Jesse Jackson and the betrayal of the civil-rights movement
His attacks on Jews went beyond his “Hymietown” slur. More than
that, his illiberal opposition to the Western canon and grifting racial
hucksterism did great damage.
JNS
Feb 18, 2026
Jesse
Jackson walks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after the
opening ceremony of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South
Africa, August 31, 2001.
Being an aide to Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr., as well as one of his companions in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4,
1968—the day the leader of the civil-rights movement was shot and
killed—conferred a certain status on Rev. Jesse Jackson that amounted to
secular sainthood. Parlaying that clout into being the first serious
African-American candidate to run for president—with his two ultimately
unsuccessful, but impactful, campaigns for the Democratic Party
nomination in 1984 and 1988—gave him a place in history that nothing
else he did or said could take away.
Those résumé items are the main reasons why Jackson, who died
on Feb. 17 at the age of 84, has remained an icon for
African-Americans. The vast majority of the electorate may not have been
interested in having him as their president, and many—both inside and
outside of the black community—had long ago tired of his egotism,
grifting and soaring, yet self-referential rhetoric. Yet they were ready
to acknowledge him as a key figure in a civil-rights movement that,
after a decade of strife, would eventually be regarded by most Americans
as a cause whose success brought great pride. That explains why
coverage of his passing in the mainstream media wasn’t merely respectful
but almost universally laudatory.
And yet, the chorus of praise for him
being sung this week by a wide array of leaders and institutions is
largely misplaced. Jackson should rightly be accorded his place in
history. However, his legacy is not so much a triumph of the effort to
roll back disgraceful, discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws. That was
primarily achieved by other, greater people.
Not a ‘stray quote’
Rather, his principal contribution to
American society as a whole, as well as to African-Americans, was
something else. It was the way in which he guided what was left of that
movement away from King’s vision and toward what we now know of as the
woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion that is the opposite
of his mentor’s aspiration for a color-blind society. He paved the way
for the illiberal rejection of the Western canon, without which such
freedoms are not imaginable, and even worse, a version of civil rights
that was nothing more than racial hucksterism. Along the way, he was
also a forerunner of an effort to legitimize antisemitism and loathing
for Israel that played a not insignificant role in helping fuel the
surge of Jew-hatred that is currently raging.
Yet if there were any sour notes in the obituaries, they were generally relegated to sidebars. One such was a New York Times story
that spoke of “how a stray quote of Jesse Jackson’s led to a rupture
between black and Jewish voters.” The “stray quote” was, of course, his
infamous reference to Jews that was buried deep in a Washington Post
story by reporter Milton Coleman, which said, “In private conversations
with reporters, Jackson has referred to Jews as ‘Hymie’ and to New York
as ‘Hymietown.’”
Jackson would first deny that he said the
remarks and incited his friend—the now 92-year-old hate-monger Louis
Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam—to threaten Coleman, also
African-American, calling him a “traitor,” a “Judas” and an “Uncle Tom”
who should “be made an example of.” But it was Jackson who was the liar
since other reporters admitted to having heard the remarks (though
either they didn’t want to derail Jackson’s candidacy or were
discouraged from doing so by their editors). He then apologized for the
comments in a campaign event at a synagogue that was more about guilting
Jews into granting him absolution than an acknowledgement of fault.
This wasn’t the first or the last time
Jackson would be caught uttering falsehoods. Indeed, other civil-rights
leaders in King’s inner circle bitterly complained, as the Times’
obit rightly noted, about Jackson’s lies about being the first to rush
to the martyred leader’s side and to cradle his fallen body when he was
assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the building that now
houses the National Civil Rights Museum.
Demonizing Israel and Zionism
It’s true that Jackson’s “Hymietown”
comments were a watershed moment in a black-Jewish alliance that had
begun to fracture in the late 1960s, especially after King’s death. But
what needs to be understood is that Jackson’s anti-Jewish attitudes went
far deeper than a “stray remark” that caused controversy that he never
entirely lived down.
While liberal Jews were castigated by
other Democrats for their general reluctance to get on the Jackson
bandwagon, the “Hymietown” slurs were just the tip of the iceberg of his
hostility to Jews. He anticipated a trend that is now prevalent in the
African-American community in which the State of Israel and Zionism are
demonized and falsely labeled as a form of “racism.”
As The Washington Post reported
in 1979 on a trip to Israel, Jackson devoted his efforts to promoting
terrorist Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, while refusing to meet with, among others, Jewish refugees
from Arab countries. He falsely smeared the Jewish state as
“anti-black” and then, when presented with the prospect of visiting the
Yad Vashem World Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, said he was “sick and
tired of hearing about the Holocaust.” After touring the museum, he said
that “genocide” should not be allowed to happen “to anyone, including
the Palestinians.” In this way, Jackson was floating the “genocide”
blood libel against Jews—44 years before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks
in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
While claiming to be an advocate for freedom for all, he sought to deny rights to the Jewish community. As Eunice Pollack, author of Black Antisemitism in America: Past and Present, noted
last year in JNS, he echoed the infamous antisemitic Soviet propaganda
campaign alleging that “Zionism is racism” in a 1980 speech to an
Arab-American audience. He told them, “We have the obligation to
separate Zionism from Judaism. Judaism is a religion. … Zionism is a
poisonous weed that is choking Judaism.”
Long before it became fashionable to bash
Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel for organizing and seeking to
lobby Congress to support it, Jackson denounced their efforts and said
the Democratic Party was being “perverted” by “the Jewish element.” He
claimed that the willingness of members of Congress to support Israel,
which was widely popular across the country, was “a kind of glorified
form of bribery. Financial bankrolling and moral bankruptcy.”
Nor should it be forgotten that Farrakhan,
a notorious black racist and antisemite, was part of Jackson’s 1984
campaign, sometimes warming up audiences before the candidate spoke. Far
from disavowing Farrakhan, Jackson embraced him. He also blamed Jews
for not winning the Democratic nomination in 1984 and for pressuring
former Vice President Walter Mondale not to pick him as his running mate
before losing to President Ronald Reagan in a 49-state landslide.
Jackson wasn’t so much an early critic of
the pro-Israel “lobby” as he was a forerunner of the sort of left-wing
antisemitism that is commonly expressed by people such as New York City
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and members of the congressional “Squad,” such as
Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
That shows just how dishonest the
narrative was about an overreaction to a “stray remark” being the cause
of strife between blacks and Jews.
Racial huckster and grifter
While Jews have good reason to resent the
praise being showered upon Jackson’s memory, the damage he did during
the course of his long career was not limited to alienating the two
minority populations from one another. Perhaps even more damaging was
the way his post-King version of civil rights was to his own community.
Jackson is being given credit for
promoting black businesses and achievements via his Rainbow Push
Coalition that purportedly sought to promote opportunities for people
who had been previously subjected to discrimination. While that was a
praiseworthy goal, Jackson’s tactics were anything but noble. In
practice, the effort was nothing more than a gangster-like shakedown
operation that targeted companies and larger corporations for criticism
for their alleged hiring practices and business operations, and then
accepted bribes in the form of large donations from them in exchange for
granting them absolution. As the New York Post reported in 2001, the supposedly nonprofit group’s finances, as well as Jackson’s, were anything but transparent.
Jackson was engaged in nothing less than a
big-time grift, in which he used thuggish pressure to force his targets
to pay up. He peddled influence for money, and in so doing, was also
helping himself to vast sums to finance an opulent lifestyle while still
posing as a selfless activist.
This paved the way for other racial
hucksters, like the mendacious and antisemitic Rev. Al Sharpton, now 71,
who infamously egged on violence against Jews during the 1991 riots in
the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., headquarters of the
Chassidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The same was true for the
subsequent generation of Black Lives Matter promoters who used the 2020
moral panic about race after the death of George Floyd at the hands of
Minneapolis police to profit from gullible and foolishly guilt-ridden
Americans.
Against ‘Western Civ’
Nor were these activities the only way Jackson anticipated today’s woke left activists.
In January 1987, he took time out from his
shakedowns of businesses to lead a demonstration at Stanford University
in Palo Alto, Calif., in which he and approximately 500 students
chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
It was among the first efforts to expunge
the Western canon from higher-education curricula on the dubious grounds
that it was part of “institutional racism.” That campaign reached its
zenith after the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020. In so doing, Jackson
not only gave a crucial push toward the dumbing down of America but
helped promote what would eventually be toxic leftist Marxist doctrines
like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism
into the national discussion.
Jackson may not have started the left’s
“long march” through American institutions to the point where it would
come to dominate higher education, culture and the fine arts. But he
provided it with a jump start that would help legitimize doctrines that
would ultimately undo much of the progress toward racial harmony that
King had helped achieve. And it drew a straight line to the antisemitism
now surging within these fields in the United States and beyond.
The symbolism of his rise from poverty and
discrimination in the Jim Crow South to a singular position as a
prominent political and cultural figure was remarkable. That can equally
be said about his ability to use his rhetoric as a speaker to capture
the pain of blacks and the passions of an important moment of American
history.
The activist deserves to be remembered.
Still, he should not be depicted as the hero of a great movement or one
of the slain King’s laudatory successors. Rather, he is an object lesson
in how a just cause can launch and then nurture the career of an
inveterate liar, and the promoter of hateful ideas and practices, which
ultimately betrayed the civil-rights movement with which he is
associated.
If we have not yet fully achieved King’s
desire for a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color
of their skin but by the content of their character,” it’s due in no
small measure to the folly and the feckless actions of people like Jesse
Jackson.
