Jesse Jackson was there in the vast throng gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park on the night that Barack Obama was elected US president in November 2008. He had tears streaming down his face, and why not? Growing up in deeply segregated South Carolina in the 1940s, the illegitimate son of a teenage mother, he could never have dreamt that he would one day see a black American winning the highest office in the land; or that he would have been the man who, as much as anyone else, had blazed the trail for Obama’s victory.
