Vernon Jarrett

Clarence Page has a nice remembrance of Vernon Jarrett, the Chicago journalist and activist, in today's Chicago Tribune:

He was lying in his hospital bed on Chicago's South Side earlier this spring, the Rev. Jesse Jackson recalls, when family and friends asked him what he wanted. Despite the soon-to-be-fatal throat cancer that the veteran newspaper columnist was fighting, his wish was clear and direct, according to Jackson: "An absentee ballot."

That's Jarrett. It was primary election time. Illinois Democrats were about to nominate state Sen. Barack Obama to become, they hope, the nation's first black male Democratic senator in history and Jarrett, who always appreciated history, wanted to be a part of it.

...

A native of Tennessee who moved to Chicago in 1946 with the second wave of the Great Migration, Jarrett had an immigrant's impatience with those who squandered golden opportunities, especially opportunities to educate one's self and to vote. One gave you power to determine your own fate, he would say; the other gave you power to help decide the nation's fate. Too many of our forefathers had sacrificed their lives for us to squander that right, he would remind us young pups.

Now that's a true American. In the hospital, terminally ill, and what is he thinking about? Voting and participating in the democratic process that most of us take for granted.

In a city that takes its columnists and broadcasters seriously, Jarrett was to black Chicago what Mike Royko was to just about everybody: Whether you agreed with him or not, you felt like he was downtown fighting on your side, even when it seemed like nobody was.