Jesse Jackson’s ‘Unfinished Business’

The Reverend Jesse Jackson’s death is a loss for the Civil Rights Movement that he deemed “America’s unfinished business.” President Trump memorializes him as “a force of nature like few others before him.” Jackson was an ardent advocate of the ideals set forth by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and he echoed King’s call for nonviolence in the face of injustice. His political forays, with a populist bent, were in some ways ahead of their time.Yet Jackson’s death is an opportunity, too, to weigh the direction of the civil rights cause and of the Democratic Party, in both of which Jackson played such an influential role. Writ large, Jackson’s career witnessed — and sometimes encouraged — a shift on the left away from the vision of colorblind equality under the law, of which King was an impassioned exponent. Instead, liberals have increasingly embraced an identity politics that sows division.As early as 1984, the Wall Street Journal marked, in an editorial, the ascendancy of Jackson’s stripe of politics. Fresh off a Cuba visit, which the Journal called a “love feast with Fidel Castro,” Jackson was running for president on the left wing of the Democratic party, railing against “big corporations and rich individuals.” His earlier embrace of the terrorist-backing Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, as the “friend of justice and humanity” appalled American Jews.Jackson’s tours of foreign nations and condemnation of American foreign policy during the Cold War pinned on Washington the ills facing developing nations. Sound familiar? These are all now standard talking points for the Democrats. In 1984, though, this kind of talk struck some as extreme. Hence, ahead of the party’s convention that year, the Journal’s editorial noted that Jackson “is not far from the mainstream of the Democratic Party.”That, the Journal reckoned, “is precisely the Democrats’ problem with him.” The editorial concluded that Jackson “merely carries their own inclinations a step or two further; one could even say carries them to their logical conclusions.” Jackson was ahead of the liberal curve, too, when it comes to the far left’s ideological capture of American higher education. In 1987 he was marching at Stanford and chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”It’s testament to the left’s turn away from the principle of colorblind justice that in 1996, when an emerging conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled against race-based gerrymanders, Jackson condemned the justices in personal terms. In response to the ruling he muttered that “at night the enemies of civil rights strike in white sheets, burning churches. By day they strike in black robes, burning opportunities.”That vitriol was of a piece, say, with Jackson’s refusal to disclaim the support of Minister Louis Farrakhan, even if Jackson conceded disagreement with some of the Nation of Islam chief’s rhetoric. Jackson’s legacy was tarnished, too, by his practice of using boycott threats to pressure corporations for donations under the rubric of his Rainbow Coalition. Even a liberal journalist like Joe Klein saw Jackson as “a classic shakedown artist.”It’s hard to envision that criticism being credibly leveled against King or another civil rights titan, A. Philip Randolph, who as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters mastered a strategy of pairing quiet dignity with the exercise of influence to advance racial equality. Jackson was right in seeing that race in America amounts to “unfinished business,” yet the left would make more progress by recalling the earlier generation of civil rights leadership.

Jesse Jackson’s ‘Unfinished Business’

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