E-mail a friendRev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
original airdate January 19, 2004
Former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson Sr. maintains his involvement in the process, leading voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns. A longtime civil rights and political activist, he was an assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. during the '60s movement. Jackson is the founder of the nonprofit Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, has written two books and launched the Wall Street Project, to open access to capital for women and minorities. He's often been an unofficial U.S. envoy on diplomatic missions.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Tavis: I'm delighted to welcome to the program the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. As we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On this holiday tonight. He is the president and founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and remains part of the living legacy of Dr. King, and he joins us tonight from New York City. Reverend Jackson, nice to see you, sir.
Reverend Jesse Jackson: Good to see you again, Tavis, and congratulations on this show.
Tavis: Thank you very much. We celebrate today the 75th birthday of one Martin Luther King Jr., and you had the pleasure of spending his last birthday with him. What did he do on his last birthday?
Jackson: It was interesting. He had breakfast with this family around that morning. He came to church around 10:00 in his windbreaker jacket and dungarees, and he had convened the national staff and had some allies there--some Hispanic allies, some of Chavez's group from Southwest Texas; some Jewish allies, Al Lowenstein from New York; some whites from Appalachia, some leaders of labor--a kind of multiracial coalition. The agenda was fighting for a job or an income or health care for all Americans. The Poor People's Campaign. He spent preparing for an assault on public policy priorities. Around , Zamona Clayton came in and brought with her a cake and some punch. That's how we knew it was his birthday. It was just a short celebration, then a focus on how to end the war in Vietnam. He felt that shifting priorities from the War on Poverty at home to the war on Vietnam was devastating. So he spent his own birthday at home with family and basically church work and organizing a mass action for jobs, income at home, and really for peace in the world.
Tavis: What does that say to you then about how we ought to spend this day every year honoring his legacy?
Jackson: Taking into account exactly where our struggle is. For example, in truly political terms, we lost every major election in 2000 by the margin of either unregistered voters or those registered who didn't vote. We lost the election in South Carolina, oh, 2 years ago. 288,000 blacks did not vote, only 278,000 did vote, with 400,000 unregistered. Lost a Senate race in Georgia by 30,000 votes with 600,000 blacks unregistered. And so clearly the unregistered voter if inspired, if whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently. That should be an annual day to be a marker on where we are relative to where we're trying to go on issues of jobs and justice and peace.
Tavis: I want to spend some time tonight in this conversation getting your thoughts on the economic agenda that Dr. King talked about. This morning on my NPR radio show, I had the chance to talk to your friend Ambassador Andrew Young, another young lieutenant of Dr. King back in the day, and we talked about why it is that the focus on Dr. King is always on his social message, his social work, and everybody can quote at least one line of that "I have a dream" speech, but there's never really any focus, any spotlight put on what he had to say about economics.
Jackson: Well, the real point is the speech is really not about the dream. The dream was the way it climaxed. The focus was 100 years after the promise had been made for the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln, and then 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments with the promise of Reconstruction or reparations for damage done, the promise of a Freedmen's Bureau, the promise of equal protection under the law, the promises have been broken, and that's why we were there 100 years later living in legal apartheid. He said, 'I dream of a day when the government will honor its promise.' 'Lincoln, you're behind me. You made the promise. Congress, you're in front of me. You made a promise and yet--because of the broken promise we're here today where blacks cannot use a hotel, a motel, a public toilet. We don't have the right to vote. We don't have the same rights that a Nazi P.O.W. has. We've come here today on broken promises, and so I refuse to believe you cannot honor that promise. See, we got a promissory note, bounced check marked ‘insufficient funds.'" He was talking about the broken promise of equal protection, equal opportunity, equal access, and the economic security of all Americans.
Tavis: King, as you well know, never ran for public office in his entire life, and yet I think one can argue that he is the greatest American that we've ever produced, and he didn't do it inside the electoral arena. Tell me whether or not you think elective office these days is still the way to get things done, and I ask that obviously against the backdrop of this being an election year.
Jackson: Well, he couldn't run for office. Didn't have the right to vote. He had to secure the right to vote. I would make the contention, and our struggle evolves to make this a more complete union, a more perfect union, and the first stage was to end legal slavery. Frederick Douglass didn't run, either. He couldn't. The second stage was to end legal segregation, the third stage-- secure the right to vote, which we won in Selma. Today the focus is access to capital, industry, and technology. He broke the barrier on a Voting Rights Act and began the process of voter registration. So because of that singular effort in Selma, he set the stage for this day's activists, and they manifest themselves as--what? 40 congresspeople, mayors, legislators, political coalitions. All this is the aftershock of the struggle in Selma in 1965.
Tavis: King, by the time that he died, as you certainly know, had fallen off the list of the most admired, the most popular Americans. From the time he was in his late twenties up until a few years before he died, he was always in the top 10, most often in the top 5 of the most admired, most popular Americans. By the time he died, he'd fallen off that list. You well know that he'd fallen off that list in part because of his vocal opposition to the war in Vietnam. What would he be saying about this war in Iraq today?
Jackson: Well, government attacks, media attacks--I remember him saying in Cleveland one night, "When I said to blacks that my house had been bombed, don't shoot back at whites, you said I was a great guy. When I said in the face of raging hostility, be nonviolent, you said I was a great guy.' He said, 'I'm the same guy when I said blacks should not kill whites, whites should not kill blacks, neither blacks nor whites should kill people in Vietnam, so I'm the same guy." He said, "I will speak, and I will be heard." He said that, 'Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?' And politics asks the question, ‘Will it work?' But morality asks the question, ‘Is it right?'" He said, "I refuse to back away from--it may not be popular nor politic, but if it's right, I'm against this war." He would in effect today say about this war, we broke international law. About this war, the pretext was an error. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no Al Quaeda connection, no imminent threat. We unilaterally made a move and sought to marginalize the United Nations. We split our European allies, so we're there now in isolation in an awful predicament. We're there as an invader, a killer, and an occupier, and we've just created a mess in Iraq, and we're losing lives, money, and our national honor.
Tavis: Not that slavery and segregation were not evil in of themselves and not that they weren't ugly and divisive and every negative ugly pejorative that one could think of, but certainly today an individual like an Osama bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein does in fact change the way one could argue that one ought to think about the notion of Kingian nonviolence. I ask this question: How would one square King's philosophy of nonviolence and civil disobedience with a guy like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden?
Jackson: Well, in the case of Saddam Hussein, for example, we had him contained. The airspace was occupied by the U.S. and British forces. He was not likely to attack Iran nor Syria, not likely to hit Europe. And, so, we had him contained. We had the time and the strength to use internal forces and pressure and isolation to get him out, without killing up a lot of people and getting a lot of people killed. The result being a quagmire. And if he were an imminent threat, that would have been some motivation to move on him.
Dr. King had said at one time that he would join people like Bonhoeffer. He found Hitler to be absolute evil. While he believed in nonviolence, he would have drawn those theologians who sought to overthrow Hitler. So he would not have backed away from trying to find the forces in Afghanistan engaged in the terrorist act of 9/11. He was not naive. He believed in his heart and in his head that nonviolence as a way of conflict resolution was the right thing to do. But he had a great sense of justice and his sense of appropriate action.
Tavis: I had on this program last week, Reverend Jackson-- I'd like, if I can, to talk a minute about your politics. I know this is Dr. King's holiday, but, again, as you said earlier that your working with Dr. King set the stage for you to do the work that you've done and to build the kind of legacy that you've built. I had on this program last week Carol Moseley Braun, who of course is running for president. The only woman running on the Democratic side for the White House. I asked her last week, and I now want to ask you, since you were the subject of the question, what it says about black power in America today, 36 years after King's death, that we had a better chance, black folk that is, had a better chance of electing a black president when you ran in '84 and in '88? Many would argue we had a better shot then than we have of electing an African American in '04. Do you buy that, and what do you make of it, or is it just the folk we have running?
Jackson: Well, it's the conditions, it's the candidacy. When I ran in 1984, first there was a sense of a bottom-up movement for political change. People like Maxine Waters and Dick Hascher and Ron Dellums and ministers, it was a bottom-up movement. There was a certain surge. I remember when Harold was running for mayor and Kennedy came in support of Jane Byrne, and Mondale supported--we felt very insulted, very aggrieved by that, so that was a movement bottom-up. Ministers made the commitment to raise money, and people like Maxine to organize people. And so, we put together the--we had the infrastructure and the money and the message and the timing. It took all of that to make it happen. And anything short of that, you cannot run a competitive campaign. And there will be blacks in the future if they put together message, money. Infrastructure can build coalitions and can win. They can win the primaries. Our future in politics is bright.
Tavis: Let me come back to Dr. King again. It occurs to me, as we have this conversation, that there are all kinds of forces now. And one could argue, I guess legitimately, it's not even a matter of force as it is a matter of chronology, a matter of time that has passed by, where we are seeing more and more files--more FBI files, more CIA files--more books being written, the passing of time is starting, one could argue, to tarnish the image that we have of Dr. King. The more we learn about him, the more we know he was an imperfect man. Square for me his being imperfect in so many ways, and yet again perhaps the greatest American we've ever produced.
Jackson: An imperfect man with a perfect mission. And that is--that is history. Moses, you know, killed people in the name of fighting to free his people. And yet God blessed him to be a great leader, a great emancipator. King David set Uriah up to get him killed, to go to bed with Bathsheba. Yet said to be a man after God, so on high. And so, God has always used imperfect people to do his perfect will. What we do know is that Dr. King, as an instrument of God's peace, was the vehicle to bring about radical social change in our country, to raise human standards around the world. The success of our drive to end apartheid in southern America inspired people--people singing 'We Shall Overcome' in Gdansk, Poland. They sang it in Tiananmen Square in China. They sang it in Sheffield, South Africa. So this vehicle, this less-than-perfect vehicle, sought a perfect state of justice and peace and made his impact upon the world.
I've never seen great baseball players who didn't strike out sometimes. If you measure them, you measure them by their cumulative batting average, their strikeouts and their home runs, their hits and their errors. If we fall down, we get back up again. And champions get back up again because the ground is no place for a champion. And they know that through it all that nothing's too close to God. That's faith. That's not our profession, it's our faith in God and belief in what we're doing that gives us strength to carry on.
Jackson: Well, it's interesting that President Bush has 3 blacks in his cabinet, says his top Supreme Court justice hero is Clarence Thomas, and yet he does not support affirmative action. Sent the Supreme Court--sent lawyers to the Supreme Court to try to kill an access to opportunity. Equal Opportunity, for example. He came in and after--though he has blacks in the Cabinet, he's not met with the NAACP, our leadership conference, our Congressional Black Caucus, organized labor one time in 3 years. We have not known a closed-door policy to the White House and justice like this in half a century. And the fact is, we won the election. Our vote won the election. We lost by the margin of a stopped count, where a revolution took place.
Ordinarily, the president selects the Supreme Court. This time the Supreme Court selected the president. That's different. It's had a devastating impact upon everybody. We've gone from, what, a trillion-and-a-half-dollar surplus to $500 billion deficit. In that same time, we've had a net loss of jobs in every state. So now the need to build a coalition is not limited to, say, black, brown or white, but a coalition with shared interests that can fight for a fair trade policy, an even playing field for American workers, a fair tax policy, a commitment to educate all children as a matter of constitutional right, the fair treatment of our veterans, and a foreign policy that's not foreign to our values.
Tavis: You're still a Democrat, last I checked, and still campaigning for Democrats, last I checked, and yet in this campaign, although you have 9 choices, you've chosen not to endorse anyone. What does that mean? What-- Can I read something into that? That Jesse Jackson hasn't endorsed anybody?
Jackson: No. It's a matter of really playing a role I choose to play. I would urge all Democrats who are running, since I've done it before, keep one eye on competition and one on cooperation. The kind of bloodletting that's taking place now is not a good thing. The kind of 'mad Dean disease,' there's so much attack and bloodletting with him, you cannot get the message. I mean, are you for health care, jobs, justice? 'What is your plan?' 'My plan is anti-Dean.' Well, at some point, you got to keep your message going. Furthermore, this is the intrasquad game. The real game starts after the convention with the Republicans in New York. So you have to run a certain kind of steady gait, Tavis, one eye on cooperation and one on competition. I would hope that those who are running would not end up unwittingly doing sound bites for the opposition next fall.
Tavis: No one can turn a phrase like Jesse Jackson. I hear you. The 'mad Dean disease.' But let--
Jackson: Well, that's kind of the obsession, and there must be a competition for who has the best plan to put America back to work. Who has the best plan? South Carolina, for example: You've lost 75,000 jobs in the last 3 years, 65,000 manufacturing jobs. There's 150,000 children in poverty. In every state, more young blacks in jail than there are in college, and so there are issues of substance out there, and they should be running on those issues, not just running against who they perceive to be in the front.
Tavis: We happened to have on this program also last week another young man you might've heard of named Jesse Jackson Jr., who was a guest on this program. And I had a chance to ask him this question. Let me ask you the same question, now that you've mentioned this 'mad Dean disease'--and I hear the point you're making about what you are for and not just what you are against. But is it not a legitimate criticism to be leveled at any candidate, any white candidate, any candidate period, seeking the Democratic nomination--where black folk and brown folk are the most loyal constituencies--to have had a track record of hiring and of employing people of color at the higher and upper echelons of their administrations? Is that not legitimate?
Jackson: It's legitimate, but not only do they don't have any blacks in Cabinet in Vermont, didn't have any blacks in Vermont. I mean, Vermont got 62 blacks in the state capital, less than 1% black people. On the other hand, Bush got 3 blacks in his Cabinet, but they're not supporting affirmative action. He got 3 blacks in his Cabinet, and you can't get a meeting to talk with Attorney General John Ashcroft. And so that is a measurement, but where does one stand today on affirmative action? Where does one stand today on gender equality? Where does one stand today on a fair trade policy for working people? Where does one stand today on public education for all children, not charter schools for a few? So I think that it is a legitimate question, but it ought to have, I think, some context.
Tavis: Got a few more minutes with you, Reverend Jackson. Let me again follow up on this notion that you raise of criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft. There are many people in this country who believe that with Patriot Act I and Patriot Act II that civil liberties, that civil rights in this country are in retrograde, that we're sliding down a slippery slope. Are you one of those persons?
Jackson: Well, I'm convinced of that. You know, historically, because this is a "we the people" government. Even when Lyndon Johnson was considering promoting Thurgood Marshall in the courts, he convened black leadership and said, "I'm looking at making this move. Give me some sense of consensus, some sense of discussion." So in some sense, Thurgood came kind of out of the body of leadership, of a certain respect for leadership.
In this administration, because there is no dialogue, we can share a concern about security, we can share a concern against terrorism, we can share a concern about the health of the nation's justice system, but a closed-door policy--so much for compassionate conservatism when, in fact... And I find it to be of course just painful to see Mr. Bush--one day he'll put 3 blacks in Cabinet and against affirmative action. Next day he'll go to St. Louis and take a picture with 3 young black girls as the backdrop and then say "leave no child behind" while public schools have been cut. They'll go and do a thing with veterans and say, "I'm with the veterans"--he had a chance to be one and chose not to be one--and then he'll cut their health-care bill. And so it is this simply manipulation of images--we need to have access to the White House. We deserve it. We've earned it, to help share in the bountifulness and the options of our nation.
Tavis: You can criticize Bush and Dr. Rice and Secretary Powell and Attorney General Ashcroft and Mr. Rumsfeld all you want, Reverend Jackson, but there are some who argue that you cannot beat George W. Bush, that Dean, of all people, is the wrong guy. He's too far to the left. He's too close to Jesse Jackson to beat George W. Bush.
Jackson: Well, uh, we beat George Bush before, for starters. Number 2, if the 9 who are running turn to each other and not on each other--we have the numbers, we have the need. This time, Bush is gonna have to run on his record. If you go to South Carolina or New York or California and ask, "Are you better off?" The answer has to be no. "Is there a net loss of jobs?" Yes. The top 1% get a huge tax cut. Those at the bottom get a small tax cut, a job cut, a benefit cut, a tuition hike. "Are you better off?" A recovery without jobs, that's a swimming pool without water. Don't dive in a swimming pool without water. So we are less safe because of this misadventure into Iraq. We've gone from surplus to deficit. We have fewer jobs. He'll have to run at that point on his record and not on manipulating media images. I think he's vulnerable.
Tavis: Got a minute and half to go here, Reverend Jackson. Let me ask you whether any candidate--I don't care who it is--whether any candidate on the Democratic ticket, given that we now live in the most multicultural, multiracial, and multi-ethnic America ever-- women coming into their own finally in this country, although sexism is still alive and well, as is racism--should any candidate at the top of the ticket be seriously considered if they do not have on their short list women and people of color as their running mates? Should they even be considered as the nominee?
Jackson: They should be on their short list. I mean, Mondale put on his ticket Geraldine Ferraro. It ought to be a part of the short list. It might not be the one that makes the cut necessarily. There's regional balance, there's gender balance, there's ethnic balance, of course, because there's qualified blacks to be both president--and there's Hispanics to be president--and on the ticket. There's no position we cannot hold. So in an election there's nothing we should not be considered for, to answer that question.
Tavis: Reverend Jesse Jackson, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. Happy King Day to you. Thank you for sharing your memories of your friend, the late great Dr. King.
Jackson: He would be delighted that you have this show. This is a good thing for all of Americans.
Tavis: Thank you, Reverend Jackson.
Jackson: Thank you.
Tavis: My pleasure. That's our show for tonight. Join me tomorrow on my radio show on NPR, National Public Radio, and we'll see you back here next time on PBS. Good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching, and keep the faith.
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