Jesse Jackson, 1941–2026

The death of Jesse Jackson at age 84 removes a notable character from the world stage. Most of the obituaries have been laudatory and concentrate on Jackson’s life as a civil rights activist. A cartoon in Business Day showed Jackson, clenched fist aloft, being welcomed to heaven by Nelson Mandela: both men are thus equally regarded as saints.

There was no doubt of Jackson’s commitment to civil rights and the causes of black and poor people more generally. Indeed, he tried hard to broaden the civil rights struggle into a more general pro-poor crusade without regard to race. But his career was remarkable partly because, like Allan Boesak, he combined the role of crusader with that of huckster. He was intensely media-conscious and from an early stage he grasped that being a major civil rights leader could also be a lucrative career, that the promotion of the Struggle could go hand in hand with personal self-promotion and that in no small degree it was also showbiz.

By the 1960s many young black American radicals were being tempted away from the traditional non-violent forms of protest towards more extreme movements – Stokely Carmichael and others towards the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Malcolm X to the Nation of Islam, and Eldridge Cleaver and others to the Black Panthers. These turned out to be a cul-de-sac and none of these leaders ended well. Carmichael died young, a privileged resident of Sékou Touré’s appalling police state in Guinea. Malcolm X died even younger, murdered by his own movement, and Eldridge Cleaver ended up trying to make a living by selling Black Panther golf bags.

At the same time, a number of other young activists were smart enough to see that, although the charismatic radicals poured scorn on the Rev Martin Luther King’s non-violent gradualism, it was King who had really captured the hearts and minds of the American black community with his mixture of civil rights heroism with the gospel-and-Bible traditions so strong among black Americans. Jackson (who became a Baptist minister himself), Andrew Young, and Ralph Abernathy were among those who stayed close to King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

King recognised Jackson’s abilities and gave him leadership roles but was disturbed by Jackson’s attention-seeking and clear ambition. King was a generation older than these young Turks and it was already clear that what was at stake was the succession to King.

Assassination

When King was assassinated in 1968, Jackson was in a parking lot a floor below. Nonetheless, Jackson told reporters that he was the last person to speak to King and that King had died in his arms. This was strongly contested by a number of King’s other aides, who saw it as Jackson’s pre-emptive attempt to inherit King’s mantle. Jackson also wore a blood-stained jumper through countless TV interviews for several days after the shooting, claiming the blood was King’s – though this, too, was disputed. This was widely interpreted to mean that Jackson had seen King’s death as merely a major career opportunity. King’s widow, Coretta, was only one of many who refused to speak to Jackson for years afterwards.

King had left Abernathy in charge of the SCLC, for Abernathy was a man after his own heart. Inevitably, Abernathy and Jackson clashed frequently, because Jackson was determined to inherit the leadership of the civil rights struggle.

In 1971 Abernathy ordered Jackson to move operations from Chicago to Atlanta, but Jackson, who had built a secure political base in Chicago, refused to move. This culminated in an all-out fight between the two men, with Abernathy questioning Jackson’s handling of the movement’s money.

Ultimately, Jackson left the SCLC and founded his own organisations. Abernathy slowly faded from the scene, returning to his church duties. He was simply no match for Jackson’s high media profile and headline-grabbing speeches and behaviour.

Having become the undisputed leader of the black cause, Jackson was in great demand to play a part in many local struggles. He was hyper-active, both nationally and internationally, dashing from hostage crises in the Middle East to anti-apartheid protests elsewhere to civil rights or pro-poverty campaigns anywhere in America. Because his participation in such local struggles always guaranteed more support and publicity, local activists were keen to welcome him, though some were disgruntled to find that he charged a fee for his participation.

In 1984 and again in 1988 Jackson ran for president. Although he preached a general pro-poor programme aimed at both black and white, the heart of his campaigns was his rabble-rousing rhetoric as he sought to mobilise the black ghettoes to vote in the Democratic primaries. In this he was extremely successful, racking up millions of votes, and managed to win primaries in several states with large black populations.

Problem

This was a major problem for mainstream Democratic candidates. On the one hand, it was always obvious that Jackson couldn’t possibly win because he was too dependent on the black minority. On the other hand, any Democratic candidate needed the black vote to defeat a Republican opponent, and Jackson seemed to have the black vote sewn up. And, once mobilised by Jackson’s fire-and-brimstone oratory, black voters were often disinclined to turn out to vote for white Democrat candidates. Not coincidentally, both the Democrats’ presidential candidates in 1984 and 1988, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, fared dramatically badly.

As 1992 approached, there was much speculation that Jackson would run again – posing a major problem for Bill Clinton’s campaign. I spoke to a friend who was a senior player in the Clinton campaign and asked him if they were worried that Jackson would be a spoiler. He was surprisingly upbeat. “If he runs, Jesse will always back out in the end and endorse the main Democratic candidate. Somewhere, under a bridge at night, a deal will be done and a big bag of money will change hands.”

In fact, Clinton, a natural fixer, had other ideas. Well before the election he reached a deal whereby Jackson did not run. The details of this deal have never been revealed but they certainly included Jackson playing an influential role within the Clinton administration. Jackson had an often-decisive voice in United States (US) policy towards Africa in the 1990s and organisations such as USAID were extremely sensitive to Jackson’s wishes.

Clinton offered Jackson several positions, including that of US ambassador to South Africa, although Jackson accepted none of them, just as he had always turned down opportunities to run for Congress or the Senate. In effect, he always spurned positions where he would have been publicly accountable, preferring to remain an entirely independent player based in Chicago, a situation in which he set the rules and played only the game that he wanted.

Jackson had, of course, become prominent in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s and had visited South Africa several times. This sometimes produced collisions that introduced liberal South Africans to Jackson’s hardball style.

A notable such case occurred at the University of Cape Town where, after Jackson had made a major speech on campus, faculty members who were liberals or left-wingers were told that they could have a special meeting with Jackson. They filled a lecture room at the allotted time, only for Jackson to enter with a TV camera trawling after him. Turning to the waiting faculty, Jackson denounced them as racists and “honky trash” (supporters of the apartheid regime) and proudly announced that he had come all the way from the US to make it clear that he detested apartheid and would not stand for any of their racism. His flabbergasted audience remained stunned and silent while Jackson concluded his rant and exited the room along with the TV crew. They had, they realised, been used as simply a stage audience of white faces for a TV clip to be shown in the US, emphasising Jackson’s heroic role in the struggle against apartheid.

Like not a few black American leaders, Jackson claimed to black American audiences that he had been the man who really brought down apartheid. But his visits to South Africa quickly taught him that such claims were indignantly dismissed by the African National Congress and he was shrewd enough not to repeat them, at least not before a South African audience.

Rise of Obama

The rise of Barack Obama presented Jackson with a special challenge, particularly since Obama, too, was Chicago-based. While they tended to support many of the same causes, Jackson was no admirer of Obama. Resentful of him as a rival, Jackson accused Obama of not being a “real black” because he didn’t speak with the accents of the ghetto and hadn’t come up through the civil rights struggle. The real problem was that Jackson was outclassed by Obama’s Ivy League intellectual superiority, his polished speech-making, and his more graceful deportment. After Obama had given a speech criticising the damage done to the black community by absent black fathers, Jackson was caught on an open microphone denouncing Obama for “talking down” to his fellow blacks, with Jackson concluding that “I’d like to cut his nuts off”.

Obama made no comment but clearly took note. When he was in the White House, some surprise was expressed that the radical firebrand Al Sharpton was a frequent visitor there. In fact, the explanation was simple. Obama needed contact with a leader of ghetto blacks, both for political reasons and so as to remain aware of what his most loyal voters were thinking and saying. He doubtless had many differences with Sharpton, but Sharpton had the supreme advantage of not being Jesse Jackson, whom Obama was never willing to trust.

Donald Trump, who hated Obama – essentially because he was outclassed by him – took note of this feud, providing Jackson with free offices in his buildings, and he has prominently eulogised Jackson since his death while simultaneously depicting Barack and Michele Obama as apes, the most overt display of racism by a president since the era of slavery.

Jackson was a good example of black social mobility. He had five children (plus a sixth born out of wedlock with a campaign worker) and he was sufficiently well off to give them all university educations, though almost all of them joined his civil rights organisations, which were, in effect, the family business. His son, Jesse Jackson Jr., became a Congressman, but ended up serving a 30-month prison sentence after admitting that he had misused campaign funds. This affluent family circumstance was a far cry from Jackson’s own far less privileged home background – though, typically enough, he had greatly exaggerated this by claiming he had only been able to eat by stealing food, an untruth exposed by his peers.

Jackson’s death has been greeted by eulogies that omit mention of any of the less heroic sides of Jackson’s career. In effect, the nobility of the civil rights struggle has been allowed to wipe the slate clean. But life and history are always more complicated.