(electric guitar strum)
- [Graham] I think your mom, when she was 16 years old,
before she had you,
she actually had five college music scholarship offers,
she was a soloist at church.
Why was it though after she had you,
she was almost exiled from the church?
- Well because of the moral standards
of our church community.
They frowned upon a baby being born out wedlock.
And when mother became pregnant
it was so prominent and so well known,
it became an issue.
So, finally she had to leave the choir,
and bring me down in front of the altar
and apologize for my birth.
She was accepted and received again
and back in her special place in church
for which she never left.
Well, that was the moral standards of that day.
- I think you guys had a nine dollar budget
when you would go to the grocery store to buy groceries,
what would happen sometimes
when you'd get to the front register?
- Oh, well my father, Avery, he'd come home
and we'd go buy groceries and maybe the limit would be $9
or $8.50 or something.
And I could count better than he could count
and I was in fifth grade
and I would be trying, if I miscalculated
and we were like $9.60 rather than $8.80,
even though we shopped at that grocery store all the time
it was not like bring the money back and get it next week
we had to sit right in that line and take the product out
and put it back on the shelf.
It was humiliating and umm
never want to be in that position.
- I understand the first house you lived in
with your mom and grandma, you guys had wallpaper up
more to protect from the wind coming into the house--
- Dad had to put a sealing, they call it,
around the doors to cut the wind.
And wallpaper, not so much for decoration,
but to break the wind.
We didn't develop a complex about that Graham
because we were conditioned in that way.
Something within me said, "We can change that condition".
- Really?
- And that we should never live this way.
And, uh--
- So you were conscious of it at the time
that that wasn't the standard that--
- We would go to the white people's house
and look what they had and we just didn't have it.
- I read this story somewhere that your biological dad
got a new house and you would on occasion, like,
enviously stand outside on the street and look in.
- He moved to a very nice, he was very entrepreneurial,
very industrious, so a very nice house
on the other side of town.
White house, big picture window and
central air and heating.
A stream ran through his yard,
he would garden the flowers or stuff like that.
I would just go and look.
I was very hesitant to approach him.
Especially if my step-mama was there,
I'd internalize anxiety about that.
- Why wouldn't you approach?
- Children are sensitive to being affirmed or rejected.
And not getting in trouble.
It's very complicated situation.
- Your half brother, Noah, had said
at times, though, you felt rejected.
How so?
- As somebody your blood cries out to you.
But, it did not have deep indentations
because I was so loved by my mother and step-father.
My step-father adopted me legally when I was 12.
I was Jesse Burns, my grandmother's name.
I became Jesse Jackson, that's my third name.
I'm adopted.
Guess I was never fatherless,
I was never homeless to that extent.
I mean, other children had worse conditions, frankly.
And they were less loved.