Feb.18

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Jesse Jackson Is Dead...

Jesse Jackson, perhaps the most prominent civil rights activist of the post-King years, and the first Black person to spend time as a frontrunner for a major-party presidential nomination, has died at the age of 84.

As we always note when a major national or international figure dies, we are not in a position to write the kind of obituary you can get from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, CBS News, NBC News, or The Guardian. First of all, they can get Jackson's family, or Barack Obama, or Al Sharpton on the phone to comment. We can't. Further, they have the resources to write the obits years or decades in advance, so that they just have to dust them off, update them a bit, and go. We don't.

Instead, we are going to do what we do sometimes when someone important dies, such as we did with Sandra Day O'Connor and Dianne Feinstein, and share 10 anecdotes about Jackson that might be enlightening:

1. Beginnings: Jackson noted, many times, that it was not racism that initially sparked his interest in activism, it was being mocked for having been born out of wedlock. This experience taught him that it's not fair to be treated differently due to the circumstances of one's birth. It also means that it is technically correct to say that Jackson got into civil rights activism because he was a bastard.
   
   
2. The Sporting Life: What do Jackson, former Associate Justice Byron White, Gerald Ford and, supposedly, Fidel Castro have in common? They had a shot to pursue careers as professional athletes. White actually played a bit for the Steelers, before serving in World War II and then deciding his law career offered a better future. Ford turned down an offer from the Detroit Lions, which was sensible, and one from the Green Bay Packers, which was madness, because he also decided the law offered better prospects. Fidel Castro claimed, or had people claim on his behalf, that he had major-league tryouts, but that's probably false. As to Jackson, he got a football scholarship from the University of Illinois (he only played a year), but his best sport was actually baseball. He turned down a minor league contract offer from the Chicago White Sox, because he was more concerned with getting an education.
   
   
3. MLK: Jackson got his first serious work as an activist as part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Eventually, Jackson worked his way into King's inner circle, a position he enjoyed until the end of King's life. On the night King was assassinated, Jackson and Ralph Abernathy were waiting to have dinner with the civil rights leader, and both were close enough when the act took place that they were splashed with King's blood.
   
   
4. First Mourner: There are some unpleasant parts to Jackson's story, with his behavior in the aftermath of the King assassination looming large in the unflattering complaints about him. Jackson took to wearing his blood-stained turtleneck for TV interviews, for days after the shooting. He also made claims, which were hotly disputed by Abernathy, that he (Jackson) cradled the dying King's head in his arms, and that he alone heard King's last words. Most of the rest of King's inside circle felt that Jackson was trying to profit off the tragedy by christening himself "First Mourner." Coretta Scott King, the fallen man's widow, did not speak to Jackson for years thereafter because she was so furious.
   
   This was hardly the last time Jackson demonstrated less-than-admirable tendencies. He was a male of his era, and that meant he felt free to treat a room full of women as a meat market. Actually, and we know firsthand witnesses to this, Jackson was pretty extreme, even for males of his era, such that he would have been a candidate for #MeToo if he'd been born 25 years later. He was also known to say some very indecorous things when he thought he was speaking privately, such as the time he used the antisemitic slur "Hymietown" to refer to New York City.
   
   
5. Urban Legends: Among modern-day musicians, there's a saying that you know you've arrived once Weird Al Yankovic has done a cover of one of your songs. Among politicians, the corollary might be that you know you've arrived once you've been the subject of a widely circulated urban legend. Jackson was the target of several of them, most of them backdoor attempts to either discredit him as a Black man, or to discredit Black people in general. Probably the most famous of these is a story, obviously false, that Jackson was visiting an appliance store one day and began complaining that the washing machines were racist because they were all white. The white clerk/proprietor allegedly fired back "Don't worry, Mr. Jackson, the agitators are all black."
   
   
6. Second... Or Third... Or...: The NYT obit (click the link above) describes Jackson as "the second Black candidate from a major party to run for president, after Shirley Chisholm." Nearly all other obits include this same factoid. This claim is either outright wrong, or is at least very misleading. First, starting with Frederick Douglass way back in 1848, there were at least a dozen Black people who ran for president on third-party tickets and who received at least some popular votes. Even if we limit ourselves to major parties, Douglass (R, 1888), Channing E. Phillips (D, 1968), Chisholm (D, 1972), Walter Fauntroy (D, 1972) and Barbara Jordan (D, 1976) all got votes at their party's convention. In most cases, this was one or two protest votes, but Phillips and Chisholm both got considerably more than that.
   
   Rather than try hard to make Jackson a "first" or a "second," it's really just better to say that his presidential runs were a key chapter in a saga that would ultimately lead to Barack Obama's election in 2008. This is how Jackson himself viewed it; when Obama's victory was confirmed, Jackson said that Obama had run the last leg of a race that had been going on for 60 years.
   
   
7. Mr. Senator?: Similarly, quite a few obits declare that Jackson ran for office several times, but was never elected to any of them. This is not entirely correct. Since 1991, Washington, DC, has elected two shadow senators and one shadow representative. These positions are distinct from the non-voting delegate to the House that D.C. also elects. The shadow senators are entitled to be called "Mr. Senator," but do not have any other privileges—they are not sworn in, they do not get office space, they cannot vote, and they receive no salary. They are, in effect, lobbyists who try to persuade the other members to grant statehood and to do other things on behalf of the district (the only other "shadow" delegation is from Puerto Rico, since 2017).
   
   Jackson was elected one of the first two shadow senators from D.C., and served one 6-year term. He was succeeded by Paul Strauss, who is still serving.
   
   
8. Gay is OK: A fair number of Black activists of Jackson's era were not too friendly to LGBTQ activists. Part of that is that Black activists tended to come from an evangelical Christian background, and so had it ingrained in them that gay is not OK. Another part is that devoted activists tend to think their cause is the important one, and that any other cause is an unwelcome distraction.
   
   Jackson was pretty far ahead of the curve when it came to accepting LGBTQ Americans. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, he gave a primetime speech in which he declared:

   America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.

   That was the first time that a speaker at a major party convention had uttered the words "gay" or "lesbian." And though Jackson's Rainbow Coalition was not specifically named in reference to the LGBTQ pride flag, he nonetheless made clear that LGBTQ people were welcome as members of the organization, as he believed all struggles for equality are really just the one struggle for equality.
   
   
9. Diplomat: Although Jackson was never president, he followed a similar path to Jimmy Carter, the man he tried to succeed as the Democrats' nominee in 1984, and became a high-profile, jet-setting negotiator assigned to various special projects. He secured the release of Navy Pilot Robert Goodman (1984), 48 Americans held in Cuba (also 1984), hundreds of people held in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein (1991) and three U.S. prisoners of war held by Yugoslav President Slobadan Milosevic (1999). For this, Jackson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton. Jackson was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and while he didn't win it, he was a far better candidate than... certain people.
   
   
10. Look at Meeeeeeeeee!: Speaking of Donald Trump, assuming that is who we were referring to at the end of the previous entry, he has been chummy with Jackson for many years. After Jackson died, Trump issued a statement in which he... made it all about him. We'll wait a moment while you pick your jaw up off the floor and recover from the shock. The President decreed: "Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way." In other words, those of you who think Trump is a racist are clearly wrong because—say it with us—he has a Black friend.

Jackson was a complicated fellow, like most historical figures. Of course, some are more complicated than others. (Z)