Shakedown
Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
REGNERY PUBLISHING, INC.
Copyright © 2002 Kenneth R. Timmerman.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-89526-165-0
Chapter One
Manufacturing a Myth
—Martin Luther King Jr., August 23, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
"He Died in My Arms"
The date was April 5, 1968. Just twelve hours after an assassin murdered civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a young black follower announced on the NBC Today Show that King had "died in my arms." He had cradled King's head and was "the last person on earth" to whom King had spoken. As proof, he appeared on TV wearing an olive-brown turtleneck sweater that he claimed bore the stains of Dr. King's *******.
The young man was Jesse Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old dropout of the Chicago Theological Seminary, who had insinuated himself into King's entourage three years earlier. His powerful story made for riveting television.
Later that day, Jackson appeared at a rare public session of the Chicago City Council convened by Mayor Richard Daley to commemorate Dr. King. Mayor Daley hoped the memorial service would help calm the anger in Chicago's predominantly black South Side. Once again, wearing the same bloodstained turtleneck and Rap Brown sunglasses, Jackson told the story of King's final moments.
"I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of ******* from Dr. King's head," Jackson told the audience. "This ******* is on the chest and hands of those who would not have welcomed him here yesterday. He went through, literally, a crucifixion. I was there. And I'll be there for the resurrection."
Jackson's tale of cradling the head of the dying Dr. King was repeated four days later in the Chicago Defender and in more than a hundred news articles over the next seven years. The only problem with Jackson's cathartic tale: it is false.
Jackson got away with the lie for nearly a decade, and repeated it at every opportunity. One of Jackson's early backers in Chicago, Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner, published an in-depth interview with Jackson in the magazine's November 1969 issue, labeling him the "fiery heir apparent to Martin Luther King." The puff piece helped promote Jackson with white liberals, and noted: "The Reverend Jackson's first national exposure came as a result of his closeness to Dr. King. He was talking to King on the porch of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when the fatal shot was fired, and cradled the dying man in his arms."
On April 6, 1970, to commemorate the second anniversary of King's death, Time magazine featured Jackson on its cover. "Jackson was the last man King spoke to before he was shot in Memphis," Time wrote. "Jesse ran to the balcony, held King's head, but it was too late."
It wasn't until 1975 that a black reporter from Chicago, Barbara Reynolds, tracked down other members of Dr. King's entourage and published their account of what actually happened in Memphis.
"The only person who cradled Dr. King was [the Reverend Ralph] Abernathy," said Hosea Williams, a top deputy to Dr. King at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) who was present during the shooting. "It's a helluva thing to capitalize on a man's death, especially one you professed to love."
Said Andrew Young, the SCLC executive director who went on to become a United States congressman, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta: "The *******, the cradling, were all things I read in the newspaper and they are all mysteries to me."
King's chosen successor as leader of the SCLC, the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy, said, "I am sure Reverend Jackson would not say to me that he cradled Dr. King. I am sure that Reverend Jackson would realize that I was the person who was on the balcony with Dr. King and did not leave his side until he was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital in Memphis. I am sure that he would not say to me that he even came near Dr. King after Doc was shot."
Chicago musician Ben Branch was with Jackson in the courtyard of the motel when the shooting occurred. "My guess is that Jesse smeared the ******* on his shirt after getting it off the balcony. But who knows where he got it from? All I can say is that Jesse didn't touch him."
Branch later told WJM television in Chicago that Jackson "disappeared in thin air" after the shots rang out, apparently in fear of the Memphis police officers who rushed to the scene. Another King follower said Jackson hid behind the motel swimming pool. Yet another said that he complained that he was sick and was leaving immediately for Chicago to check into a hospital. "This whole thing's really shot my nerves," Jackson reportedly said.
But wherever he went immediately after the shooting, it was not up to the balcony or to King's room. Andrew Young was the first one to reach King, along with an unidentified white man who grabbed a towel and fitted it over the gaping wound where the right side of King's face had been. The Reverend Abernathy, who had been shaving for dinner in the next room, joined them moments later and shouted down to an aide to call an ambulance.
For many years, Jackson's aides circulated a photograph of Jackson, Dr. King, and the Reverend Abernathy on the Lorraine Motel balcony, which they claimed was taken only minutes before King was shot. Once again, it was a lie. That picture—a posed shot—had been taken a day earlier. When King was assassinated, the scene was different. Reynolds writes: "A photographer for the Public Broadcasting Library, documenting the Poor People's campaign, caught forever in his camera lens all those who were on the balcony seconds after the gun blast. They were pointing in the direction from where the shots were fired, a two-story brick rooming house about 200 feet across the street. Jesse was not identified in photos as being among them."
When the ambulance came, Abernathy and Young accompanied King to the hospital. Twenty minutes later, camera crews from NBC, ABC, and CBS started arriving at the motel. "Jesse called to me from across the lot and said, ‘Don't talk to them,’" Branch recalls. "I agreed because I thought he meant none of us were supposed to talk until Abernathy got back from the hospital. So I walked away."
But that wasn't what Jackson had in mind. Hosea Williams recounts what happened next. "I was in my room. I looked out and saw Jesse talking to these TV people. I came out to hear what was being said. I heard Jesse say, ‘Yes, I was the last man in the world King spoke to.’" Williams says he was so furious that he climbed over a railing and rushed toward Jackson, until he was restrained by a police officer. "I called Jesse a dirty, stinking, lying so-and-so, or something like that," Williams said. "I had no hang-ups about Jesse talking to the press. That was okay, but why lie?"
When NBC reporter David Burrington came on the air from Memphis later that evening, he added a second layer to the lie Jackson was broadcasting about being the last man with whom King spoke. "The Reverend Jesse Jackson of Chicago, one of King's closest aides, was beside him when he was shot while standing on a veranda outside his motel room," Burrington reported.
At the time of the shooting, Jackson was no Reverend. But, says former confidant and speechwriter Hurley Green, "Dr. King told Jesse that everybody who worked in the movement was a minister, so Jesse went to seminary for six months, dropped out, and called himself a minister."
Nor was Jackson on especially good terms with King or other members of the SCLC staff, who mistrusted his ambition, his audacity, and his refusal to be a team player. At the last SCLC staff meeting, one week before he was shot, King expressed his displeasure with Jackson's criticism of his decision to call off a March 28 demonstration in Memphis (which would subsequently degenerate into a riot). Disgusted with Jackson's behavior, King walked out of the room.
Jackson ran after him, trying to continue the discussion. Wheeling around, King said angrily, "Don't you ever pull that kind of thing at one of my meetings." He added, "If you are so interested in doing your own thing that you can't do what the organization is structured to do, go ahead ... but for God's sake don't bother me."
Just two minutes before he was shot, King spied Jackson in the courtyard of the motel and asked him to put on a tie and join him for dinner. It was the first time he had exchanged pleasantries with Jackson since their angry encounter at the staff meeting a week earlier. "Those in the courtyard knew that the personal invitation was Dr. King's way of making up with Jesse," Reynolds writes.
Like that other monumental overachiever, former president Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson has long had a troubled relationship with the truth.
It's not as if Jackson needed to stretch the truth. Like Clinton, his accomplishments are many and the mainstream press has lavished attention on him. And yet, from the very start of his career as a national leader, he has consistently bent the facts to fit the glorified self-image he has sought to create: that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s one true heir.
Don Rose was the publicist for the Chicago-based civil rights coalition, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), which became Dr. King's center of operations in Chicago during the last two years of his life. He was one of the first people Jackson called when he rushed back to Chicago after King's assassination. According to one account of their conversation, which Rose gave to the New York Times Magazine for a July 9, 1972, profile of Jackson, the two "decided that Jackson could be sold to the press as the new King."
Later, during Jackson's second presidential campaign in 1988, Rose told reporters that his account of Jackson conniving to grab King's mantle had been "overblown." They had only discussed Jackson's "terrific potential to become the leader of the movement." But there was "no concerted plan," Rose said.
Jackson called Rose after his weekly Operation Breadbasket meeting, which, on the first Saturday after King's death, was attended by 4,000 people—ten times the normal crowd that came to hear Jackson speak. According to reporter Betty Washington, who watched Jackson's performance that morning, "I felt he was imitating Dr. King.... I remember it had some of the people in the audience in hysterics. The way they acted, it was as if King was being reincarnated in that man. It was like he was trying to be King, like something staged."
Jackson drove to various Chicago television stations that afternoon with Rose and aides from Operation Breadbasket. According to one aide, Jackson and Rose calmly talked in the limo about how they could build Jackson's image as the sole heir to King's civil rights throne. "There was a very conscious effort to project Jackson as the figure most closely associated with King, a little like the myth-making that evolved from Memphis. Jesse very seriously and very calculatingly discussed the ingredients and objectives necessary to assume the position of the new leader. The psychological impact of the project and the reaction of the press to Jesse were discussed.... The conversation was cut and dried. He would be packaged like any other product."
Early Lies
Jackson's lies about Dr. King's assassination were not his first. He has consistently embellished his own upbringing and his early days in the civil rights movement, and has danced around his troubled personal relationship with Dr. King and the movement King left behind, the SCLC.
Born on October 8, 1941, to a sixteen-year-old unwed woman in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson has often said that he grew up in dire poverty "on the wrong side of the tracks." His adoptive *******, Charles Jackson, was a returning World War II soldier who gave Jesse his last name at the age of thirteen, and prided himself on providing for his family. Jackson would later say in a biographical sketch called Up from the Ghetto that his ******* was a janitor and his mom, a maid. "I used to run bootleg *******, bought hot clothes. I had to steal to survive." The facts were quite different. Jackson's ******* was a career postal worker, while Jackson's mom worked as a beautician. The Jacksons even had a telephone in the early 1950s, when many whites, as well as blacks, did not. Charles Jackson responded with embarrassment when reporters confronted him with Jackson's tales. "We were never poor. We never wanted for anything. We've never been on welfare, because I was never without a job. We never begged anybody for a dime. And my family never went hungry a day in their lives." They lived modestly, but not in poverty, thanks to his hard work.
Some biographers have speculated that Jackson's uneasy relationship with the truth stems from his having been an illegitimate baby. Jackson's biological *******, Noah Robinson, was happily married when he fell for the sixteen-year-old girl next door. He was also one of the wealthiest men in Greenville's black community and lived in a large, imposing house with a wrought iron "R" on the chimney. Jackson's middle name, Louis, was that of Robinson's own *******, a pastor.
Less than one year after Jackson was born, Robinson's wife gave birth to a ******* they named Noah R. Robinson Jr. Jackson and his younger half brother attended the same schools, but returned home to separate households every evening. Although Greenville was a sizeable town of 62,000, the black community was small enough to be plagued by small-town gossip, and by the time Jackson was nine he clearly understood that he had two fathers.
Before he died in 1997, Noah Robinson Sr. reminisced with biographer Barbara Reynolds about seeing Jesse as a nine-year-old boy, standing in his backyard, gazing in through the window. "Sometimes I wouldn't see him right away and Noah Junior would tell me he was out there," Robinson said. "No telling how long he could have been there. As soon as I would go to the window and wave, he would wave back and run away." Robinson acknowledged Jackson as his *******, but was unable to welcome him openly into his home until Jesse was sixteen.
Jackson has frequently claimed that Old South racism prevented him from pursuing a career as a star athlete. In all-black Sterling High, Jackson played quarterback and pitched on the baseball team. His rival at all-white Greenville High was named Dickie Dietz. Years later, Jackson would say that he and Dietz competed against each other in the summer of 1959 at major league tryouts, and that he struck Dietz out three times. But because of a racist system, Dietz was offered a $95,000 contract with the major leagues, while the scouts only offered Jackson $6,000 and a chance to go to college in the off-season.
But in his inimitable sycophantic style, biographer Marshall Frady acknowledges that Jackson's account "under closer scrutiny, proved a trifle evanescent in some particulars." The problem, as Dietz himself would later tell reporters, was that far from striking him out three times, Jackson "merely hit him once in the back with the ball, hard."
Jackson was no "victim," though he has spent his life developing the cult of victimhood. Compared to many inner city schools today, after thirty-five years of a federal welfare system that has promoted single-parent households and eroded the quality of education, Jackson's all-black high school was a haven of respectability and academic achievement. By the eleventh grade, Jackson was studying French. He won an athletic scholarship directly out of high school to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a freshman during the 1959-1960 season he played quarterback briefly, before he was moved to the backfield and then to the line. It was about as far from stardom as one can get, and Jackson wasn't happy.
As Jackson tells the story, even up North in the Big Ten, the long arm of racism reached down to prevent a talented young black man from realizing his dream. "They told me blacks could not be quarterbacks." But once again, facts don't bear him out. University records show that Illinois's starting quarterback that year was Mel Meyers, who also happened to be black. Years later, when Jackson was running for president, his coach at Illinois, Ray Eliot, told the Los Angeles Times that Jackson had been placed on academic probation during his second semester. In other words, he faced the choice of leaving the University of Illinois voluntarily or possibly flunking out. The story about not being able to play quarterback because he was black was just an excuse.
THAT Jesse Jackson????
