Three years ago, Jesse Jackson resigned from his lofty self-anointed position as head of “Rainbow Push”. For 50 years, Jackson headed Rainbow Push, until old age and a stroke took him away from his money-printing machine. He did well for himself and his family, collecting gobs of money by hustling money out of billion-dollar cap corporations.
Jackson race-hustled most, if not all, of his adult life. In his youth, he was part of the MLK entourage. More of a hanger-on. But if you listened to Jackson after King’s assassination, you’d mistake him for King’s closest confidante. King did have a close circle of men he trusted and listened to. Jackson was not part of that inner group. Hosea Williams was.
On the day King was killed, Williams rushed to King’s side after he was shot. The bullet had hit King on the right cheek under his right eye. The bullet passed through his brain and exited at the base of his spinal cord. King didn’t die immediately – but he was effectively brain-dead. King had no ability to speak to anyone. Three people were with King as he lay on the hotel balcony. Hosea Williams was there. Jackson was not.
In the next few hours and days that followed, Jackson seized on what he knew would be his path to “The Mountaintop”. Within a few hours, Jackson claimed to anyone who would listen that he had “held King’s head” when life slipped from his body. Although King was unable to speak, Jackson claimed that King spoke to him and King said to Jackson: “Jesse take our people over the mountaintop”. Jackson then told anyone who would listen to “look at my shirt”. Jackson’s shirt was “soaked” in blood.
Hosea Williams was on that balcony. Williams knew that everything Jackson had claimed was false. Williams knew that the only way that blood had ended up on Jackson shirt was for Jackson to put his hands in the pool of blood and smear it on his shirt.
Jackson left Memphis without telling anyone. Jackson had one more grief-grifting card to play, and boy did he play it. He flew back to his home base of Chicago. There, the very next day, Jackson was on TV. Williams watched in stunned amazement, as Jackson recounted his mythology, while wearing the same bloody shirt.
Elmer Gantry couldn’t have done it better. Jackson’s grift was then in full swing.
Jackson started “Rainbow Push” a few years after leaving MLK’s assassination. Jackson race-hustled and grifted for five decades, amassing a mountain of cash. Although Jackson may have had good intentions at some point, his organization seemed to be a blueprint for later race-hustlers like BLM managed. Both “legally extorted” money from corporations by playing the race card.
“Pay me, and you buy my silence.”
Ken Timmerman wrote the definitive book on Jesse Jackson and his successful efforts to make corporations bend a knee to avoid boycotts or bad-faith threats of “racism.” In his book “Shakedown,” Timmerman goes into well-researched detail about Jackson’s money “shakedown”. He and his henchmen forced corporations to pay to shut Jackson up. The grift was simple and elegant.
Unlike BLM, which would overtly threaten boycotts, Jackson was less obvious. 25 years ago, when Jackson was at the peak of his pile of money, former friend and business partner Harold Doley Jr. saw what he described as Jackson’s business “turning into racketeering.” in 2001, Doley said:
“Let me bring Rev. Jackson back to reality,” Doley said. “He’s using African-Americans to enrich himself.
“His effectiveness is in shaking down corporate America. His income for his operations, since he’s come to Wall Street, has gone from $695,000 to over $17 million [in 2000]. There is no dot-com stock I’m aware of that has had that kind of success.”
Doley recounted a familiar litany of backroom deals in which Jackson allegedly secured special access and favors for his allies and contributors by threatening, if only by implication, racial trouble if white-owned firms didn’t play along.
“I saw the way he operated. I saw some of the draconian deals that he cut,” Doley said.
When Doley went to his lawyers with concerns that Jackson’s sweetheart deal-making may violate the RICO statutes, they advised him to cut all ties with Jackson.
Jackson died 3 weeks ago. His memorial was last week. It brought out everyday people and fading Democrat luminaries – including three former presidents. I am, obviously, not a Jackson fan. He was a race-hustling grifter, but his memorial wasn’t the place to make political speeches or to pontificate on how much smarter you are than the assembled crowd. Barack Obama managed to do the former, and Joe Biden managed the latter.
It was such egregious behavior that Jackson’s son, Jesse Jr., (a convicted felon and amateur myth-weaver in his own right) lambasted Obama for making his dad’s funeral about Obama.
But now that Jackson is but a memory, I think it’s time to get back to what I know – making fun of Democrats.
