UNITED STATES: Can Jesse Jackson Take on Martin Luther King’s Job?

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 6 1997 (IPS) - Supporters of former presidential candidate, the Rev Jesse Jackson, are hoping that the prominent black activist can fill the shoes of the most famous U.S. civil rights leader, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.

Jackson, they say, is the best choice to become the fourth president in the history of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the black civil-rights organisation which King led until his death in 1968.

“I cannot think of a better and more able person to lead the organisation than the Rev Jesse Jackson,” wrote Tyrone Brooks, a Georgia state representative who had been regarded as one of the contenders for the job, in a letter this week to the committee which is searching for candidates for the SCLC presidency.

“Jesse is a product and was a child of the (civil rights) movement, getting his training and direction in life from the SCLC,” Brooks wrote. “There is no doubt in my mind that Jesse will maintain an activist-oriented movement and work to keep the dream alive.”

As Brooks told IPS, the selection could revitalise the SCLC, which has decreased in visibility since its heyday under King, by merging the church-based civil rights group with Jackson’s progressive, multi-ethnic National Rainbow Coalition.

Leaders of the Rainbow Coalition, which helped boost Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 bids to become the first black Democratic candidate for U.S. president, also are encouraged by the possibility that their leader could take on King’s mantle and former organisation.

“I believe that a consolidation of the civil rights community would be an ideal sort of situation, and that Jesse Jackson would be the ideal person to head that conglomeration,” says Joe Beasley, director of the Rainbow Coalition’s southern operations.

“It really would energise the civil rights community,” Beasley argues. Jackson, he says, not only shares the legacy of the civil rights movement — he was one of first people at King’s side when the SCLC leader was shot by an assassin on Apr 4, 1968 — but also possesses organisational strength and high visibility on his own.

But whether Jackson, long at odds with the older and more conservative SCLC leadership, will now be allowed to take the job most associated with King, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, remains in doubt. The search committee entrusted to find a successor to the current SCLC president, the Rev Joseph Lowery, has been looking for candidates for almost a year without making official contact with Jackson.

Sources knowledgeable about the SCLC search say that the committee has focused more on people already within the organisation, as well as on the children of King and the second SCLC president, the Rev Ralph Abernathy.

Ever since Jackson rose to prominence, rumours have spread that the “old guard” at the SCLC resented him for his brash image and political tactics. Brooks concedes that, in the past, Jackson’s leadership of economically based “empowerment organisations”, like the Chicago-based Operation Push, put him at odds with the older generation of black leaders.

“That old history is something from a bygone era,” he adds. “Most of the leaders and most of the (SCLC) staff have put that behind us.”

Yet some leaders are not willing to set aside old rivalries to make room for Jackson. That was apparent in 1993, when several black leaders objected to a campaign to have the reverend replace Benjamin Hooks as the head of the nation’s most prominent mainstream civil-rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Jackson withdrew his name in favour of the Rev Benjamin Chavis.

Both Brooks and Beasley contend that Jackson would be willing to consider an offer from the SCLC to head the organisation — as long as the offer is a serious one.

Both the SCLC and Jackson have faced declining fortunes in recent years, a factor which could tempt them into an alliance. Since the 1980-88 presidency of Ronald Reagan and a concomitant assault on affirmative action and welfare, most civil-rights groups have been on the defensive; both the NAACP and SCLC have faced decreasing membership and lower visibility.

Jackson has also suffered in recent years, as the Democratic Party has tried, under President Bill Clinton, to move rightward and distance itself from Jackson’s coalition of ethnic and racial minorities, organised labour and poor and urban voters.

The marginalisation of Jackson was most clear this week, when the reverend wrote a three-page letter to Clinton attacking the “shameful disrepair” of U.S. civil-rights policy and noting that the White House had refused requests from Jackson for a meeting with Clinton for several months. Jackson also argued in his letter that Clinton’s closest aides are nearly all white and have done little to advance social justice.

Jackson met with Clinton on Wednesday, but the president only announced a plan to appoint a small advisory board, of perhaps seven people, to investigate U.S. race relations.

If Jackson were to occupy King’s position in the SCLC, he could have the prestige to avoid rebuffs from the White House. But some of his former advisors doubt that he is interested in the SCLC post, in any case.

“Jackson’s already got an independent base, with the Rainbow Coalition and Operation Push, and has national visibility,” says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal Washington think tank, and an advisor to Jackson during his presidential campaigns. “The SCLC is basically a spent force.”

Jackson could raise the SCLC’s prestige anew if he were to devote all his time to it, Borosage argues, but he performs too many other tasks for it to be likely that he would invest much effort in SCLC work.

Still, King’s mantle may be hard to resist. Brooks is confident that, if the SCLC asks the Rainbow Coalition leader to take the post, Jackson would agree. The question, he adds, is whether they will do so before the SCLC holds its next convention in Atlanta in July, when the members are expected to induct the next president.