"He kept throwing King up to me," says Jackson, "how King was able to do what he was doin' 'cause he was using these larger concepts of theology and history. 'He's prepared himself for this. He's now down there in Birmingham just talkin', he's relatin' those concepts to the whole of society.'"

Proctor remembers that "Jesse was very moved by the image of Martin Luther King," and it was not long before he entered into what would prove a central fixation of his life: "He thought somebody like King was the kind of thing he would like to be," says Proctor. "He saw himself as embryonic to something bigger like that."

Soon Jackson was exploring for himself how King's "moral dynamics" could be deployed within the folk values of Southern culture. During one demonstration outside a cafeteria, he says, "police finally were moving to arrest us, and we kneeled and started saying the Lord's Prayer. Police all took off their caps and bowed their heads. Can't arrest folks prayin'. We finished, they started for us again. We stood up and started singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' They stopped, put their hands over their heart. Can't arrest folks singing the national anthem. We were touching something bigger, see, that we both respected. Opening up the moral terms of the situation. Went on for, like, half an hour, until we got tired and let 'em arrest us."

Greensboro itself was once described by a local black as one of the "nice-nasty" towns of the South then, the racial acrimonies of its white community dressed in a studied civility. Its chief of detectives, Captain William Jackson, is recalled even by his adversaries then, as, in (the words of the then A&T chaplain, A. Knighton Stanley) ... "a fair and just man, something of a gentleman. He raised horses, you know. We trusted him more than we did the FBI."

In time, a protocol of sorts had set in between marchers and Captain Jackson's police officers, in which, says Stanley, "we'd often tell them what we were going to do when we staged demonstrations," this arrangement producing confrontations described by one witness as "a kind of ballet." But as Jackson inexorably assumed leadership of the movement, says Stanley, "it got hot and heavy, it did reenergize things" - to a point where "it was a little frightening. Because it seemed out of control."

Joining the demonstrations before long were "troops from the community," as Stanley phrases it, "and non-violence was not one of their virtues - as the preachers described them, 'hoodlums and thieves walking in the streets.'"

But Jackson seemed remarkably able to manage them with that same capacity noted during his youth in Greenville for connecting across the whole social spectrum; as his friend Leroy Greggs had put it, "He didn't carry himself as an intellectual, he could mix with anybody." Now, according to Stanley, "while Jesse was more princely in his carriage than the leadership which had always been there, his communication with the street people was far better than theirs. We were afraid we now had a monster on our hands."

At the same time, Jackson began to acquire a canniness for a certain situational jujitsu - deftly developing a combination of concurrent threats and options to a converging critical point, which he would then use to leverage the whole conflict to a stage beyond all prior expectations - an intricate counterplay that was to greatly serve his progress through the years ahead. At rallies, he would bawl forth such baleful forecasts as "We won't stop until we get all we want. We'll be there tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow! We'll take over the city of Greensboro!"

Having conjured these dire prospects, he would then nimbly step in to act as mediator between the students and Greensboro's white power system to avert what he had invoked, with a settlement advancing the matter further than most had thought possible. This rather isometric exercise also happened to entail his initially striking out on swashbuckling ploys of his own, independent of the rest of the movement's leadership.

As he now explains it, "I had my popular base with the students while I kept my position in CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), had that base there, too, as an option."

But his predilection for virtuoso initiatives occasioned the same irritations then as it would throughout his career, confirming the forebodings of the other student leaders who had met (one) night to discuss bringing him into their campaign.

"You can imagine the tension among those guys who had sweated through the movement a long time before him," says Stanley. "Now Jesse was showing up in photos out front, looking good. We began to swear that Jesse was showing up in the Greensboro Daily News even when he was not present. He would be in the picture, and we'd say, 'But he wasn't even there.'"

Finally, though, on a hot May afternoon in 1963, an illumination far more profound than such tactical gymnastics came to him. The Greensboro police, having run out of jail space along with their customary civility by now, herded some four hundred students into the dilapidated wards of an abandoned polio hospital meant to hold only a hundred and twenty-five occupants, a low, flat, barrackslike construction. Jackson led a march there, and when he arrived, found classmates crammed up in the windows for air, who, as soon as they saw him, wailed out over the teeming police dogs and troopers. "We dyin' from heat in here, man. You got to help us. Don't let us perish in here."

Jackson bellowed back to them over the chain-link fence, past the police with their dogs, "We'll get you out, we'll get you out! They can't stop us! We'll set you free!" and turning to the marchers behind him with barely a pause, his face shining with tears and sweat in the sun, he began delivering himself of a sudden, impromptu oration.

Stanley got there after Jackson had begun, but was immediately overwhelmed.

"It was a tremendous speech. It wasn't a tirade about the harshness of being in prison without soap and toothpaste and all that. He was talking about the suffering of those inside in the larger context of justice, and what this movement meant in terms of a turning point in the history of the nation. It flowed without forethought. It was poetic. Those of us who were listening, we said, 'My God, this is comparable to Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail.'"

When Jackson had finished, both Stanley and a white friend with him were so awed that "we agreed it needed to be in print, that he must say it again so we could transcribe it and publish it."

But when the two of them rushed over to Jackson and told him it was imperative he repeat the speech into a tape recorder as soon as one could be fetched, he only gazed back at them, remembers Stanley, "with a kind of nonplussed amazement. He said, 'What did I say?' He had absolutely no recall of what he had said."

It was as if, Stanley suggests, some other force, "some voice and authority beyond himself," even what some might term the Holy Spirit of the original Pentecost, had descended on him and taken him over.

In retrospect, Stanley considers it "probably his inaugural speech in getting on to the business of his life."

Jackson now declares that what happened to him there that May afternoon with his captive fellow students crying to him from the windows of the hospital, amounted to "a revolutionary moment in my life," a kind of epiphany that "threw me into a whole new psychic pattern." Up to then, all his personal aggrievements and desperations had found no "comprehensive language of action," as he terms it, "to confront the general condition that your individual plight was just one part of." Out of that recognition arose his apostolic ambition "to spend my life working as an agent to transform the outer structures of society, and the inner structures of people, to bring about a new heaven and a new earth." ...

(Jackson's wife, Jackie, says): "He began to live and become a man in Greensboro. he took on his identity in Greensboro, and from there he moved into what he's been doing ever since."

From the book Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson by

Marshall Frady. Copyright © 1996 by Marshall Frady. Reprinted with permission of Random House Inc.