Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1996 by Clarence Page

"Great things happen in small places. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville."

--Jesse Jackson, 1988 interview

Had there been no Jesse Jackson, it would have been necessary to invent him. As it happened, he invented himself. Or, in keeping with time-honored American traditions,, he reinvented himself.

No phase of that reinvention was more controversial than the "bloody shirt" incident. Just after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jackson, then a 27-year-old aide to King, appeared on national television and spoke to the Chicago City Council wearing a shirt stained with King's blood, while other still-shaken Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) officials prepared for the funeral. He did not exactly say that King died in his arms, but neither did he do anything to discourage the notion.

Journalist Marshall Frady's reconstruction of the episode in his new biography, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, is riveting. The slain leader's blood was puddled so heavily on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel that the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King's closest aide, was able to scoop it up with a piece of cardboard from a laundered shirt and pour it into a jar. ("This is Martin's precious blood," Abernathy cried. "His blood was shed for us.") The earnest and ambitious Jackson already had worked his way quickly into the upper ranks of the SCLC, propelled in part by his restless desire to take charge--sometimes without the advance approval of his superiors.

As another King aide (and future Atlanta mayor), Andrew Young, described it to Frady:

"I can see Jesse going over and leaning down

and placing both his palms down flat in that pool of

blood, and then standing up and, like this"--and

Young slowly passes both his hands down his

chest--"wiping it down the front of his shirt ..."

What are we to make of this scene? Was it bizarre opportunism? Many thought so. Among them were Coretta Scott King and others who would not speak to Jackson for years to come.

Or was it a sincere attempt by Jackson, in this moment of stunning, profound grief, to assume the mantle he felt obliged, even destined, to take? Frady, like Young, casts this astonishing moment in a remarkably favorable light, as he casts Jackson's other similarly questionable actions, but here his defense of Jackson is persuasive. Frady quotes some whose anger with Jackson over the bloody shirt episode remains alive years later. But he also quotes other soldiers in the cause who are more willing to excuse Jackson's act and his unwillingness to talk about it, even to the editors and ghostwriters who have tried over the years to help him write the autobiography he has yet to complete. He may not remember all that went on that day himself, they say. Young, a Baptist minister, offers a theological explanation: "We Baptists, you know, we believe there's power in the blood--power that's transferable."

The young Jackson already had established a reputation for what Frady calls "a magnificence of spirit and an appalling crassness." Yet it was his penchant for impatiently seizing moments to his best advantage--while other, more cautious souls hesitated--that enabled him to breathe a new, hip, in-yo'-face style into the black liberation movement at the time King was trying, with limited success, to expand the fight for civil rights into the murkier battlefront of economic justice. By his own admission, Jackson was a less-than-perfect leader. But no one could match the young man's charismatic presence, his gift for rhyming epigrammatical oratory, and his ability to win concessions from powerful business and political interests. Quickly and decisively, Jesse Louis Jackson moved into that vacuum of need that creates, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu once described himself, a "leader by default." Alas, it took a leader of singular audaciousness to hold together a movement in a time that no longer offered the clear moral choices presented by the era of police dogs, firehoses, belligerent Southern sheriffs, and "white" and "colored" water fountains. "Absent the great moral dramaturgy of King's day," Frady writes, "Jackson was left to struggle in the vague spiritual flats of a more prosaic and middling season to find his apotheosis, his mountaintop."

In mapping out that vague moral landscape, Frady's pursuit of the bloody shirt question exemplifies his book's greatest strength and its one annoying weakness. He provides the most thorough and trenchant study of Jackson to date, effectively picking up where USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds's seminal and definitive 1975 biography, Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement and the Myth, leaves off. Yet, he sometimes tries a little too hard to explain away the very weaknesses for which Jackson should be held most accountable, for they. most often have compromised his effectiveness. In the conservative backlash of the 1990s, his flaws have done more than that: They have left him (and to a disturbing degree his movement) adrift and, in Frady's words, "increasingly given to stray, darkening ruminations."