Happy Black History Month, BET fam, and welcome to your weekly installment of: The Blackest Moment of the Week! This series explores fun, informational, silly, and or incredible revelations in the zeitgeist every week this month.

For the third installment, we’re honoring the late Jesse Jackson. 

When news of Jackson’s passing sent people back through the archive this week, one short, powerful 1972 clip found new life online: the civil-rights leader sitting on the stoop of “Sesame Street,” leading a diverse group of children in a call-and-response that ends with a single, defiant affirmation: “I am somebody.” That minute-long moment has circulated as a teaching tool, a rallying cry, and a tiny civics lesson for generations. 

The lines Jackson asked the kids to repeat weren’t invented in that studio, they trace back to a mid-20th-century sermon/poem credited to Rev. William Holmes Borders Sr. Jackson turned the litany into a public ritual that could be heard at concerts, rallies, and on television. 

On the “Sesame Street” set, he broke the poem down into short phrases — “I may be poor… but I am somebody” — so children could echo it back, the camera cutting to their faces as they spoke. The simplicity is the point: dignity, visibility, and a spoken claim to worth that’s hard to argue with when a child voices it aloud. 

Why does that brief classroom-style moment matter in 2026? For kids who don’t often see themselves centered on TV, the segment offered three lessons in one: representation (children of multiple backgrounds are on screen), language (a chant that names common stigmas and counters them), and permission (an adult leader handing over the microphone of self-worth).

In the early 1970s, children’s television programming was explicitly curricular. “Sesame Street” sought to teach literacy, counting, and social skills to under-resourced kids. Dispatching a civil-rights message through a neighborhood stoop fit the show’s mission to a T. 

The phrase also grew beyond the “Sesame Street” moment. Jackson’s stretches of “I Am Somebody” at events such as Wattstax and other mass gatherings, turned it into a communal call and response, something to be spoken together in crowds, to dull shame, and to insist on personhood in spaces that had tried to deny it. Mattering is so important, especially to children. That public life gave the “Sesame Street” version a second life. Teachers replayed it in classrooms, parents shared it with kids, and decades later, the clip still circulates on social platforms as a small corrective to the ways media sometimes erases young Black lives. 

In 2026, when viewers rewatch the clip, it’s tempting to treat it as nostalgia. But its power is more than that. The chant models an accessible, repeatable script kids can use when they face dismissal or low expectations. It’s not history. It’s the present, a present…a gift, a tool for immediate, everyday resistance. It’s a way to say “no” to being unseen without needing a lecture, a policy, or a debate. That is why the stoop, the chant, and the kids’ small, clear voices still land — and why, this week, the clip has become a fitting, tender reminder of what Jackson spent a lifetime fighting to protect. 

Happy Black History Month! Stay tuned next week for the final installment of The Blackest Moment of the Week!