Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2024 Democratic National Convention speech

For a couple of seconds during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last night, the camera cut to the eighty-two-year-old Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., and I remembered two previous presidential elections: first, I voted for Jackson in the California presidential primary in 1984 (the first presidential election after I turned 18) and watched his televised speech at the DNC that July in San Francisco. Second, on election night in November 2008 in Chicago during Barack Obama's speech after his opponent John McCain conceded, there was a similar cut to Jackson crying at the sight of the first African-American to win the highest office in the United States. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 August 2024)