Jackson, Jesse L., Sr.

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 African American National Biography

Jackson, Jesse L., Sr.

(8 Oct. 1941– ),

civil rights leader, was born Jesse Louis Robinson in Greenville, South Carolina. His mother, Nancy Burns, was only sixteen years old when Jesse was born, and she was not married to Jackson's father, Noah Robinson. On 2 October 1943 Jackson's mother married Charles H. Jackson, a janitor, who adopted Jackson and gave him his name. In the course of his career, Jackson has frequently used the fact that he was born out of wedlock to a teenage mother to try to inspire young people to believe that no matter what their backgrounds they can “be somebody.” At Greenville's Sterling High School, Jackson was a good student and an outstanding athlete. After graduation from high school, he accepted a football scholarship at the University of Illinois but left after a year. Jackson attributed his departure to the school's racist sports policy, stating that he could not play quarterback because it was a “whites only position.”

Enrolling in 1961 at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T), an historically black college in Greensboro, Jackson became the school's star quarterback, head of his fraternity, and president of the student government. He was also a leader of the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the leading national civil rights organizations in the 1960s. At age twenty-three he led demonstrations protesting segregation at Greensboro lunch counters and helped to organize a student civil rights group, the North Carolina Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights. Thus, from his high school and early college days, Jackson displayed the talents and ambition for leadership that were to characterize the rest of his life. Equally clear at this time was Jackson's intention to use those talents and ambitions in the cause of civil rights, which he has continued throughout his career. In 1962 he married Jacqueline Lavina Davis, a student from Fort Pierce, Florida. In the course of their marriage the Jacksons had five children. (In 1996his oldest son, Jesse Louis Jackson Jr., was elected to the U.S. Congress from Chicago.)

Jesse Jackson campaigns for passage of the Hawkins-Humphrey Bill for full employment, 15 January 1975. Civil rights activist, minister, and occasional Democratic presidential candidate, Jackson remains one of America's most recognizable and sometimes controversial voices for equal justice under the law. (Library of Congress/Thomas J. O'Halloran, photographer.)

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In 1964 Jackson graduated from North Carolina A&T with a BA in Sociology and moved to Chicago to attend seminary. He had entered the ministry while in college, but he was not ordained into the Baptist clergy until 1968. Jackson enrolled in the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1965 and continued his civil rights activism, working for the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an umbrella association of Chicago civic and civil rights groups. Within a year Jackson had become director of the Coordinating Council. He dropped out of seminary to join the voting rights protests in Selma, Alabama, then being led by John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King was a strong-willed and gifted leader, and he surrounded himself with men of similar abilities, including Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, and Wyatt Tee Walker, among others. Viewing King as a hero and role model for activist ministry, Jackson desperately wanted to be a part of his inner circle. Within a year Jackson attained his goal when he was appointed national director of Operation Breadbasket in 1967. Headquartered in Chicago, Operation Breadbasket was the northern arm of the largely southern-based SCLC. Modeled after a similar organization in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, led by Leon H. Sullivan, Breadbasket targeted and protested against businesses with discriminatory employment and contracting practices.

Operation Breadbasket thrived in Chicago under Jackson's leadership. The organization led highly visible boycotts against some of the city's leading businesses, sometimes resulting in employment opportunities for black workers and contracts for black entrepreneurs. Breadbasket's success made Jackson an influential figure in Chicago politics and enhanced his stature in SCLC's inner circle. That Jackson, considerably younger than the other SCLC leaders, could so quickly be placed in charge of SCLC's northern operations is testament to both his talents and his ambitions. Jackson was with King at the time of his assassination in Memphis in 1968 and claimed to have cradled the dying leader on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, although the others present dispute this claim. Indeed, it was this dispute about Jackson's role at the time of King's death that initiated tensions between him and the SCLC leadership and that would eventually lead to Jackson's suspension and ultimate resignation from the organization. Mistrust of Jackson was reinforced when, against the explicit wishes of the King family and SCLC staff, he appeared the day after the assassination before the Chicago City Council and on national television in clothing that he claimed bore King's blood.

At the time of his death King was in the final stages of planning the Poor People's Campaign—marches, demonstrations, and other protest activities designed to highlight the extent of poverty in America and to secure for the poor federally guaranteed jobs and income. Jackson, along with SCLC leaders James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette, had initially questioned the strategy and clarity of planning for the Poor People's March on Washington in internal SCLC deliberations. After King's death, however, he skillfully used the media and effectively stole the spotlight from Abernathy, King's designated successor, on the day of the national demonstration.

Undoubtedly Jackson believed that he was better equipped to succeed King than Abernathy, and shortly after the Poor People's Campaign concluded, he asked the SCLC board to give him a higher position in the organization. The board refused. Sensing that Jackson was turning Operation Breadbasket into an autonomous organization, in 1971 the SCLC board asked Jackson to move Breadbasket to Atlanta, SCLC's national headquarters. Jackson refused. Later in the year the board suspended Jackson for sixty days because of alleged irregularities in the handling of Breadbasket funds. At this point Jackson resigned from SCLC and created Operation “PUSH” (People United to Save Humanity) and named himself president. Operation PUSH (which in personnel was essentially Operation Breadbasket with a new name) continued Breadbasket's economic protests and boycotts, but it also began to engage in political protests and organizing. Jackson also established PUSH-EXCEL to encourage high performance by black schoolchildren. Adopting the self-styled characterization of the “country preacher,” he traveled the country preaching moral responsibility, especially regarding sex during the teen years, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and the use of illegal drugs.

In 1972 Jackson made his first foray into national Democratic Party politics, cochairing an alternate delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Charging that the regular delegation headed by Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago had excluded minorities and women, Jackson played a major role in persuading the convention to oust the Daley delegation and replace it with the one he cochaired. In 1984 and again in 1988 Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president. He gained widespread support from black voters and Latinos, bringing significant numbers of new registrants into the Democratic Party. The excitement of his candidacy was felt largely in the Democratic primaries in 1984. He won in the District of Columbia and Louisiana, beating both the perceived front-runner Walter Mondale, a former vice president, and Senator Gary Hart, and in Maryland he came in second, ahead of Hart. Jackson's performance at the primary level won him delegates to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, but with little support from the larger white electorate, he did not come close to winning the nomination. More important, however, was the popular acknowledgment of Jackson as the leading African American in the Democratic Party. In both the 1984 and 1988 elections he stood out as one of the party's leading advocates for liberal and progressive causes. He also established the Rainbow Coalition Inc., as a progressive, liberal adjunct to the Democratic Party. By the 1980s public opinion polls showed that blacks and whites alike perceived Jackson to be the preeminent African American leader.

Jackson also achieved international recognition as a “citizen diplomat,” visiting countries in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Pursuing conflict mediation, he negotiated the release of American prisoners of war in Syria and Yugoslavia and the release of political prisoners in Cuba. In the 1990s he called attention to the need for African American economic empowerment. He established the Wall Street Project to facilitate access by blacks and other minorities to investment capital, credit, and contracts and to help them secure positions as executives and board members in major American financial and corporate institutions. Unlike the economic empowerment strategy of Operation Breadbasket, the Wall Street Project relied on negotiations between elite power brokers, rather than mass boycotts and protests. The peripatetic Jackson, however, continued to lead demonstrations for causes that included not only civil rights but also the environment, women's rights, and workers' rights. In addition, he hosted Both Sides, a Sunday afternoon news talk program on CNN. In 1995 Jackson's Operation PUSH and his Rainbow Coalition were merged. The new organization, with Jackson as president, was called the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

Jackson's popularity and moral authority as a leader were undermined early in 2001 when the tabloid press revealed that he had fathered a child with Karin Stanford, a member of his staff who had written a book about his involvement in international affairs. The revelation of this extramarital relationship diminished Jackson's credibility, especially given the allegations of financial irregularities regarding his organizations' payments to his mistress and their child. He also lost his television talk show on CNN as a result of the affair.

According to a national survey conducted in 2000 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Jackson had declined considerably in influence. The Joint Center's poll revealed Jackson with an 83 percent favorable to 9 percent unfavorable rating among blacks. In a 2002 poll the Joint Center found that Jackson's favorable rating among blacks had dropped to 60 percent, while his unfavorable rating had increased to 26 percent. By 2003 black scholars and commentators on African American politics were increasingly talking and writing about the “end of the Jackson era.” And, in a move widely viewed as an attempt to displace Jackson as the preeminent African American leader, Al Sharpton, a Jackson protégé, announced he was running for the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

From a historical perspective, it cannot be denied that Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. held sway over the minds and hearts of African Americans in the post–civil rights era. During the 1980s and 1990s, at a time of declining civil rights gains, Jackson championed a spirit of protest that spoke to national and international human rights concerns, thus positioning himself as the most visible African American leader since Martin Luther King Jr. A 2000 poll of black political scientists asked them to list and rank the greatest black leaders of all time. Specifically they were asked to list in “rank order the five African Americans who, in your historical judgment, have had the greatest impact, for good or ill, on the well being and destinies of the African people in the United States” (Smith, 128). Of the ten greatest leaders, Jackson was the only living person on the list. He ranked number seven behind Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Thurgood Marshall, but ahead of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. As one respondent in the poll wrote, “History will be very kind to him” (Smith, 133).

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