It is becoming difficult to remember a time when Jackson was not a spice in the bubbling stew of American politics. He was bent over the body of Martin Luther King Jr. on the motel balcony in Memphis in 1968. In the 1970s came the whirling dervish of American protest. Then in January 1984, when he brokered the release of a Naval aviator who had been shot down over Lebanon and held by Syria, he acquired a hold on the medias attention and black America’s imagination: “Run, Jesse, run!”
He won a lot of votes, and prominent roles at the Democrats’ 1984 and 1988 conventions. Too prominent, said some Democrats as they sifted the rubble after the Mondale and Dukakis defeats. In 1992 Bill Clinton kept his distance from Jackson. In 1996 Clinton could wind up wishing that Jackson were held by Syria. Today Jackson speaks acidly about “the Newts and Clintons” as though these are two species of political creatures that are difficult to distinguish and ought to be endangered. That tells you the mood he is in.
But on a recent day he was in no mood to talk about presidential politics until he had talked at Length about what he seemed to consider more pressing matters. He is working to organize 100 ministers in each of America’s 50 largest cities to commit inner city parents to take their children to school on opening day, meet their teachers and exchange home phone numbers, turn the tv off three hours a night, and talk to the teacher about grades after the first nine weeks. Children who do well in the first nine weeks, says Jackson, are apt to stay on. If every minister energizes 200 parents, that means 20,000 parents in each city, a million in the 50 cities. He is also trying to weave what he calls a “cable of relationships” around Juvenile offenders by getting 100 churches in each of the 50 cities to take responsibility for reclaiming 20 youths each , meeting with judges and becoming charged with supervision of offenders. One hundred churches times 20 youths times 50 cities can mean 100,000 wayward kids redeemed.
These ideas represent Jackson at his most admirable, in a role for which he is suited-the role of an Urban John Wesley, saving society from the bottom up, one soul at a time. But after he has deferred political talk long enough to talk about the jails he has been visiting-jails full of school dropouts who can’t read maps well enough to drive a cab, jails from which such young men emerge “sicker and slicker”-then and only then is he ready to talk about 1876 and 1896 and 1996, and the possibility that “we may have to open up the process and get another line on the ballot.”
In the election of 1876 the Democrat, New York Gov. Samuel Tilden, won about 250,000 more popular votes than the Republican, Ohio Gov. Rutherford Hayes, but the electoral votes in some Southern states were disputed. The electoral commission that declared Hayes the winner was supported by Southern Democrats in exchange for, among other things, Republican promises to withdraw federal troops from the South, thereby beginning the end of Reconstruction. In 1896 the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, affirmed the constitutionality of segregation under the rubric of “separate but equal” accommodations for the races. Today, because of the collapse of liberalism’s redoubt in congress, and especially in light of President Clinton’s wary and tepid defense of affirmative action, Jackson says we are seeing the dismantling of what he calls the Second Reconstruction, a withdrawal of legal protections and government assistance comparable to the withdrawal of the military and legal protections of blacks between 1876 and 1896.
Now, there is preposterous hyperbole in the proposition that African-Americans are as vulnerable in America today as they were in the South in the late 19th century. That proposition libels, evenhandedly, both America and African-Americans. The former is not vicious and the latter are not weak. And Jackson’s idea that government provision of services and protections is so vital to the future of African-Americans is less sensible than the work he is doing, apart from government, in what can be called his Wesleyan mode. However, he seems to mean what he says about the supreme importance of next year’s election, so hear what Frank Watkins, the Rainbow Coalition’s political director, says about the capabilities of the half a million dollars’ worth of computerized communications technology that has been crammed into the Coalition’s headquarters.
Watkins has the names and addresses of about 470,000 Jackson sympathizers, and with software purchased from the Census Bureau he can, for example, do blanket mailings to every zip code where at least 90 percent of the residents are African-Americans. Or he can target auto workers or lawyers or innumerable other categories of voters. Watkins does not know what Jackson will do in 1996; Jackson probably does not know. But Watkins says his job is to be ready for a campaign. And Jackson, by interpreting 1996 as the return of 1876 and 1896, makes his credibility hostage to his willingness to run against “the Newts and Clintons.” And when he speaks of getting “another line on the ballot,” he seems to be threatening to be not just a distraction to be disposed of during the primary season, but a November presence draining votes from the Democratic Party’s base. just what Clinton needs: another problem he can’t solve without creating problems.
