He was there sitting up front in one of the nice hairs facing the audience. He wasn’t a pallbearer and I have no idea why he was given such a prominent seat. Guess the Houston family thinks he’s worth the exposure.
My guess is that he demanded to sit there and they caved.
Here are some of the facts about MLKs death by the author of Shakedown, Ken Timmerman... Shakedown exposes Jackson for the huckster he is.
A: Jesse Jackson was not up on the balcony. They even tried to show the picture of Jesse Jackson up on the balcony with Martin Luther King. That picture was taken the day before. It was a publicity shot.
He was not up on the balcony with Martin Luther King. He was down in the parking lot talking to a bunch of musicians – Ben Branch and others. When the shots rang out, he fled and hid behind the swimming pool area and reappeared 20-30 minutes later when the television cameras arrived on the scene. That’s when Jesse Jackson told other Southern Christian Leadership Conference staffers, “Don’t you talk to the press whatever you do.”
Q: We know there were pictures all over the place of Jesse with blood on his shirt. Given that Jesse was in the parking lot when Dr. King was shot, where did that come from?
A: The next morning, he flew to Chicago and went on the NBC “Today Show.” In the meantime, he had hired a public relations agent. So here is a guy who is in such grief from Martin Luther King’s assassination that he comes back to Chicago and has the presence of mind to have himself taken from interview to interview in a chauffeur-driven car with a P.R. agent. The P.R. agent takes him to the NBC “Today” show, he appears in a shirt that he claims is smeared with Dr. Martin Luther King’s blood and he says on national television, “He died in my arms” – an absolute, patent lie.
The guy is a total fraud.