Seeking Votes and Clout

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with Jackson and other black leaders to sing We Shall Overcome. Within days, the Justice Department dispatched ten additional registrars to sign up voters, and later it sent 322 observers to monitor the primaries. The results: an increase of 13% in the black vote from comparable previous primaries, a black victory over a white incumbent for a seat in the legislature, and a respectable, if not overwhelming, showing by black candidates for local offices across the state.

This week the N.A.A.C.P., which hopes to register 2 million voters nationwide in 1983, will shift its focus north. It will set out on an "Overground Railroad" to reach unregistered blacks, traveling from Covington, Ky., to Detroit along a route of the antebellum Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the South.

As was shown by successes in Chicago and Philadelphia, the best way to register blacks in a city is to have a black running at the top of the ticket, a lesson not lost on Jesse Jackson. In Boston, Melvin King, a black former state representative, is pursuing what was once considered a hopeless race for mayor. With 2,000 new voters registering each week, King is now given an outside chance of scoring an upset in the nine-candidate race. Harold Washington went to Boston last week and endorsed King at a rally attended by 1,000 in the heart of the mostly black Roxbury district. "Register, register, register," the crowd chanted. When it was over, some 400 had.

Jackson may not be the main cause of this revival in black political participation, but he has been its most visible Tom Paine and its public symbol. He frightens some as a demagogue, annoys others as a gadfly and provokes intense hatred in a few people with his grandstanding style. Yet he has been, and clearly plans to remain, the most watched and quoted black leader since Martin Luther King Jr.

His drive to win, to be acclaimed and applauded, was forged during his childhood in Greenville, S.C., where he strove to overcome the taunts of "Jesse ain't got no daddy." Says he: "I was made aware of the odds of survival as a child. I'm still fighting those odds and defying those odds." He made the honor roll and starred in football. "My teachers did not teach me there was a ceiling on my aspirations." He was elected a student-body officer and was a member of the French club. "In church, I learned that I was God's child." He left high school with a football scholarship to the University of Illinois.

But it was when he went north to college that he felt in full force the humiliation of racial discrimination, both on the football team and in the college's fraternity life.

So he transferred back south to predominantly black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where the student sit-ins were just beginning. Upon graduating, he entered a three-year program at Chicago Theological Seminary.

But in 1965, after watching on television the brutal beatings in Selma, Ala., he left before getting his degree (he was later ordained a Baptist minister) and joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff at the S.C.L.C.

There occurs during the lives of most ambitious political figures a process of mythmaking, often self-induced. For Jackson, this began when King was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis. The