Kindred Spirit

So sometimes that lovely and indomitable optimism got stained with blood.

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Here he comes. Gliding up onstage, touching his tie the way Nat King Cole used to do. He's standing in front of hundreds in a gymnasium on the campus of Indiana University Southeast in New Albany. "How y'all doing?" he asks. "It's a little warm in here. Hope you don't mind." And he's taking off his suit jacket. "I love you," some unseen voice shouts. "Love you back," he says, with a musician's perfect timing.

Here he comes into the Dean Dome on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill. "I'm running because of what Dr. King called the fierce urgency of now," he says, as if leading a church revival, his finger pointing in the air, "because I believe in such a thing as being too late, and that hour, North Carolina, is upon us." The politician has the gift of morphing from preacher to musician and back to politician. The crowd is swaying and screaming.

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If one had to chronicle when the stylish black man in America landed upon mainstream consciousness, one would do well to peruse the 1944 Esquire Jazz Book. Inside its pages are photos of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins and Cootie Williams, Dizzy Gillespie and Cab Calloway. All have a signature look: the lovely cotton suit, the natty white shirt, the hepcat tie. Of course there had been elegant figures during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but they didn't infiltrate the recesses of mainstream America. The men in Esquire's 1944 jazz book, though, were as near as the phonograph sitting in parlors in Iowa, in Colorado. The music got them into white America. "Sweet Georgia Brown." "Begin the Beguine." Lovely music, lovely suits. It was as if Cool were being born.

To some extent, their success could be seen as furthering stereotypes: the black man and music, the black man and sports. The doors opened to the entertainer and athlete were not open to the Negro insurance man in Atlanta or the Negro doctor in Los Angeles. The athlete and entertainer moved with a freedom unimaginable to the black businessman.

And yet, Jesse Owens, famous for winning gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, was forced to take peculiar jobs back on American soil, including racing against horses for pocket money. "I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler," Owens once recalled, "but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the president, either."

In the late 1940s, champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson began helping newspaperman Walter Winchell raise money for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. It was also a way for Robinson to identify with mainstream (white) audiences: Many families had had a member touched by the illness. In 1952 -- confident that he had successfully crossed over -- Robinson walked away from the fight game and went into show business.

He was talented on drums and piano. But there lay a deeper element in his post-boxing decision-making: There was no other line of work save entertainment that could come remotely close to earning him the kind of money he had made fighting. With his dance act, he played Chicago and Manhattan, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. Celebrities caught his show. He traveled with the Count Basie Band. He wore beautiful suits. He sang "The Very Thought of You" off-key, but enjoyed himself anyway.

Still, there were limits. Robinson's act drew big nightclub revenues in the beginning, but the novelty soon wore off. He scurried back to the boxing ring. When Robinson died in 1989, Jesse Jackson gave the main eulogy, standing before those at Robinson's funeral as an emblem of someone who also had made pioneering crossover leaps. All during his activist life, Jackson has spoken with a beautiful music, an operatic soaring and crashing. Those Iowa farmers fell in love with him during his presidential campaigns. In his presidential run of 1984, he brought hundreds of delegates with him to the Democratic convention. In 1988 he brought more than 1,200 delegates to the gathering.

But Jackson, for all his rhetorical gifts, seemed weighed down at times by a sad history: He might as well have been pulling Medgar Evers and Viola Liuzzo and Martin Luther King Jr. and all the others in a red wagon behind him. Halfway across the room is not the same as crossing over.