Throughout his childhood, Jackson said, he never really had to interact with white people. He went to black schools, black fairs, black theaters, black churches. “I still do,” he said. “A black church in L.A., maybe once a year. I’m solid with God.”
He grew up with the attitude that it was “me against the world,” he said. “Oh, and I was a selfish kid. When my mother made me share a piece of candy, I threw my half away. If I couldn’t eat the whole thing, I didn’t get any satisfaction out of it.” His pleasures were solitary. He listened to “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” “The Shadow,” “Amos ’n’ Andy” on the radio, which taught him how to tell stories in his head. Later, in his 20s, TV and movies made the biggest impact. “Shaft” and “The Mod Squad,” big Afros, cool shades and an attitude that “blacks could be black, proud and beautiful. That wasn’t what I’d been taught in school.”
Left to his own devices, Jackson learned to be content with himself, “to sit alone for hours doing nothing and not to have separation anxiety. I would see my mother maybe two times a year. She’d leave, and there was nothing I could do about it. I learned to accept it. If a person leaves me, I immediately forget them. I don’t dwell on people who leave.”
Jackson describes his college-freshman self as a “straight arrow” who was on the cheer squad and swim team and aspired to be a marine biologist. Like many students in the ’60s, he spent his time drinking, playing cards, dabbling in drugs. Then he noticed a group of older black students, who didn’t look like any other students. They had big Afros, wore black twisted braids of rope around their necks and had an aura of genuine menace about them, unlike the make-believe movie menace of his later blaxploitation heroes. At first Jackson didn’t know what they were about. “I only knew they were pretty much angry all the time,” he said. “They took studying seriously.” When Jackson and his classmates cut up in the dorms, these scary guys snapped at them: “You wanna flunk out and go to war and get killed?” Jackson asked them, “What war?” It was 1967. They said, “The war in Vietnam.” Hard as it is to believe, Jackson’s response, he said, was, “Where’s that?” They said, “Get a map and find it yourself.”
“These were serious guys, returning war vets going to school on the G.I. Bill,” he said. “They were articulate about war, racism, the C.I.A.” Jackson began to realize that once he left Morehouse, he would leave the last vestiges of that black cocoon that had protected him all his life. After Morehouse, he’d be thrown into that bigger world dominated by whites. He remembered how blacks were treated on those rare occasions when he’d stepped into the white world as a boy. He decided he, too, would get involved in the racial struggle. “I wasn’t gonna let people spit on me and go to jail,” he said. He started hanging out with those former G.I.’s, which led him to H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. “It was my ‘kill whitey’ period,” he said. “I really thought there’d be an armed struggle between blacks and whites. So we began to collect guns.”
Then one day the F.B.I. appeared at his mother’s door. They told her that if her son didn’t quit his radical lifestyle, he’d be dead within a year. So, in the summer of his junior year, he said, “she shipped me off to L.A.” He worked there as a social worker for two years, then returned to Morehouse, joined a theater program, forged a relationship with Richardson, got his degree in arts drama in 1972 and “put my politics away.” On Halloween night, in 1976, he and Richardson arrived in New York City.