Zaire Goodman (left), Rev. Jesse Jackson and Zaire's mother, now-Buffalo Common Councilor Zeneta Everhart, at the White House in July 2022, less than two months after Goodman was wounded by a racist mass murderer in Buffalo. Credit: Courtesy Zeneta Everhart

Zeneta Everhart, a Buffalo Common Councilor, is an early riser, usually up at 4 a.m. She was returning constituent emails and half-watching television Tuesday morning when she stopped short: The Rev. Al Sharpton was on the screen, talking about the death at 84 of Rev. Jesse Jackson, a giant of the American civil rights movement.

Everhart paused, attempting to process the news. She tried to counter her immediate feeling of irreplaceable loss with the memory of a request Jackson made of her almost four years ago at the White House, during an unexpected meeting she will never forget.

“He spoke life over Zaire,” Everhart said of the instant when Jackson met her son, Zaire Goodman. They were all in Washington D.C. on a July day in 2022, not quite two months after a racist killer in body armor targeted Black staff and shoppers at a Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. He murdered 10 women and men and wounded three others.

Among those who survived was Goodman, 21 at the time, a Tops employee who was shot in the neck as he gathered shopping carts on a warm spring afternoon.

A few weeks later, Everhart and Garnell Whitfield Jr. — a former Buffalo fire commissioner whose 86-year-old mother, Ruth, was murdered at Tops — were among family members grieving mass murders in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas who were asked to testify before Congress. Their stark and passionate accounts helped lead to passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, intended to make it harder for guns to fall into the hands of dangerous people.

In July of that year, the Biden administration hosted a White House gathering to spotlight the act, which Biden had signed into law in June. Goodman, Everhart and Whitfield were invited, as were many others tied by grief and resolve to the bloodshed in Buffalo and Uvalde. In their Congressional testimony, Everhart and Whitfield had both linked their family suffering to the deep national history of what Whitfield called “the cancer of white supremacy.”

A photo of Ruth Whitfield and her late husband, Garnell Sr. Credit: Courtesy Garnell Whitfield Jr.

Whitfield said this week that he sat on the presidential stage for that event. Jackson was in the audience as a guest of honor, and Whitfield had the chance and privilege, he said, to see him afterward. “He laid a foundation for all of us,” Whitfield said of Jackson’s life, by “speaking to the conscience of this world.”

Both Whitfield and Everhart recalled how Jackson was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 at a Memphis hotel when King was murdered by an assassin, and Whitfield said Jackson — in witnessing such trauma — was forever tested by the same question confronted by Ruth Whitfield’s family and everyone linked by sorrow to May 14:

In the face of unspeakable hatred — after “they’ve taken something so precious,” Whitfield said — how do you find the strength to move forward with a movement for change based on love and nonviolence?

For a lifetime of such fortitude, Whitfield said Jackson — even after his death — remains a beacon.

Everhart was a young child when Jackson gave his “rainbow coalition” address at the 1984 Democratic convention, considered one of the great speeches in national history. But she was keenly aware of his work as she grew older: Jackson remained a prominent figure and a link to national civil rights giants as Everhart came of age and contemplated a career in community service.

“We didn’t have Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in our lifetimes,” Everhart said. She described Jackson as a kind of community North Star “who rolled with King” and provided a galvanizing voice during many sequences of American turbulence and pain.

It was deeply emotional, then, to see him at the White House event. Everhart and Goodman were there with now-U.S. Rep. Tim Kennedy — at that time a state senator – for whom Everhart worked as a staff member.

Ruth Whitfield: At 86, the Buffalo great-grandmother was the eldest of 10 people killed on May 14, 2022 by a racist murderer at a Tops supermarket. Credit: Courtesy Garnell Whitfield Jr.

“Oh my God,” she remembers thinking of Jackson, “we’ve got to speak to him.”

Everhart asked one of Jackson’s companions if she and her son could say hello. The man said of course, and in an instant Jackson was moving forward to embrace them. He said he was intensely and painfully aware of the magnitude of what was lost at Tops.

Everhart, speaking on behalf of her son, remembered this week how they were overwhelmed that Jackson – “with all the things he’s been involved with” – knew their story. He held Everhart’s hand as he spoke with mother and son, and then he began to pray:

He asked God to protect Goodman “as the survivor of a terrorist attack” and for Everhart, as a mother, to find “the strength to carry on the torch.”

In testimony before the House Oversight Committee that spring, she had described cleaning her son’s wounds after the shooting, how a young man who had started the day on a typical shift at a grocery store had been penetrated by bullets or shrapnel in four places, and how she could feel pieces of metal lodged under his skin.

She said Jackson fully understood: Every family wounded by the bloodshed at Tops had been dragged into the poisonous core of a long American struggle.

Zaire Goodman with his mom, Zeneta Everhart, onhis high school graduation day from City Honors, in Buffalo. Credit: Courtesy Zeneta Everhart

Fifteen months later — with Jackson’s words about moving forward still vivid in her mind — Everhart would be elected to the Buffalo Common Council.

Whitfield, too, said it was “an awesome thing” to spend time with Jackson, on that day. Ruth Whitfield, he said, was a great-grandmother who revered Jackson. After spending her childhood in a nation where racial segregation and exclusion were a part of daily life, Whitfield said his mom became a champion of “anyone of color that was doing anything,” whether it was Tiger Woods breaking records on the golf course or the Williams sisters, dominating tennis…

Or Jesse Jackson — companion of King and one of the subsequent leaders of a great movement — becoming a two-time Democratic presidential candidate, a national leader with legendary skills as a speaker who won multiple presidential primaries and caucuses.

“Without Jesse Jackson, there is no Barack Obama,” Whitfield said. “He opened that door.”

Whitfield said he joined his parents at both Obama inaugurations and at the unveiling of the Washington D.C. memorial to King. They all saw Jackson, until the day he died, as a reminder of countless barriers cleared, but also of the vast American distance left to travel.

Zaire Goodman at the White House, July 2022, on the day he met Rev. Jesse Jackson, Credit: Courtesy Zeneta Everhart

“He espoused Christian values,” Whitfield said of Jackson, the idea of authentic love and compassion as the most effective strategy for change. The core notion of the Rainbow Coalition was “advocating for everyone,” Whitfield said — the sheer dogged belief, even when set against the worst inhumanity, that justice and equality will inevitably lead to the greatest national benefits.

The challenge now, Whitfield said, is to “teach our children his legacy,” and to hope that young people of the same passion and diligence will continue to carry on his message. “We have to set the example, to walk in that space as he did for us,” said Whitfield, saying there is a need for passionate young leaders to counteract desperate national efforts that are intended “to turn back the clock”.

As it did for Everhart and Goodman and for so many others, the bloodshed at Tops altered the trajectory of Whitfield’s life. His retirement transformed into unshakeable commitment, he said: He felt he had been too unaware as vicious ideologies regained quiet traction through the Internet. He vowed to confront racism and hatred for as long as he is able.

He said that promise – a living commitment to his mother, and to everyone who died at Tops and the larger community – led him to enter the Democratic primary for mayor of Buffalo last year, in a race eventually won by Sean Ryan. With his brother Raymond, Whitfield organized a Buffalo conference in their mother’s memory to counteract hate with education, and the brothers have also taken part in such events as the Eradicate Hate Global Summit – intended to build relationships that undercut “hate-fueled violence.”

In that sense, Jackson’s life becomes a kind of mountaintop example. What Whitfield and Everhart remember most of meeting him almost four years ago goes beyond the disbelief of sharing time with a national figure who was iconic of a movement.

It is the idea that Jackson saw their pain, empathized with it and had one message they both remembered with intensity, when they learned he had died:

Keep going.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...