Jesse Jackson on Martin Luther King's assassination (April 4, 1968): 'It redefined America'
Jesse Jackson still
remembers the sound of the gunshot and the sight of blood. They have been with
him for half a century. “Every time I think about it, it’s like pulling a scab
off a sore,” he says. “It’s a hurtful, painful thought: that a man of love is
killed by hate; that a man of peace should be killed by violence; a man who
cared is killed by the careless.” Jackson and fellow
civil rights veteran Andrew Young are the last surviving disciples of Martin Luther
King who witnessed his assassination on 4 April 1968. Others who were
at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee, that day have been claimed by the
passing decades. And each milestone anniversary has offered a snapshot of
Jackson’s, and the nation’s, jagged and jarringly uneven narratives.
Twenty years after the
deadly shooting, in 1988, Baptist preacher Jackson was mounting his second bid
to become America’s first black president. He
invoked King and his death repeatedly as he took on Michael Dukakis in
the Democratic primaries and caucuses. He won 11 contests but failed to gain
the nomination. At the 40-year
mark after King’s death, the torch had been passed to Barack Obama,
locked in a Democratic primary of his own against Hillary Clinton and under
pressure over his relationship with the outspoken pastor Jeremiah Wright. The
senator praised Jackson, a fellow Chicagoan, for making his run possible. On
the night Obama won the presidency, Jackson wept.
Now it is 50 years and
the wheel has turned again. Jackson announced last November that he has
been diagnosed
with Parkinson’s disease. Donald Trump, endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan,
is in the White House. Just as many saw King’s assassination by the escaped
convict James Earl Ray – a white man partly inspired by the segregationist
governor George Wallace – as a reactionary strike against revolution, so
Trump’s election has been interpreted as (in King’s phrase) a “white backlash”
against Obama. Amid the tumult of the
1960s, King, outspoken against the Vietnam war, was one of the most hated men
in America and his life was in constant danger. His house was bombed, his
followers were killed, his name was trashed by newspaper editorials and his
phones were tapped by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. His two-thirds disapproval rating
in a 1966 Gallup poll sits at odds
with today’s “I have a dream” sanctification.
“They loved him as a
martyr after he was killed but rejected him as a marcher when he was alive,”
recalls Jackson, 76, still a dedicated activist, speaking by phone from an
African development conference in Morocco. “We tend to embrace martyrs. In many
ways he has a moral authority now you wouldn’t see if he was still alive. He is
a universal frame of reference for moral authority, the global frame of
reference for nonviolent justice and social change. If he had not died, that
probably would not be the case.”.. read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/31/jesse-jackson-martin-luther-king-assassination