SUPERBOWL
The Super Bowl commercial that omits the history of “I am somebody”
More than 50 years ago, Rev. Jesse Jackson demanded action not just slogans
When you watch the “Somebody” Super Bowl advertisement for the NFL, it may sound familiar. It’s a pleasing commercial with a nice message. It’s familiar though, because you’ve heard it before, and it wasn’t for youth sports or for the NFL.
If you are young, you might remember this call-and-response from Netflix a couple of years ago. Netflix began airing the documentary “Save the Children: A Concert for the Ages” in 2023.
For several years, Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and later his group Operation PUSH) had been organizing similar festivals at Chicago’s International Amphitheater since 1967, as a trade show for Black-owned businesses. The entertainers made sure the audience showed up.
At those concerts, Rev. Jesse Jackson came to the stage following the performers like the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Isaac Hayes. Really any entertainer you can imagine appeared at one of those events. And, earlier that year, Jackson had used the phrase on Sesame Street and again at the Wattstax concert.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time that crowd in 1972 had heard the phrase, it almost surely wasn’t even the first time from Rev. Jackson.
In 1963, he used it. “I may be poor — but I am somebody,” he bellowed to the crowd. The phrase itself likely comes from a 1940 poem Reverend William Holmes Borders.
Each time Jackson used that phrase, he wasn’t simply warming up the crowd. He was calling for radical solutions to pressing problems; problems that haven’t gone away ever since. He was calling for dignity and respect as well as for equitable public education and robust social welfare programs, programs that sit precariously in the hands of new federal officials seemingly unaware of their value.
The call-and-response — that the NFL has taken advantage of in its commercial — originally aimed to move the audience to social action, not just words. Black businesses wanted consumers to act and buy their products. Black artists wanted galleries to act and show their works.
And, that’s why at the 1971 Black Expo, Rep. Shirley Chisholm was busy organizing for her presidential run the next year. Chisholm and Jackson wanted change. “I am somebody” was more than just a slogan or a tag line. It was a demand.
Today, Rev. Jackson is likely watching the Super Bowl somewhere, he was after all the quarterback for North Carolina A&T’s football team in 1964, a position he wasn’t permitted to play at the University of Illinois. Those ads unknowingly call to the demands of earlier day, a day that Rev. Jackson remembers all too well and hopefully the country will act on again soon.
