Jackson sees no choice but to focus on the black community itself. Though he continues to blame societal neglect, though he complains that Bill Clinton has yet to honor his campaign promises, Jackson increasingly aims his speeches at the most basic moral issues among his people: black-on-black violence, the disappearance of families and religious values in city slums, the silent, corrosive assent of students to guns and drugs in urban schools. On a visit to Chicago, he confessed he is “relieved” when he finds himself being followed on a street by a white person rather than a black. That confession was “humiliating,” Jackson said in an interview with NEWSWEEK, but he stands by it.
In part, Jackson is reacting like any big city homeowner: he’s fed up. This year there have been five murders on his block in a middle-class, Washington, D.C., neighborhood near Howard University. Three youths were blown away by two others in a back-seat drug quarrel. A merchant was shot in a robbery. And Jackson’s wife witnessed a late-night slaying as she emptied the trash. “I’m addressing what I’m seeing,” he says glumly.
Some of his stands have a conservative cast. He rebuked Chicago blacks who are championing the release of a convicted–but supposedly “reformed”–gang leader. Jackson won’t object to spending more on prisons. He won’t rule out a voluntary program to use the implantable contraceptive Norplant to prevent teen pregnancies. To stop the murder, he says, blacks must undergo a “social-values revolution.” Students must report drug and gun users. Families must lay down rules. Cops must be on the beat in the schools.
But Jackson is not as close as he once was to the kids in the schools. Twenty years ago he would stop to lecture students he saw playing craps. Even a decade ago the issues he dealt with in the schools were teen pregnancy, the risks of smoking and alcohol, and the rising level of school dropouts. Now it’s teen-on-teen murders, crack cocaine. When he calls on kids to finger classmates who carry guns, students defend the necessity of carrying weapons for self-protection. What’s so different now, Jackson says, is “the glorified violence, the rather aggressive attacks on police and how the youth are reacting to authority in their psychology.”
Like a Delta bluesman, Jackson has seen the music of his politics copied and sanitized for a wider market by a fellow rural Southerner–Bill Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, Clinton aides baited Jackson. But the president himself made “hope” the watchword of his campaign and reformulated some of Jackson’s mix of self-help and big government for his own “New Democrat” uses. He even journeyed to Memphis recently–following the path of Martin Luther King–to speak of moral uplift to black preachers. Clinton, Jackson concedes, projects a “certain quality of caring.” Yet Jackson himself is rarely invited to the White House. He talks infrequently to the president, and hasn’t been asked for his views on welfare reform. His only contact is on foreign-policy issues such as Haiti.
While blacks have risen to power in the cities and in Congress, Jackson laments the absence of the new “street” leadership he says is needed for “progressive” change. Like a war veteran, he talks increasingly about the instructive value of the battles he fought–and that younger folks are missing. “Many of our youth have not won anything,” he says. “They’ve not won a boycott. They are not tough political fighters. And now they have a low confidence level.”
Just as distressing to Jackson are the trendy expressions of racial “rage” on the part of middle-class blacks who’ve benefited from past advances in civil rights. In his NEWSWEEK interview, he bitterly recalled a conversation with a successful actor who said he wanted to vent his anger, but declined to accompany Jackson on a speaking trip to a high school out of fear that he would anger his movie industry employers. The actor, it turned out, had come from an intact family, had studied acting since childhood and had attended some of the finest arts-oriented schools. “Rather than share how you coped and conquered,” Jackson says he told the man, “You’re out here selling the bulls—.”
An intensely public man, Jackson is taking increasing solace in his own social achievement: his family. He notes proudly that he was a poor child who had not known his real father, who worked his way up by way of athletic scholarships and who now is the father of five children, graduates of institutions such as the University of Virginia and Northwestern. One son, Jesse Jr., is now field director of Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition.
Not that Jesse Sr. will ever leave politics. Though he’s focusing on African-Americans for now, he’s sure to turn back to the nation as a whole. And, as Clinton knows, Jackson is still a force in the left wing of the Democratic Party. “It’s a long game,” Jackson says of his goal of using politics to achieve racial justice, “and I’m constantly rejuvenated because it’s about seeing the way out” of social problems, including rampant violence. But for Jackson, the path is no longer so apparent.
