REV. JESSE JACKSON DEAD AT 84:
A protégé of Martin Luther King, lifelong champion of civil rights and a mesmerising public speaker, Jackson had himself run for president in 1984 and 1988 and gone far further than anyone at that time believed a black man could. He had shown that an African-American politician could win white votes and aspire to the presidency.
He had “won a solid place in history”, The New York Times declared. “For the first time in American history, a black made a serious bid for the White House and was taken seriously by the electorate.” A Washington Post columnist wrote that he had “advanced the prospects of black politicians by a good 25 years. He may never be president of the United States, but some black American will. And whoever it is will owe a tremendous debt to Jackson.”
Jackson said he wept in that Chicago park because he was thinking of “all the martyrs and murdered whose blood made that night possible”, and because he knew “people in the villages of Kenya and Haiti, and mansions and palaces of Europe and China, were all watching this young Africa-American male assume the leadership to take our nation out of the pit to a higher place”.
But he would have been inhuman not to have felt a little envious of his fellow Chicagoan that night. He must have reflected on what might have been. And if he was honest with himself he would have acknowledged that Obama — calm, measured and reassuring — was the better candidate.
Jackson’s strengths were also his weaknesses. He was driven, ambitious, a powerful orator and brilliant at garnering publicity, but he was also impulsive, attention-grabbing, and endlessly controversial. He met Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and the like and famously once referring to Jews as “hymies” and New York as “hymietown”. His relentless fight against injustice, poverty and discrimination carried him far, and did much to highlight the plight of black, poor and marginalised Americans, but he was too divisive to go all the way.
At PJ Media, Rick Moran asks: Race Hustler or Civil Rights Icon? Jesse Jackson Dead at 84.
He was a con artist and a “race pimp.” He was an opportunist, a race hustler, and a corporate shakedown expert who enriched himself by using funds earmarked for “the cause” for his own personal gain. He was an admirer of notorious racist and virulent antisemite Louis Farrakhan.
Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, was all of that. He was also one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, a groundbreaking political figure, one of the best political strategists in American history, and a towering figure in local Chicago Democratic politics.
You can’t look at Jesse Jackson as a one-dimensional stick figure. Like all humans, especially those who have left their mark on history, he was a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can’t simplify his sins or his enormous contributions to American politics. He was a force whose impact will be felt for generations.
There is no doubting Jesse Jackson’s impact on American history. He was the first “serious” black candidate for president in that he energized the base of the Democratic Party in a multi-racial coalition that forced the party to swing hard left. His grassroots coalition, known as “Operation Push,” was the most dynamic organization in the U.S. until a scandal brought it down.
He was given the opportunity to speak in prime time in the 1984 and 1988 conventions despite finishing far behind Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in the nomination race. Both speeches are considered among the finest convention speeches in American history.
At NRO, Dan McLaughlin adds: On the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Charity toward the departed suggests leaving off further discussion of Jackson’s public career here, but not without noting the man’s abundant gifts as a public speaker in his prime. As P. J. O’Rourke described Jackson’s convention speech in 1988: “I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram — to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.”
Presumably, O’Rourke was referring to an event from the previous year, when Jackson wanted everyone to be excluded from Western culture: “On January 15, 1987, Jesse Jackson and around 500 protesters marched down Palm Drive, Stanford University’s grand main entrance, chanting ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.’”
