and responsibility. The lessons often register years later, not as memory, but as orientation.
This piece belongs to a broader thread within my writing: recognising how proximity—to people, ideas, or environments—recalibrates what we consider possible. Atlanta, for me, was one such environment. The gratitude expressed here is therefore less about personality and more about demonstration: witnessing that moral language, lived openly, can expand the horizon of another person’s life.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
There are moments and periods in life that do not announce themselves as important while they are happening.
They feel ordinary—rooms, conversations, people moving in and out of doors—and only later does their meaning reveal itself. Not as an event, but as an orientation that quietly took root inside you.
My time in Atlanta was like that.
On many occasions, I did not yet fully understand I was standing in proximity to history. I only knew certain rooms carried a different kind of gravity. The air was conversational—even casual at times—yet the subjects were rarely small. People spoke not only about what was, but about what ought to be, and they spoke as if the distance between the two could be crossed.
Over time I began to recognise that the rooms were not what carried the weight—the people did. Certain individuals seemed to inhabit those conversations differently. They did not speak as commentators observing history, but as participants attempting to shape it.
Among those presences was Jesse Jackson.
What struck me was not celebrity.
It was scale.
Here was someone who moved through disagreement without shrinking, through criticism without retreat, and through doubt without abandoning voice—both his own and that of the larger African American community. Whether one agreed with every position was beside the point. The example lay in the posture: the refusal to wait for permission before speaking moral language within public space.
At the time, I could not have articulated it.
But I absorbed it—fully.
I watched people respond—supporters energised, detractors unsettled—and slowly realised that reaction itself was part of the phenomenon. When a person expands the frame through which others see themselves, resistance naturally follows. The friction was not evidence of failure; it was evidence that something structural in perception had been touched.
And while I earned two degrees and completed my first leg of graduate school there, Atlanta became a classroom without syllabus.
I learned that influence is not merely persuasion.
It is the capacity to inhabit conviction publicly.
It is the willingness to speak toward a future others cannot yet see and behave as though it already participates in the present.
Years later, I recognise the personal consequence. Exposure recalibrates possibility. You cannot easily return to a smaller understanding of what a human being is permitted to attempt once you have witnessed someone live beyond the usual psychological boundaries.
Such is akin to the observation attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.:
Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
One suspects this pattern has repeated itself across generations—that many who later stepped onto national stages first learned, in rooms like those, that voice need not wait for permission.
Reverend Jackson left an imprint on many.
History will always debate public figures. That is its nature.
But biography is quieter.
For me, gratitude remains—not for perfection, but for demonstration. I encountered, early enough, an example of a life lived at a scale larger than approval. And once seen, that scale becomes difficult to forget.
Atlanta did not simply give me memories.
It gave me proportion.
And for that, I remain grateful.