The text for today`s sermon, said the preacher, will be the Book of Luke, Chapter 16, Verses 19 through 31, a passage with which he had been wrestling for about a month.
It is a passage about wealth and poverty, virtue and transgression and their rewards, containing a simple message that any good preacher could use to teach his congregation a short, valuable lesson.
But there was nothing simple here, nor anything short, either. This preacher went on for 45 minutes. Before he was done he had talked about sin and redemption, yes, and about wealth and poverty. But he had also dealt with the Persian Gulf and Thomas Jefferson, with Ronald Reagan and Central America, with ”a great sense of uneasiness in our nation,” and with himself, perhaps more than anything with himself.
”I remember when I had no family,” he told the congregation. This was about 20 minutes into the sermon and every eye was on him, every mind attuned to him. By now he was rocking from left to right with each rhythmic sentence, standing often on the balls of his feet as a boxer would, his forehead glistening. ”When I was born there was no name for me. I had no daddy to claim me. A lot of neighbors laughed at me. My mamma scorned and put out of church. I couldn`t get Daddy`s name. Grandmother gave me a name to hold me over.”
He paused then. He looked serious and the church was silent. Then he stood straight up at the podium, and he smiled very brightly and he said,
”But I`m makin` it pretty good.”
Even in a black Baptist church in Mobile, this was no ordinary sermon. It was a combination of a moral homily, a political speech, a personal psychological catharsis, an inspirational monologue and an old-fashioned jeremiad.
But then, this was no ordinary preacher. This was Jesse Louis Jackson, ordained Baptist minister, radical activist, teacher, civil rights crusader, television personality, orator and, not incidentally, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
And Jesse Jackson is many things, so many that perhaps the least interesting is that he is the first black person to make a serious (if, ultimately, futile) run for the presidential nomination of a major party. He can be a gloomy brooder, but he can be funny and jolly. He is now brusque, now gracious. He is a social philosopher who will provide an original and perhaps profound insight and follow it immediately with a piece of fatuous claptrap. He is an intense and, it clearly seems, sincere moralist, but a man who appreciates roguery, even a man who sometimes engages in roguery and, like a true rogue, is charming about it. He is a person of impressive intelligence-no, make that prodigious intelligence-who sometimes does and says the dumbest things.
He is a 45-year-old man who can eloquently tell high school students to work hard, to eschew drugs and gangs, but he has himself made common cause
with gang leaders and drug runners where they have had power. He is a champion of the poor who lives in near opulence and who has never been all that clear about where his money comes from, either his personal income, some of his political contributions or the revenues for his various social service organizations. He talks of serving others, and there is little doubt that he means it. But he is also self-absorbed to a degree rare even in a politician. ”Jesse is always thinking,” said someone who has known him for a long time, ”usually about himself.”
”I have a greater responsibility” than other politicians, he said once. ”It`s almost like I have to set the climate. I`m expected to raise the comfort level of meatpackers, to go to the Rio Grande Valley and do the same thing with farm workers, and really nobody else is expected to deliver that. Life`s put great demands on me and I accept them. I have to earn my wings every day.”
And then there is the one thing he is not. He is not dull. Whatever his flaws, and they are manifest, whatever his political shortcomings, however much his opinions may enrage and embitter some people, Jackson can make one claim no one else in American politics can really make, not even Ronald Reagan or Edward Kennedy. He will never bore you.
It is not only that he is such an instinctive and accomplished orator. It is not only that some of his opinions are outside the mainstream or that he expresses them so bluntly and so vividly. It is that he himself is so blunt and so vivid. In an age when so many candidates seem cut from the same pattern, so finely coiffed, so prudent in speech and manner, Jackson stands out.
Oh, he`s finely dressed enough. One reason that congregation laughed when he said ”I`m doin` all right” is that they knew none of them could afford that tailored tan suit. When Jackson showed up to hand out food to poor people in Manchester, N.H., a few years ago, he appeared wearing a sweater that probably cost enough to feed a family of five for a week. Jackson makes headlines by occasionally spending the night with a poor family. For the most part, though, no matter who is paying the bill, he stays in very nice hotels. But Jackson is cut from no pattern but his own. Perhaps one reason he evokes such passion, one reason so few are neutral about him, is that for all his political shrewdness and occasional duplicity, his basic character is less concealed than those of most other politicians. After all, almost everyone who runs for president is self-absorbed. Most of them just hide it better. Jackson doesn`t even try.
Take the simple political example of his claims that by inspiring thousands of blacks to register and vote he deserves the credit for the Democratic victories in the U.S. Senate last year and that by running in 1984 he headed off the formation of a third party.
The first claim is arguable. All those black voters did help Democratic candidates in the South but so did all the moderate white voters the Democratic candidates were able to win. The third party claim is laughable. Nobody was planning any such thing. Jackson`s recollection that Kennedy Democrats and John Anderson Republicans were talking about an independent party is nowhere confirmable.
But all politicians exaggerate their own importance. Gov. Michael Dukakis claims more credit than he is due for the Massachusetts economy, Rep. Richard Gephardt claims his trade bill is tougher than it is, and Rep. Jack Kemp claims the tax cuts he sponsored have cured all economic ills. Why are these exaggerations considered ”just politics” while Jackson`s are seized on as examples of foolishness or mendacity?
Maybe the answer is that more than most politicians, Jackson really engages the intellect. His basic appeal is more emotional than cerebral, based less on what he says than on the picturesque (and sometimes outrageous) way he says it. But what he says is often striking. Most presidential candidates propose piecemeal reforms, tinkerings, incremental improvements. Jackson wants some basic changes.
Not that he is, by the standard definition, a radical. Though he often uses the rhetoric of the hard-line Left and gladly accepts its support, Jackson is patriotic, concerned about military strength, wary of the Soviet Union and committed to a free-enterprise economic system, to individual responsibility and initiative and to conventional personal values. But within the confines of that foundation, Jackson wants some major departures, and he bases those proposals on a comprehensive analysis of American society that is carefully considered, internally consistent and daring. Gary Hart may have been the candidate who spoke in 1984 of ”new ideas,” but as much as any recent presidential contender, Jackson is basing his campaign on a vision of American society and on a plan to improve it.
Because he sets out his vision so bluntly, because he sprinkles his speeches and writings with statistics and with broad conclusions on which he bases still more conclusions, Jackson invites criticism when those statistics turn out to be wrong, as they often do, or when his sweeping conclusions are questionable.
Part of his vision is a rejection of the ”melting pot.” In almost every speech he makes, Jackson says: ”America is not like a blanket, one piece of unbroken cloth-the same color, the same texture, the same size. It is more like a quilt-many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.”
As Jackson sees it, social justice and political victory for the Democrats (and for him) will stem from recognizing that the country is divided into these subgroups and from treating each of them fairly, with an emphasis on what he called his special constituency-”the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.”
All candidates appeal to voters along ethnic, economic and ideological lines; all argue that their economic policies will help the poor. But there is a substantive difference between Jackson`s social view and that of other politicians. Where the others deal with the different groups as part of an interwoven fabric-a mosaic if not a blanket-he institutionalizes the distinctions, planning to deal with the various groups separately, granting legitimacy to each.
It is by dealing with them separately, Jackson thinks, that the country can be properly governed, and it is by appealing to them in a coalition that he can get elected. In addition to racial minorities, he has said, ”we`ll pull together SANE and Freeze, the Non-Intervention in Central America and Free South Africa peace activists and the Asians fighting Asian-bashing” and other groups to win the election.
This is the key to his plan for winning the nomination. His hope is that he will get the support of just enough ”movement” activists and disgruntled workers and farmers to add to his base among blacks to bring him to the Democratic convention with more delegates than any other candidate.
As a political strategy this is highly questionable. All the racial minorities and all the liberal activists added together do not come close to being a majority of the electorate, even of the Democratic primary electorate. But at least Jackson`s political strategy is consistent with his social vision.
”I`m bicultural,” Jackson has said. ”If you live on one side of town and work on the other side of town, you have to adjust to the leadership of the dominant group. But the paradox is that worldwide the minority is the majority.”
This feeling of kinship with the worldwide majority, especially those once ”disinherited and disrespected,” affects Jackson`s foreign policy views. It is what inspired him to go to Cuba and shout ”Long live Che Guevera” (who was long dead), linking the leftist revolutionary with Martin Luther King. Had a white politician done that, he might never have gotten a black vote again. Had another black politician done it, he might have been seriously damaged. But Jackson, who never concedes defeat, is nothing if not resilient.
This attitude of Jackson`s is also one reason he has been sympathetic to the plight of Arabs, both in the Middle East and in America. ”They, too, know the pain and hurt of racial and religious rejection,” Jackson has said of Arab-Americans, many of whom support him. And since his celebrated embrace of Yasser Arafat in 1979, he has been viewed skeptically by supporters of Israel, many of whom choose to forget that after that embrace, he warned the PLO leader to recognize Israel`s right to exist and to abandon terrorism.
But there may be another reason for Jackson`s sympathy to the Arab cause. Though he has always denied it vigorously, many people believe he has a touch of mild anti-Semitism in him. It is not just the Arafat hug or the pro-Arab statements, not even just his impolitic reference to Jews as ”Hymie” and New York as ”Hymietown” in January of 1984. Long before that Jackson had been doing to Jews what so many people do to other races or religions-holding the group responsible for the transgressions, real or imagined, of one of its members.
Once he noted that Freeman Gosden, one of the originators of the old
”Amos `n` Andy” radio program, was Jewish, somehow linking his ethnic heritage with the racial condescension of the show. Once he noted that when Richard Nixon was trying to cut back poverty programs, his two chief aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, were Jewish. They aren`t, as though that matters. Hyman Bookbinder, the former executive director of the American Jewish Committee, recalled in a published interview that if the owner of substandard low-income housing was Jewish, to Jackson he was not merely a slumlord but a ”Jewish slumlord.”
On the other hand, Jackson has often made common cause with Jewish leaders. He worked with the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most prominent Jewish theologians of the century. In 1974 he had been one of the first to protest after Gen. George Brown, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, said that ”Jews own the banks and newspapers in this country.”
Like everyone else, Jackson is a product of his past, and as with many blacks, part of that past was unfair treatment by merchants and landlords, many of whom happened to be Jewish. Almost 20 years ago, while being interviewed in Chicago, Jackson looked out his office window and said, ”See the businesses up and down 47th Street? White. All they want out of us is money.” Almost all those businesses then were owned by Jews, some of whom gouged their customers. It was inevitable that inner-city blacks reacted to the background, as well as the character, of those merchants. The ill-fated
”Hymie” remark, Jackson later explained, stemmed from Chicago black slang in which ”Hymie” was the nickname for the cut-rate Jewish haberdasher.
Despite his denials, Jackson seems to recognize his shortcomings here, and he has worked hard since the 1984 campaign to change both his image among Jewish voters and his own attitudes. ”I am not a perfect servant,” he said to the 1984 Democratic convention. ”I am a public servant, doing my best against the odds. As I grow and develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.”
In the last two years, Jackson has forged a close alliance with Ann F. Lewis, a highly regarded liberal Democratic political strategist who has not hesitated to discuss Jewish sensitivities with him. ”I told him at the outset that I was born Ann Frank and that this means something to me,” said Lewis, whose brother is Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and who thinks that her words
(and, perhaps, her chicken soup) have had an impact. ”He`s really a very open person,” she said. ”He`s not a closed book.”
Nor is this the only way Jackson has changed since 1984. Then he was an angry man, an outsider. He campaigned as much against his own party as against the Republicans, squandering valuable time in a childish attack on the Democratic delegate-selection rules. He called his political movement ”the Rainbow Coalition,” but as noted by Michael Harrington, the socialist writer who was a sympathetic observer, ”it was a monochromatic rainbow.” Despite the presence of a few Hispanics, American-Indians and white radicals in his entourage, when Jackson exclaimed at the end of every rally, ”Our time has come,” it was quite clear that he was talking only about blacks.
This time his approach and, he hopes, his support are broader. He has marched with striking meatpackers and television technicians, joined peace demonstrations, spoken to feminist groups and shown support for troubled farmers. This time he is running as a loyal Democrat with friends in the party establishment.
Not everyone is convinced that this change is either permanent or sincere. ”Jesse will act like a grown-up as long as things are going well for him,” said a prominent black politician who did not want to be identified.
”As soon as things start going bad, look out.”
For now, though, most Democratic leaders are trying hard to stay friendly with Jackson, and some of the friendliest are white Southerners. This should not be a surprise. Jackson is usually thought of as the black candidate, but he is also a Southerner, proud of it and conscious of it, even though he has long made his home in Chicago.
”A lot of people don`t understand the South,” he said. ”The religious character of the South, the military character of the South.” One reason Southerners eventually accepted civil rights, he said, is that both the churches and the commander in chief (President Lyndon Johnson) insisted on it. ”The flag and the Bible,” Jackson said. ”There`s so much romance in the South, even with the black-white thing. It was an equation. There was an imbalance in the equation, but it always added up to 10.”
In a sense, one of racism`s worst (and most foolish) impacts on Jackson was that it stifled his inherent desire to be a good ol` boy. His first hero was not a black politician but a white basketball player, Frank Selvy of the University of South Carolina, the school where Jackson wanted to play football but a school that didn`t recruit black athletes in the late 1950s when Jackson finished high school.
”I`ve always loved country music,” Jackson said not long ago, riding in a car in the South. ”It`s part of my culture. I would listen to Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. I remember when Red Foley had a heart attack and they sang `Peace in the Valley` on the Opry.” He paused for a moment. ”You know, in the South we almost had to learn not to like each other.” One of the things he is happiest about is the support of folk-country singer Kris Kristofferson, who has written a song called ”Call him Brother Jesse Jackson.”
When it comes time to relax, though, Brother Jesse Jackson prefers something like the Crusaders, a black jazz fusion band. Jackson may be many other things in addition to a black man, but just as it is impossible to appreciate his appeal without seeing him before a black audience, it is impossible to understand him without remembering that he is a black man who grew up in the South in the era of legal segregation and constant
psychological repression.
”I`m a Third World person,” Jackson said. ”I grew up in an occupied zone.” Such rhetoric may sound extreme today, but this is one presidential candidate who knew better than to try to register to vote until he moved north, who was not allowed to go to the country music shows at Textile Hall in Greenville as a young man, who was rebuffed because of his skin color by almost every institution of his society-the government, the schools, the Democratic Party, even the churches.
The bitterness that sometimes shows through Jackson`s humor, the self-pity that cannot always be hidden by his exuberance, the ”us against them”
mentality, the moralistic crusading attitude toward all injustices, real or imagined-all this can be explained by the simple reality of growing up as a talented, energetic young man whose very manhood was denied by the world around him.
”Jackson was my third name,” he said in that sermon, and it is not necessary to be a trained psychologist to see how his early personal life-the humiliated young mother, the uncertainty of his fatherhood (Jackson knew both his biological father and Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother when Jesse was 9) could only enhance the bitterness as well as the determination of someone like Jackson.
All this is the kind of background that has beaten many people, driving them to drink or into crime or despair. Only the strong can overcome it. Jackson had some help to add to his strength. Like others who have survived that kind of upbringing, he had the church, a stable family life after his mother`s marriage, his athletic skills to give him hope for the future and his intelligence to tell him to use that hope.
Besides, whatever else he is, Jesse Jackson is one very strong man. He`s makin` it pretty good. He is, as he would put it, somebody.
