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 there, 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 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. – 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, an organization created by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1963 to organize boycotts of businesses that failed to hire blacks or otherwise treated blacks unfairly. Despite King's 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.
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, Jackson had already hired a public relations agent to accompany him 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, SCLC chose Dr. Ralph Abernathy as King’s successor. In 1971 Jackson broke with 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.
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.
But 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 currently serving a life sentence in prison 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, and attempted to force Viacom to sell the UPN Network to Percy Sutton, in whose Inner City Broadcasting company Jackson held $1.2 million worth of shares; and 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.
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; and in 1983, alleging that President Reagan’s economic policies had severely impacted blacks, he made the first of his two runs for U.S. President. Despite the revelation by the Washington Post that Jackson (in a conversation with his campaign aides) had called Jews “Hymies” and New York City “Hymietown,” he received 3.5 million votes during the primaries, enough to guarantee respect within the Democratic Party and the chance to give a major speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention.
Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign enjoyed greater success; he 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. The issues coordinator for Jackson's campaign was Robert Borosage, who had spent the previous nine years as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies.
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 and Nigeria's Abdulsalami Abubakar. 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 gerrymandered voting districts (which were drawn on racial rather than geographic lines so as to virtually guarantee the electoral victories of minority candidates therein) 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 said. 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.”
On October 27, 1997, Jackson and Rainbow/PUSH joined the League of United Latin American Citizens, the NAACP, and the National Organization for Women in organizing a "civil rights" march across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. The stated purpose of the march was "to protest attempts to discriminate against immigrants and dismantle affirmative action." (California was the site of Proposition 209, which had banned racial preferences in the state's public sector, and Proposition 187, which was designed to cut illegal aliens off from taxpayer-funded programs and other benefits.) Invoking the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackson told the marchers: "He [King] dreamed ... that the walls of legal structure that separated races would be replaced by a bridge and that under one big tent we could be judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin. The dream is not to be color blind nor gender blind, but to be color and gender sensitive and caring and inclusive. ... We choose vision over blindness. We do not need to pray for cataracts over our eyes [but] for clarity."
In July 2004 Jackson characterized the Iraq War as one of America's many "wars of mass deception" and "a moral disgrace." He called the toppling of Saddam Hussein "an illegal and unjust act." He has spoken out against the war in conjunction with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, which is led by the longtime pro-Castro socialist Leslie Cagan. Jackson also has spoken out against the Patriot Act, depicting it as an assault on civil liberties.
In 2008 Jackson endorsed Democrat candidate Barack Obama for U.S. President.
In October 2008, Jackson, speaking in France at the first World Policy Forum, predicted that an Obama presidency would bring "fundamental changes" in U.S. foreign policy -- most notably by ending America's "decades of putting Israel's interests first," and by standing up to "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades." "Barack is determined to repair our relations with the world of Islam and Muslims," Jackson elaborated. "Thanks to his background and ecumenical approach, he knows how Muslims feel while remaining committed to his own faith."
When asked whether an Obama presidential victory would close the chapter of black grievances linked to the legacy of slavery, Jackson responded: "No, that chapter won't be closed. However, Obama's victory will be a huge step in the direction we have wanted America to take for decades."
Jackson was also asked whether Obama -- who is not a descendant of slaves -- was in fact representative of a typical American black. He replied: "You don't need to be a descendant of slaves to experience the oppression, the suffocating injustice and the ugly racism that exists in our society. Obama experienced the same environment as all American blacks did. It was nonsense to suggest that he was somehow not black enough to feel the pain."
Jackson expressed his belief that Obama, as President, would apologize for the "arrogance of the Bush administration," and would thereby help America to "heal wounds" it had inflicted on other nations.
Jackson hosts his own nationally syndicated, weekly radio program titled Keep Hope Alive, which airs in more than 40 markets nationwide. Among his most frequent guests are Al Sharpton and James Zogby (founder and President of the Arab American Institute).
A longtime admirer of former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Jackson once said: "Viva Fidel! Viva Che [Guevara]! Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I've ever met."
Jackson is also an enthusiastic backer of the community organization ACORN.