Thinking about Jesse Jackson
See that girl shake her thing, We can’t all be Dr. King.
These lyrics were composed by an aging civil rights movement figure in response to the dismay some of his colleagues expressed about the frivolous pursuits of young blacks. “We didn’t march in Selma so black girls could have cornrows and black boys could listen to obscene rap lyrics,” went the typical lament.
In fact, whether they knew it or not, this was part of what the civil rights protesters did march for. Freedom includes freedom to do frivolous and even dumb things (as long as they are lawful).
This, I think, was the point of the ditty quoted above. It came to my mind when I heard that Jesse Jackson died. Jackson didn’t “shake his thing.” But he was a performer/showman/politician, not a profound, high-minded moral leader like King. And Jackson at times did shake down corporate America.
The other thing that came to mind was a story I read decades ago about Jackson's days as a teenager in Columbia, South Carolina. Jackson was an outstanding baseball player and, in fact, was offered a professional contract.
Jackson says he turned the offer down because it was for a much smaller amount than was paid to the late Dick Dietz, the best young white player in South Carolina at the time. Jackson considered himself a better player than Dietz, who went on to have a successful major league career which included a home run in the 1970 all-star game.
The other thing that stood out in the portrait of the civil rights leader as a young man was Jackson’s statement that when working in the kitchen of the local all-white country club, he would spit into the food being prepared for members.
Had I been a black kid raised in South Carolina during the oppressive 1950s, I might well have been bitter enough to have done the same thing. But this is not the behavior one would hope for in a future leader of a great moral movement. It’s almost certainly not something Martin Luther King Jr. ever did.
But like the song says, we can’t all be Dr. King.
RIP
RIP ? i'm not so sure about that. He was a bigot, a racist and an anti-Semite.
He was a fun house mirror version of King. King was a moral visionary and a great American who wanted the Unitef States to live up to its ideals. Jackson was a hard leftist who was an early progenitor of the politics of division and resentment and who helped turn a significant part of urban black America anti-semitic. King was philo Semitic and Zionist. Jackson, to put it mildly, was not.