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Jesse Jackson Exposed
By Chris Arabia
December 9, 2002 Jesse Jackson's Latest Shakedown
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
January 14, 2004 Letter Reveals Jesse Jackson's 'Shakedown' Bid of GE, Critic Says
By Marc Morano
March 26, 2002 Jesse Jackson Uncovers "Racism" Yet Again
By John Perazzo
May 30, 2001 Jesse's Obsession
By Larry Elder
December 1, 1999 Jesse's Riot Act
By Karina Williams
November 18, 1999 Throw Away the Key
By David Horowitz
November 22, 1999 Jesse, Liberia, and Blood Diamonds
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
July 25, 2003 Hanoi Jesse?
By Chris Weinkopf
May 7, 1999 Jesse Jackson at Michigan State
By Bruce S. Thornton
September 23, 2002 NASCAR PUSHes Back
By Dave Shiflett
August 22, 2003 Jesse's Illegitimacy
By Chris Weinkopf
January 28, 2001 Hidden Motives
By Lowell Ponte
November 17, 1999 Jesse, William, Martin, and John
By Lowell Ponte
January 24, 2001 Jesse Jackson's Latest "Outrage" Is Outrageous
By Joel Mowbray
May 15, 2003 The Real Reason for Jesse Jackson's No-Show at Augusta
By Larry Elder
May 8, 2003 Black Leadership Network Urges NASCAR to Sever Ties with Jesse Jackson
By National Center for Public Policy Research
July 2, 2003 A Tale of Two Tourists By David Dolan August 5, 2002
Why Jesse Jackson's Not Amused
By Marni Soupcoff
September 25, 2002
Jesse Jackson: A Real Con Man
By Lowell Ponte
July 18, 2003 Jesse's War Plan
By Richard Poe
December 18, 2000 Civil Rights Leaders Who Hate America
By John Perazzo
September 30, 2001 |
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- Civil rights leader
- Founded Rainbow PUSH Coalition
- Blackmails corporations with threats of racial boycotts and negative publicity
- “Racism is a deeply ingrained congenital deformity in the U.S. It is at the root of our society, and it is the rot of our national character.”
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1941; he was educated in the Greenville public schools, then attended the University of Illinois on a football scholarship, subsequently transferring to North Carolina A&T State University. While at North Carolina A&T, Jackson became active in the nascent civil rights movement in the South and led various protests and sit-ins at local restaurants and other businesses. Upon his graduation, he moved to Chicago to begin divinity studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary and devote his energies to the civil rights movement.
Though he began characterizing himself as a Baptist minister in 1968, Jackson had never actually earned a traditional ordination. He failed out of the Chicago Theological Seminary during his first year there. Kenneth Timmerman – author of the authoritative book Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson – explains: “[There is normally] a two- to three-year process for earning that title [Reverend]. Jesse Jackson got himself ordained two months after Martin Luther King was shot. It was essentially a political ordination, a shotgun ordination. He did not go through the long procedure. He was not licensed to preach, as far as I could determine. I went to the church where he was ordained. He did not go through this two-year process. He never submitted himself to the authority of the church. He has never had a church himself, and he has been accountable to no one.”
It would not be until the year 2000 that Jackson received his Master of Divinity degree from Chicago. By that time, his son –Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D – Illinois) – was on the board of the seminary. The younger Jackson had earned his M.A. in theology from that same institution a decade earlier.
Jesse Jackson, Sr. participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965; Martin Luther King, Jr., put Jackson in charge of several civil rights projects in Chicago, and Jackson was eventually appointed to head Operation Breadbasket, a group created by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1963 to organize boycotts of businesses that failed to hire blacks or otherwise treated blacks unfairly. Despite King and Jackson’s professional relationship, the two men were known to clash on several occasions. Jackson has often overstated the closeness of his relationship to King, even claiming to have been the last person King spoke to after he had been fatally shot in 1968; when confronted with plain facts on the issue, Jackson has resorted to Biblical parallels, comparing his relationship to King with Paul’s relationship to Jesus, and contrasting Paul’s relationship to Peter by saying that, while Peter was closer to the Man, Paul was closer to the message.
Specifically, Jackson claimed that he was on the balcony with King immediately after the latter had been mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, and that he had cradled the dying civil rights leader in his arms as he took his final breaths. At the moment King was shot, Jackson was actually in a nearby parking lot talking to a group of musicians. Kenneth Timmerman describes what happened next: “When the shots rang out, he [Jackson] 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.’ . . . Nobody had given him that job. He took that job. Call it ‘entrepreneurial instinct’ if you wish, but on the spot he realized that he had an opportunity to spin the events to create his own persona and create a possibility for him to become a leader in the black movement. He had no prospects at that point.”
The next morning, Jackson flew to Chicago to make a guest appearance on the NBC “Today Show.” In the few hours that had passed between the King assassination and Jackson’s flight to the Windy City, the purportedly grief-stricken Jackson had already hired a public relations agent; this agent accompanied Jackson as he was transported from interview to interview in a chauffeur-driven car. Before a national television audience on the “Today” show, Jackson donned a shirt that he claimed was smeared with the dying Dr. King’s blood. “He died in my arms,” lied Jackson.
After King’s murder, the SCLC chose Dr. Ralph Abernathy as King’s successor. In 1971 Jackson broke with the SCLC and left Operation Breadbasket. The circumstances that led to his departure were as follows: A black Chicago Tribune reporter named Angela Parker did some research and discovered that, following King’s assassination, Jackson had embezzled money from Operation Breadbasket. Parker went to Atlanta and presented the evidence to Abernathy, who publicly confronted Jackson with the charges. When Abernathy suspended Jackson for sixty days, a raging Jackson decided to break away and establish his own organization called Operation PUSH (acronym for People United to Save Humanity).
At one of the first weekly meetings of his new organization, in front of hundreds of people, Jackson pointed to Angela Parker, who was in attendance as a reporter to cover the event, and charged angrily: “This woman has been destroying black leadership.” The commotion that resulted when credulous listeners directed their wrath at Parker created a very tense atmosphere, and Parker was forced to leave. When she arrived home, picketers were protesting outside her house. She eventually had to move to another residence – all because of the hate campaign that Jackson had directed against her.
In the early days of Operation PUSH, its tactics were essentially the same as those of Operation Breadbasket: the targeting of businesses that failed to hire blacks or in other ways treated blacks unfairly, and giving assistance to black-owned businesses.
However, numerous accusations of extortion and corruption have dogged PUSH’s activities over the years, as well as the activities of Jackson’s successor organizations, the Rainbow Coalition and the Citizenship Education Fund. These activities have been detailed in several sources, including Timmerman’s Shakedown. Jackson has repeatedly threatened businesses and corporations, black and white, with boycotts, racially biased criticism, and (implicitly) outright violence, if they refused to enrich him or his organizations. Among the companies: Coca-Cola, Texaco, Viacom, AT&T, Boeing, and Coors. In addition, his organizations have received at least $50 million from the U.S. government.
To site some specifics: Coca-Cola was induced to award a lucrative distributorship to Jackson’s half-brother, Noah, in order to protect itself from racially based attacks by Jackson (Noah is serving a life sentence for arranging the contract murder of three business associates); Anheuser-Busch awarded a beer distributorship to Jackson’s sons, Yusef and Jonathan, for the same reason; President Jimmy Carter directed $7 million in government funds to PUSH; President Bill Clinton sent Jackson on a junket to Africa that cost American taxpayers $42 million; Jackson opposed the merger of Viacom and CBS, initially attempting to force Viacom to sell the UPN Network to Percy Sutton: Jackson held a then $1.2 million worth of shares of Sutton’s Inner City Broadcasting; Jackson opposed the merger of SBC Communications and Ameritech until Ameritech sold its cellular business to a group headed by Chester Davenport, another Jackson friend. Jackson has received literally millions of dollars for his Citizens Education Fund as part of negotiated settlements with companies he has frivolously accused of racist employment practices.
In addition to his ethical improprieties, Jackson radicalized the political agenda of Operation PUSH, moving directly into the political arena to unseat the Chicago delegates of Mayor Richard Daley at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. He began his international political career later in the decade. In 1979, with President Carter’s blessing, he went to South Africa to speak against the apartheid regime; he made a controversial visit to Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat; in 1983, alleging that President Reagan’s economic policies has severely impacted blacks and that the Democratic Party was largely indifferent to black concerns, Jackson made the first of his two runs for President. Despite the revelation by the Washington Post that Jackson had called Jews “hymies” and New York City “hymietown,” he received 3.5 million votes during the primaries, enough to guarantee respect within the Party and the chance to give a major speech at the national convention.
Jackson’s 1988 Presidential campaign enjoyed greater success; the Democrats had no strong front-runner, and the Iran-Contra scandal had tarnished the last years of the Reagan administration, making the Republicans appear vulnerable. Jackson won several Southern primaries and caucuses, then showed significant strength in the North by winning the Michigan primary. He was briefly the Democratic frontrunner until Michael Dukakis rallied and claimed the nomination. Jackson’s strong showing allowed him to radicalize the party’s platform and eventually contributed to Dukakis’ loss to George Bush in the Presidential election.
Jackson was elected a “shadow Senator” from Washington, D.C. in 1991, but declined to seek re-election in 1997, preferring to concentrate on “reforming” American corporate life by means of the aforementioned policy of manipulation buttressed by reckless charges of racism. President Clinton’s decision to appoint him “Special Envoy of the President and Secretary of State for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa” returned Jackson to the diplomatic arena. In addition to the exorbitant expenditures Jackson ran up during his trip, he embraced and praised numerous African dictators, including Zambia’s Fredrick Chiluba (whose tenure was marked by rampant corruption, including embezzlement), and Nigerian President Abdulsalami Abubakar (embezzler of at least $40 million from Nigeria’s treasury). Jackson also became one of Clinton’s spiritual counselors during the Monica Lewinski affair; at about the same time, Jackson’s still-hidden mistress, Karin Stanford, was bearing the couple’s child.
For many years, Jackson has been a passionate supporter of racial preferences in employment and college admissions. Invoking the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. to support his position, Jackson has used the term “intellectual terrorism” to describe any suggestion that King, were he alive today, would oppose racial preferences for African Americans. Favoring preferences in all sectors of American life, Jackson has proposed that in return for the $600 billion that black American consumers spend each year, black business owners should be guaranteed a corresponding share of the service and manufacturing contracts that U.S. companies award. “We must have a plan to achieve equal results,” he asserts.
While corporate America strives relentlessly to increase black participation at every level of its activities, Jackson laments “the corporate lockout” which he says has kept blacks “out of banking and textiles and [the] auto [industry] and food markets and telecommunications.” Explaining that “the walls” must “come down,” whether they be “in South Africa [a reference to that nation’s former apartheid regime] or South Carolina,” he exhorts “Wall Street corporations” to “open up the marketplace” and “let us [blacks] in.”
When California voters in 1996 passed Proposition 209, which eliminated racial preferences from the admissions policies of the state’s university system, Jackson charged that California schools were “cleansing” themselves of black students, and he urged Americans to “pursue the dream of an inclusive society.” Similarly, when the Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that racially gerrymandered voting districts (which were drawn on racial rather than geographic lines so as to virtually guarantee the electoral victories of minority candidates in those districts) were unconstitutional, Jackson predicted that the Court’s decision (which mandated the redrawing of the districts on geographic lines) would cause “a kind of ethnic cleansing” in Congress.
Such forecasts are predicated on what has been the signature theme of Jackson’s career as a civil rights activist: his persistent claim that whites are reflexive racists, and that racial progress has proceeded far too slowly and imperceptibly in its treatment of black citizens in recent decades. Calling white racism a problem that “the entire nation has to deal with,” Jackson professes to yearn for a future “in which white Americans will have grown, by overcoming their unfounded fears” of black people. “Racism is a deeply ingrained congenital deformity in the U.S. It is at the root of our society and it is the rot of our national character.”
Jackson trumpeted this theme as a guest speaker at Louis Farrakhan’s October 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC. “Now we have the burden of two Americas: one-half slave and one-half free,” he told the throngs of listeners. Explaining that blacks were “yearning to breathe free,” he exhorted those in attendance to break out of their “shackles” because no one would “free” them voluntarily. “Slave masters never retire,” he said. “Oppressors never retire.” Jackson named, as the principal perpetrators of this “oppression,” law-enforcement officials who “chastise the [black] mothers, . . . chase the daddies, [and] lock up the children.” “We [blacks] are under attack by the courts, legislatures, mass media,” he added. “We’re despised. Racists attack us for sport to win votes. We’re attacked for sport to make money.”
This has been the essence of Jackson’s self-exculpation for four decades. |
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