When Frantz Fanon wrote his seminal work Wretched of the Earth more than 40 years ago, his chapter on violence and the colonial situation was either condemned by the establishment or lauded by revolutionary anticolonial intellectuals and activists. His most prescient chapter–"The Pitfalls of National Consciousness"–outlined the corruption and cronyism that would befall those nations that had liberated themselves from colonial masters and installed native elites:
Neither financier nor industrial magnates are to be found within this national middle class. The national bourgeoisie of the underdeveloped countries is not engaged in production, nor invention, nor building, nor labor; it is completely canalized into activities of the intermediary sort. Its innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket.
And that chapter was completely ignored. Today, in Africa, the "Big Daddies" of the anticolonialist and postcolonialist period are mostly gone or are soon to be gone–men like Mobutu, Idi Amin, Savimbi–and one would hope that Robert Mugabe would have had the good graces to do so and spare Zimbabwe. The stench of corruption has often been problematic for African-American activists in regard to African nations.
This reluctance to hold other blacks accountable due to racial solidarity (along with a tendency to ignore those blacks who do so) has become a double-edged sword. Given how whites have used any foible of one as a "black tax" on all, African-Americans have had to band together and hold their noses. One still has to be on the lookout for the more subtle forms of white supremacy that still course their way throughout the American body politic. Yet the price of reticence in regard to African-Americans not policing members of their communities has led to the kind of racket that Fanon wrote about, which brings this review to the "problematic" history of the putative president of black America, Jesse L. Jackson.
Jackson is one of those "Big Daddies" whom certain quarters of America love to hate. A darling of liberals (another hated but white group), Jackson has until recently been given a free pass. But that may well change with the publication of Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson (Regnery, 501 pages, $29.95), written by Kenneth R. Timmerman, a Washington writer who works for Insight magazine (a Moonie offshoot). If you hate Jesse Jackson, you’re going to love this book; for the rest, this book is a hoot. It’s a textbook example of how to whack a man when his pants are down.
Timmerman oozes contempt for his subject, and that splotches what could have been a serious journalist deconstruction of a man who has become a classic American huckster of the civil rights industry, as well as a predatory capitalist. Instead, it’s a standard, infantile, right-wing hit job and will fit snuggly between D’Souza’s The End of Racism and Horowitz’s Hating Whitey. Everything that The Man Who Would Be King does or says shows the perfidiousness of his soul, in the author’s view.
One of the continuing controversies of Jackson’s career has been his claim that Martin Luther King died in his arms, which by now has been seen as an outright and cynical fabrication on Jackson’s part. But Timmerman isn’t happy with that. Jackson, either a coward or criminal suspect, disappeared "apparently in fear of the Memphis police officers who rushed to the scene." Why? No one knows, and the author certainly doesn’t give a clue. If one checks Marshall Frady’s book Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, dodging the police out of fear doesn’t appear, but then Timmerman considers Frady "sycophantic" in his treatment of Jackson.
Shakedown’s central premise is that Jackson used the politics of racial resentment to line his pockets by honing his skills in the civil rights movement. His chief models were Dr. Howard Schomer (who is erroneously called "Harold Schomer" throughout the book), the former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, which Jackson attended but did not graduate from, and Rev. Leon Sullivan. Schomer pioneered the disinvestment movement that challenged U.S. and multinational corporations’ policies in South Africa, which Timmerman casts aspersions on because it was also a "goal that was shared by the Soviet Union and its front organizations operating overseas." Of course the author offers not one iota of documentation to support this assertion. But, hey, we all know what commie dupes liberals were, right?
Another model for The Man Who Would Be King is Rev. Leon Sullivan, who became effective at using economic boycotts in Philadelphia. "He demonstrated that boycotts could be personally lucrative, as he was subsequently appointed to the board of directors of General Motors." Once again, there is no factual evidence or basis for a reasonable conjecture to prove a connection, yet Timmerman can’t resist an innuendo.
Later in the 1960s, while the director of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, Jackson began a series of boycotts, aided and abetted by local black businessmen but advocated by black ministers, at white firms that had no black employees or carried few if no black products. A fallout occurred when the ministers realized that there was a deal going on between Jackson and the businessmen: pledges made to him by the businessmen for boycotts. By this time, however, The Man Who Would Be King had established what the Justice Dept. would call a record of "practice and patterns"–but so has the author. In Jackson’s case it has been preachin’ black, politickin’ left but collectin’ cash.
Much is made of the fact that Jackson had some of the Black Stone Rangers hired at a firm that was boycotted and had made concessions. This, in the eyes of the author, is further example of Jackson’s criminal-mindedness; yet it also could have been him trying to get some wayward thugs some gainful employment, where Timmerman sees mafioso tendencies. He claims that Noah Robinson, Jackson’s half-brother, was "Top among the new crop of El Rukn [the gang’s new name] leaders who took over from Fort [the gang’s leader]."
So what’s going on? This tangle of relationships is never clearly explained but lost in a fog of innuendoes, conjecture and suspect documentation.
In some instances Timmerman is as bad as Jackson is when it comes to making claims. At one point in "Chapter 2: Stepping Out," the author says: "Many of the jobs Jackson claimed he forced white-owned companies to set aside for blacks were never actually created." Yet he offers no proof of his counterclaim. Surely by this time this can be checked, and the burden of proof is on the author, since his thesis is that Jackson is a shakedown artist extraordinaire.
Or take the reference to Aretha Franklin, who Timmerman asserts, became a devotee of The Man Who Would Be King "and whom black scandal sheets frequently suggested had more than just a passing friendship with Jackson." He offers no factual reference to any of these alleged black scandal sheets.
Shakedown is as evasive with the truth as Jackson is claimed to be. The book rests on the belief that if you hate that old rascal Jackie the Shake you don’t need the truth, you already know it. After all, the man shook hands with some devils–Castro and Arafat; worse still, he associated with Martin Luther King, who ruined America and made blacks actually believe they were citizens.
Shakedown really offers very little that’s new, and is apparently based on previous bios and critiques of Jackson by black reporters and academics, especially Barbara Reynolds’ Jesse Jackson: The Man, The Movement, The Myth. Timmerman does a fair job of outlining Jackson’s mastery of funneling private funds and not-for-profits revenues from Operation Breadbasket (which caused Jackson’s break with SCLC over his freelancing without its oversight) to PUSH to other venues of predatory practices in Africa and elsewhere. Jackson is surely a slippery character who has played fast and easy with the truth, amassing wealth and power, and that makes him another American "success" story like Bill Clinton, or the gang who ran Enron and bilked its workers and shareholders.
One has to ask, given that Jackson’s corruption was so legendary, how was he able not to be investigated by the same state apparatus that was slamming the Black Panthers and other likeminded black organizations? Jackson, despite being a left-talkin’ Afro-populist, is essentially a capitalist entrepreneur (albeit a corrupt one), the kind that Richard Nixon’s black capitalism program recognized. Jackson is the kind of man whom Nixon saw as wanting a share in the wealth and "a piece of the action." He posed no serious wealth redistributive threat to the status quo and, to some degree, has impeded the development of any black progressive movement for almost 20 years. His example and success has given rise to the likes of Louis Farrakhan and The Man Who Would Be Jesse, Al Sharpton. Notwithstanding Timmerman’s charge of him being a "tool of the left," as Chapter 6 is titled, Jackson used the left as a means to bolster his two egocentric presidential campaigns. He should be given credit by the right for thwarting any left-of-center third-party formation and helping the rise of the right’s favorite bête blanc, Bill Clinton.
Shakedown is marred by the author’s tendentious assertions, cheap, red-baiting bias and quotes attributed to some interview subjects without factual documentation, as in the claim that the Carter administration closed down a probe of Jackson’s finances because he’d proved invaluable to Carter’s winning the White House. Or Jackson allegedly taking money from Haiti’s exiled leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide without registering as a "foreign agent,"in violation of federal law.
Timmerman is entitled to his political beliefs, but they undermine the book’s overall effectiveness and mark it solely as political agenda, rather than as an expose in the public’s interest. Those he disagrees with are targeted as leftist, sycophants or fellow travelers of the evil empire. However, organizations such as the Capitol Research Center and Judicial Watch are not described as conservative but treated as neutral or objective. One can’t help but think that this book has only been published now that Jackson’s credibility has been exposed around his ankles. Now that he’s served his purpose and is no longer needed, the sharks are out. Shakedown aims at being a coup de grace to a body that’s still warm and twitching, but is basically just a sleazy book about a sleazy guy.
