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Commentary: Jackson, King and the Business of Black Leadership By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON Pacific News Service

Friday January 20, 2006

Jesse Jackson is peeved that Martin Luther King Jr.’s chronicler, Taylor Branch, revealed that King regarded Jackson as an egoist and opportunist. Branch made the charge in At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. He claimed that after a stormy meeting in Memphis shortly before his assassination, Dr. King shouted at Jackson that he wanted to carve out his own niche in society and was only interested in doing his own thing.  

Jackson has a right to be incensed at Branch. The revelation (allegation?) comes decades after King’s death, giving Jackson little chance to refute it. But Jackson’s ire and the propriety of the charge aside, the flap points to the glaring contrast in objectives, style and even personal motives between King, Jackson and other mainstream black leaders then and now.  

King’s style of leadership was egalitarian, hands-on and in the trenches, and he always kept a careful eye on the needs of poor and working class blacks. He was a selfless leader who never made a nickel from his civil rights activism. He would be appalled at the cash, glitter and bling fetish of prominent blacks. He would have been aghast at the money squabble within his own family over the King Center’s fate.  

King also would have recoiled at the frantic maneuver of some black leaders to command center stage at press conferences and put their media spin on racial issues. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is a textbook example of that penchant. He grabbed headlines by claiming Katrina was God’s punishment to blacks for their allegedly profligate ways. A shamefaced Nagin later apologized, but he got his camera action.  

Nagin’s shoot-from-the lip quips were no different from the ways in which other telegenic leaders operate. Jackson’s media-grabbing, hit-and-run style of leadership has long been geared to burnish his image and credentials as a humanitarian, religious leader and peace advocate. This instantly boosts his stature in the media and strengthens his standing as black America’s main, if not only, man.  

In the past few years Jackson’s image and top-dog standing as the supreme black leader has taken a severe pounding with the scandal over his fathering a child out of wedlock, the allegations of financial profiteering from his civil rights actions and the ever-present charge that he is a crass opportunist who relentlessly chases TV cameras and microphones.  

In years past, King’s SCLC, the NAACP and other mainstream black organizations relied on the nickels and dimes of poor and working class blacks for their support. This gave them complete independence and a solid constituency to mount powerful campaigns for jobs, better housing, quality schools and against police abuse.  

The profound shift in the method and style of black leadership began, tragically enough, with the murder of King, the collapse of legal segregation in the 1960s, the class divisions that imploded within black America and the greening of the black middle-class. By the close of the 1960s the civil rights movement had spent itself. The torrent of demonstrations, sit-ins, marches and civil rights legislation annihilated the legal wall of segregation. With the barriers erased the black middle-class had a field day. They were starting more and better businesses, marching into more corporations and universities, winning more political offices, buying bigger and more expensive homes, cars, clothes and jewelry, taking more luxury vacations and joining more country clubs than ever before. The first chance they got, many packed up their bags and started their headlong flight to greener, suburban pastures.  

None of their success has even the remotest bearing on the lives of the black poor, who have become even poorer and more desperate. Many of the latter turn to crime, drugs and gangs as their only way out.  

Mainstream civil rights leaders are trapped in the middle by the twisting political trends and disparate fortunes of the black middle-class and the black poor. A tilt toward an aggressive activist agenda carries the deep risk of alienating the corporate donors they have carefully cultivated in the past few years. They depend on them to gain more jobs, promotions and contracts for black professionals and businesspersons and to secure contributions for their fund-raising campaigns, banquets, scholarship funds and programs. That keeps their doors open, but it dulls the cutting-edge activism that was the trademark of King and the civil rights leaders of his day.  

Branch may have been picky, gossipy and even unfair in airing King’s censure of Jackson. But when Jackson and today’s black leaders turn leadership into a business-style competition in which success is measured by piling up political favors and corporate dollars, they leave themselves wide open to that criticism.  

 

 

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an associate editor at New America Media, an association of over 700 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic media.