It’s hard to explain to younger people what a force Jesse Jackson, who died last Tuesday at 84, once was in American politics. He rose to national prominence as part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s entourage, and was present at King’s assassination. For days after that 1968 killing, young Jackson sported the turtleneck he wore that night, stained with King’s blood. For years, Jackson associates and political enemies, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, accused Jackson of intentionally smearing the slain civil rights leader’s blood on his garment, in a self-anointing as King’s successor. Jackson repeatedly denied the charge.
He ran for the presidency twice in the 1980s, and established himself as a Democratic Party power broker in the 1990s and early 2000s. But his most durable legacy is as an avatar of racial identity politics, which, with brilliant cunning, he brought from the streets to corporate boardrooms and university administrations. We are still dealing with this illiberal cancer today, which has broken containment on the left, and has now been embraced by young white activists of the right.
Much has been said in the days since his death about Jackson’s role in the post-King civil rights movement, particularly his trailblazing campaigns for the White House. Though one is reluctant to speak ill of the dead so soon after their passing, the Chicago operator’s corrupt racializing of American politics, for the profit of himself and his allies, must not go unnoticed. There is a straight line from the kind of lucrative racial activism Jackson pioneered to the same profiteering practiced at a far grander scale by the founders of Black Lives Matter.
