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It is a question that has puzzled many writers who have sought to delve beneath the public image of this controversial, complex man, deemed the heir apparent to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, Marshall Frady, a former Newsweek reporter, uses his close ties to the enigmatic figure to forge a bold, fascinating portrait that often presents as many questions as it answers.
Maybe the solution to the Jackson riddle can be found in the rocky early years of the man born in Greenville, South Carolina, to a poor 16-year-old girl during a scandalous affair with a married man. Frady would have us believe that the stigma of illegitimacy permanently colored young Jackson's perceptions and fired his endless need to belong and achieve. As a young man, Jackson tried a brief stint at a college in Illinois but returned south to attend North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College. There he met his future wife, Jackie, and involved himself in anti-Jim Crow protests.
After a time, Jackson left for Chicago with his new family to attend Chicago Theological Seminary. His official entry into the Civil Rights Movement came later after he witnessed TV coverage of Dr. King's heroic Selma march, which triggered an 18-hour nonstop drive by Jackson to join the campaign. Once among King's SCLC leadership, Jackson thrived as a young lion, often having to be held in check by the more cautious elders. In 1968, there was much criticism of Jackson, who wore a shirt stained with the blood of the fatally shot King for several days in public gatherings. Frady points to this as the first rumblings of the man's ravenous appetite for self-promotion.
In the wake of the King assassination, Jackson found some public recognition as head of the Chicago-based Operation PUSH, which fought many of America's largest corporations for greater job opportunities for blacks. However, there was something else relentlessly driving Jackson onto the national political stage where he would make two highly publicized presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.
In an occasionally unwieldy narrative, Frady tries to cut through the glitter and sheen of the publicity-hungry leader to the swirling mix of conflicting emotions underneath: "It became the ultimate dream for the outsider of making himself into nothing less than a moral hero in the society where he and his people had long been scorned. The very size of the ambition was, in a way, a measure of the emptiness he felt in his life."
For the most part, Frady sticks to the facts, steering clear of weighty analysis and faulty pronouncements, offering a view of the private man behind the public facade. The author, who has covered Jackson since his early 1960s civil rights campaigns for Newsweek, presents the reader with the opportunity to view his subject during the euphoria of Jackson's presidential campaigns to his lackluster damage control efforts following the ill-conceived Òhymie-town" reference and other public missteps.
Jesse Jackson has come under fire several times in recent years. He was snubbed by the Clinton camp in the last presidential election to lure Reagan Democrats back to the fold. He was attacked by the moderate black establishment on more than one occasion as being too politically ambitious at the expense of his own community. He has been labeled as increasingly irrelevant by many younger blacks, who have found a new champion in the firebrand Louis Farrakhan.
Yet, as Frady aptly states in his well-researched, detailed biography, the career and accomplishments of this unique American social and political figure are far from over. Or as one Jackson observer put it: "He is constantly pronounced dead and gone, but he's like a phoenix: he always rises again."
Robert Fleming is a journalist and author of The Wisdom of the Elders.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.