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Jesse Jackson and Black People

By Amiri Baraka

We're honored to reprint Amiri Baraka’s reflections on Jesse Jackson, Dukakis and the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta. The history he witnessed has a new resonance now. Baraka’s convention narrative seems like an important part of the back story of our own time. And thanks to Jesse Jackson’s animadversions and contradictions – the drama don’t stop. Here’s a taste of what's in the body of the text:

Jesse was blowing hard and pretty, like a rhythm blade cut through most of us. “We didn’t eat turkey on three o’clock on Thanksgiving day, because Momma was off cooking someone else’s turkey. We’d play football to pass the time till momma came home. Around six we would meet her at the bottom of the hill carrying back Du Carcass.”

…In the transcript of the speech that has now been changed to “leftovers.” But he and we who heard know what he said and what he meant. That indeed this merriment was much like a holiday, and yes there were those of us down here who weren’t involved in the real business, we were just the marginalia the bubbles rising off the heady brew. We wanted to eat now, but all we were gonna get was Du Carcass, some leftovers. The white men and quite a few white women had already et...

Baraka's meditation begins in medias res:

By this time, as well, the center piece of the extravaganza had begun formally. And people began scurrying to be where they were supposed to be to get their instructions their inspiration their salaries or whatever the case was.

The big boys are so accommodating of our frustration they had even put out two sets of tee shirts with the Dukakis Bentsen regulars and another with Bentsen’s face x’d out and Jesse Jackson’s face unmarked and supported. I thought by now I should try to get to Jesse directly to find out what was on his mind and what he was going to do. Not just as a reporter for Essence magazine, but for my own and our own edification and self-defense.

But of course getting to Jackson in that maze of indirection and disinformation was difficult, even though I had been given his suite numbers by people very close to him. Finally I succeeded in getting an agreement that I could ride over to the convention with him the night he was to speak. I wanted to hear what he was going to say, how he summed up life among the Dems rat now!

So that evening my children and I gathered at the appointed place and I waited. And as secret as that point of embarkation was supposed to be there was a tiny knot of people standing there with us. As it got closer to that time we were told Jesse would appear, the secret service man in the lobby came over to me, one bumping me the way they do if they think you have some heat somewhere and are liable to grab for it on sudden surprising impact. We were asked to move back. A crazy woman danced and made nutty remarks at the edge of the little knot seeming to focus on one gent who left later after conversation with Jesse’s aides.

Then one woman I knew to be with the Jackson campaign over to me and asked me why was I waiting. I told her she shuffled through her papers and told me that there must be some mistake, that my presence was not on the schedule. Of course I protested. I had spoken with the top scheduling person who had talked directly to Jesse – I could hear her doing it – and it was she who told me what to do.

But now it was not on the schedule. I was wondering was this just the usual criss-cross of bureaucracy, or what, when the crazy woman started dancing just behind me. “Oh, is it my turn?” I told her and in a few seconds she withdrew. At that point G. Delores Tucker, former secretary of state of Pennsylvania, chairperson of the Black Democratic caucus, appeared through the door helping Mrs. Rosa Parks. I greeted them, introduced them to the children and chatted while we waited for Jesse.

In a few minutes the main group appeared. The first through the door, leading the way, was Inner City Broadcasting chairman and former Manhattan borough president, Percy Sutton. And then Jesse and his family. When I approached, “Hey, man what’s happening?”

Jesse bent in my direction saying, “I’m sorry, Imamu, but there’s no room.” As indeed there could not have been. At that point my daughter, Shani, armed with a tiny Polaroid camera I had given her to take pictures of the notables, snapped our picture. Later, the children would tell their mother that Jesse must have known me a long time to call me by the organizational title I held during the ‘60s, Imamu. History is filled with details.

The kids and I then had to scramble to get over to the convention center in time. Riding on a bus especially set up for carrying delegates and whoever back and forth. I took the kids and several other old friends I’d bumped into who were going over to viewing rooms equipped with tv monitors. This is where the people close to the delegates or officials or whoever watched. Then I took off across the street to the convention center.

But when I got there a few steps away there was a huge crowd of people outside and much weeping and wailing. There was no room in the convention either. Not even for many of the delegates. People waved their delegate badges and the press, including myself and many others, waved their various sets of credentials but the police said the place was overcrowded and no more people would be admitted. Not even the delegates!

Well if the delegates weren’t gong to be admitted, then who the hell was that inside taking up space? The argument rumbled at the top of many people’s voices all around the convention center. There was no room? Well who was there room for?

Thinking about it now such a situation could only be produced by the theatrical atmosphere such conventions produce normally, but now with the addition of the Jackson factor and the question which hung in balance above that convention and city and above us all. What would Jesse say? What would Jesse do? And this question had a celebrity dimension to it and a show business quality that brought out audience, not just delegates, just whoever had the whatever to make it.

At one point I saw Atlanta’s mayor, Andy Young, walking behind the glass walls with full entourage a picture of special pleading or was that importance? Enraged I could not get in I began to beat on the glass walls is to get Young’s attention.

He probably didn’t see me but a host of secret service chaps did and a small group came over waving at me to stop banging on the door. I didn’t so one pushed the door open and told me to stop. I banged again. Young hadn’t left and I was determined to get inside. This brought the fellow half way out the door. He told me if I banged the door again he’d arrest me. It seemed outrageous to me. I wasn’t banging at him in the first place. A loose now sparser crowd of the unadmitted looked on, one black radio reporter stepped forward with me. I banged again.

Now the secret service dude stepped forward outside the doors. “I’m gonna arrest you,” he was screaming.

“Hey, man, you don’t control shit out here…this is Atlanta. You need to take your ass back inside and be important somewhere else.”

There were two or three black Atlanta policemen standing a few steps behind me watching. I saw one’s hand go up to his mouth and I knew it was cool. They were not going to arrest me for this dude. And when he left they let it all come out in a big roar, “What’s your name, man?”

They could appreciate my argument. And they laughed like hell as the man went on his way scowling and talking at his wrist radio as he departed to show us we were still savages.

Coming around to the other side of our building still looking to get in the crowds of the left outside milled and trailed around like myself looking for a way in. I came upon a television newsman interviewing Rev. Ralph Abernathy, one time second in command to the Dr. King in SCLC. Now he was also standing on the outside (Martin Luther King, III was also kept outside, it made the next day’s papers.)

The newsman was asking about Abernathy’s being refused entrance to the convention: “What do you think Rev. Jackson would think about your being kept outside the convention tonight?”

“Oh, he wouldn’t like it at all. No, he wouldn’t like that at all. And I know this was a great speech, of the most important speeches ever made.”

Abernathy went on describing the complete inappropriateness of his being shut out, and as the newsmen finished he said, “And what is your name sir?”

I leaped into it, “You don’t know Rev Ralph Abernathy? Well how did you even get your job, you’re obviously not qualified if you don’t know who Ralph Abernathy is. He was Dr. King’s second in command in the Civil Rights movement?” But I was just covering my own embarrassment and pain at what was happening, that Abernathy could be standing here anonymously in the crowd disconnected from wherever this big top was going.

And as bizarre as this actual indication this had been one materialization of a general perception that the negroes were being asked to be the tail on the donkey or one main negro and the other “necessaries,” and for all the swirl and roar, the bravado and even sincere commitment of the rest of whoever… “us” or “them” that the only room on the donkey’s tail was for the tiny insects that live there.

I moped up the stairs in the large hall directly opposite the convention center and brooded as the various entertainers and comparisons were introduced. This was the night of the presidential nominations and Jesse would be one of the speakers. I drank Courvoisier and watched the show unfold.

Jesse’s whole presence had a magnetism about it that has diminished so rapidly it seems a long time ago already. The campaign, particularly after Super Tuesday, had given him real world statesman status. And as an independent presence, someone representing a specific constituency who had very concrete interests and the will and information to protect them. He had to be recognized and like it or not…like him or not, he must be given the weight of our claim, the respect for the implied power of his position.

Jackson’s response to Dukakis missed telephone message racism had done damage to that projection. It had brought a mumble of antipathy from the black masses and turned his image around in a way that made him seem very finite and vulnerable. You don’t let nobody insult you (us) like that. Bump Dukakis!, the oath.

But there was still the mystique of the well known, and Jesse had been our hope, even those of us who knew him when and who might even have put him down a decade or so ago for being a petty bourgeois opportunist. All of us had taken hope at the courageous picture Jesse made in opposing and exposing the gun-bearers of privilege and imperialism he was running against, beating them at every turn. Our man, big good looking, smart nigger.

But not just the question of the insult, that was just the answer to the question of when the white folks was gonna get to whiting. Where were our own priorities? Our own self determined agenda? What was it that we should be doing, armed with the actual dismissal of our humanity as “a problem”? Where was our agenda?

It was the argument that went on in the hotels where the black delegates and political activists and intellectuals were holed up. The line that kept emerging from the sincere and the others not publicly sold, “What are black folks going to get out of this?” The majority of black folks. Not just Sly and the Family Caucus.

The screen I watched the speech on was as big as a four or five story building. In glorious pseudo-color. There was a roaring all around like a sports event. It was not rock concert glitter serrating the edge of the picture but maybe Madison Square Garden one night forty years ago, when The Brown Bomber or Sugar was getting ready to come into the ring. I had my own view of what was going on, based on what I’d run into but also based on a long resident activism in the Black Liberation Movement, including a thorough knowledge of Jesse Jackson. So I was backed away from total submersion in the event. But the whirlwind of this heavyweight bout between fact and mythology, this gaudy class struggle on the big screen, had such giant roaring rhythm it caught me up in the amazing spectacle.

It is a kind of grandiose arrogance that hits first, the glitter and shine and sparkle and overblown self importance of the importantly manipulated. From the television it seemed a telethon for some new disease, a mass religious conversion or pretension. Circusy and carnival like, but for all that restrained and formal. Everything was fixed and plotted. There was no spontaneity given off just used up labor high polished for resale.

When I focused directly so I could also hear, Jackson was into his speech. What I wanted to know before was what ideas had let to this speech, what real objectives for the African American people, the Rainbow? But now the words were rolling out, the entire space held its breathless tension at our hero’s magnetic voice and rhythms.

“We meet at a crossroads,” he was saying. The camera panned incessantly getting the white folks’ reaction and the few others. There was a rapt attention widespread. These people, for whatever reason, were interested in what he was saying.

“Shall we expand, be inclusive, find unity and power, or suffer division and impotence?”

But this question seemed to have been answered. And its answer was now being read to the whole. When the lefts I’d felt the closest to had first come upon me it was to assure me that they were passing out literature among the Rainbow folk readying them for the Vice Presidential nomination. Dukakis’ nomination of Bentsen, the Democrats’ George Bush, was actually a violation of the people’s constitutional right to select a vice presidential candidate separately from the presidential candidate. People, according to the U.S. Constitution, voted for people, not parties or party choices.

These lefts’ job, they said, would be circulate the vice presidential nominating instructions and get the necessary petitions signed so they could spearhead the vice presidential nomination. But the rally, and the mounting evidence on all sides seemed to project that not only were black people to be transformed into bugs so they could ride safely in Dukakis’ tail, but even the so called anti-revisionist (i.e. anti the US Communist Party and Soviet Union) Left was being transformed into a tail pinned to the tail, and they were proud as hell of it for that matter.

But that other shoe had not hit yet, and Jesse was readying to drop it now. “Common Ground,” he was saying. “Think of Jerusalem…the birthplace for three great religions.” (Do the Israelis know that? ran through my head.)

“Common Ground! That is the challenge for our party tonight, Left wing. Right wing. Progress will come not through the boundless liberalism nor static conservatism, but at the critical mass of mutual survival. It takes two wings to fly.” (Our preachers excel in metaphor.)

“The bible teaches that when lions and lambs can lie down together and none will be afraid, there will be peace in the valley. Lions eat lambs, lambs sensibly flee from lions. Yet, even lions and lambs can find common ground. Why? Neither lions nor lambs want the forest to catch fire. Neither lions nor lambs want acid rain to fall. Neither lions nor lambs can survive nuclear war. If lions and lambs can find common ground, surely we can.”

When I heard that it broke my heart. Why? Because he had answered the question. Lions eat lambs. But then went on to un-answer it, and make it metaphysical and transparently opportunistic. Though at the end of this speech people hailed it widely, the media hailed it. But even some who were genuinely moved by the speech, if not by its pronouncements, then certainly by the gleaming aesthetic of its form, the deftness of handling of its content had to blanch at what Jesse was saying.

“Now we must build a quilt together.” He was likening U.S. society to one of his momma’s quilts. The one he spoke of now would be a quilt of lions and lambchop bones, of donkey’s tail and insects, of the rich and poor working together to keep both that way.

“Blacks and Hispanics, when we fight for civil rights, we are right – but our patch isn’t big enough,” suddenly everything was expendable if its expendability, the flexibility of its survival would provide an entrance into that craziness he was publicly aspiring to be accepted into. Even the liberation of the people who had borned him into the world, and upon whose very backs he had ridden into Atlanta for this convention like Jesus came into Galilee riding on another ass on a palm Sunday long ago, a few days before his rubout and later triumphant return from the dead. Jesse after the Atlanta debacle can be said to have experienced two thirds of the Jesus trip. Though his return from the dead remains in the mouth of speculation.

“Conservatives and Progressives, when you fight for what you believe, you are right – but your patch isn’t big enough.” You mean both the slave and the slavemaster are right? Both slavery and freedom are right? Is this what is required to qualify for the nomination as president of the United States, double talk and submission to the will of the mighty?

He would confirm this for us later by quoting a poem that began, “I am tired of sailing my little boat/ far inside the harbor bar / I want to go out where the big ships float…” But the living historically valid part of Jesse Jackson his real life ties with black working class life he would also make reference to. At best the living memory of himself necessary for what Du Bois called, “true self-consciousness” (as opposed to the “double consciousness” of the negro, who sees nothing directly but only sees himself and the world through the eyes of people who hate him). At worst though this living matter can be used to deceive, grass roots camouflage for anti grass roots ideology.

For instance when Jesse said near the end, “Most poor people are not on welfare. They work hard every day that they can. They sweep the streets. They work. They catch the early bus. They work. They pick up the garbage. They work. They feed our children in school. They work. They take care of other people’s children and cannot care for their own…” you could see black people openly weeping and whites too moved to some measure of understanding by this impressive, poetic brother. And yet…and yet…was it all for naught?

I know he broke me down near the end. Only the coldness of my perception and rationale of what all this was prevented some open weeping. The whole was a compendium of many of Jesse’s speeches throughout the campaign, and I had heard this part before as well. But it was still cutting, transporting, “Don’t give up. Hold on, for the morning comes. How do I know?...”

“I understand. I am the son of a teenage mother, who was the daughter of a teenage mother. I understand. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I understand.”

“You see Jesse Jackson on television. But you don’t know the me that makes me me. Jesse Jackson is my third name. I am adopted. I never spent a night in my daddy’s house. I really do understand.”

“Born in my mother’s bed. She couldn’t afford hospital care. I understand.”

“Born in a three room house. Bathroom in the back hard. Slop jar by the bed. I understand.”

“I am a working person’s person. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but a shovel in my hand. My mother was a working mother went to work with runs in her stockings so that I could have new socks and not be embarrassed in school. I really do understand.”

It was not just skill he maintained, but it was also feeling, real feeling. And that is Jesse’s danger to the Democrats and to white supremacy that he does feel the needs of the people but now in his personal quest for “acceptance” or “significance” or even Jesse Power (which is not quite the same as Black Power) he was willing to use the real to cover the deal.

For instance in the very next paragraph of that speech Jesse shows that he knows but also that he is willing to stall to get hold of the ball. But that ball is never coming his way except like those balls fixed to chains that are standard issue for many African Americans inside various joints, the Democratic party included.

Jesse was blowing hard and pretty, like a rhythm blade cut through most of us. “We didn’t eat turkey on three o’cloek on Thanksgiving day, because Momma was off cooking someone else’s turkey. We’d play football to pass the time till momma came home. Around six we would meet her at the bottom of the hill carrying back Du Carcass.”

Yes, I swear I heard it, and then in the hotel a black minister had verified it for me. The two of us telling everybody how Jesse had “laid on symbol” as the ancestor jailees used to say. “Lay on symbol.” In the transcript of the speech that has now been changed to “leftovers.” But he and we who heard know what he said and what he meant. That indeed this merriment was much like a holiday, and yes there were those of us down here who weren’t involved in the real business, we were just the marginalia the bubbles rising off the heady brew. We wanted to eat now, but all we were gonna get was Du Carcass, some leftovers. The white men and quite a few white women had already et.

It was a weird weird aura that gripped the country just after the speech. In the huge open hall where I sat, and later the media peoples bar there was a mixed expression it seemed to me. There had to be simple dismissal by the white majority since that is what their white supremacy instructed them to do, as far as consideration of Jesse’s candidacy or even comprehending his stand on the various issues. Jackson had pushed the whole of the electorate to the left, however, made them consider questions and stances that simply would never have been raised without him running in the primaries. So that there was also, along with the automatic dismissal, a stubborn sympathy, at Jackson’s courage?, his aggressiveness, his typical nigger problematic maddeningly continuous assertion of his (our) humanity.

Like the quick to snicker cynical media bar types. Forget the fact that I was fixing them in a clearly analytic stare from the beginning of the broadcast, until the end. Still, the quality of their responses to what was coming off the tube was easy dismissal crossed with a shadow of fresh consideration perhaps, like blowing pollen every several minutes would blow up their unsuspecting noses and there would be a lean, a curl, a certain coloring to their digging that carried a rumor of something human and common.

Talking to various people during the next few weeks brought that game cross reference, especially from whites. The need to diminish, but at the same time, the need to put that perspective, to claim after all that Jesse did “Have something.”

At the convention however the speech was a blanket air that pinned all of us together in some posture. And those evaluations were paradigms for what I would encounter once I got back home. For the most advanced, the speech was a pastiche of everything Jesse had said during the primaries, except he was intoning in tragic words, the invitation of public buggery that always prefaced the negro’s rise to the bottom.

At the other and of the political spectrum mention of the speech brought religious ecstasy and demonstration of the power of zombification. One would see throughout the rest of the convention that ossification of the Rainbow into a transportable herd of Jessephiles, most who did not understand that Jesse had already given the farm away. The others were the opportunists who benefit from peoples’ misinformation and pain.

One of the central topics that began to surface in the cross convention discussions was just who was it negotiating with the Democrats. If indeed negotiations were going on? Since the whole credibility of what Jesse was doing hinged on just what he was gonna get. Since the independent posture the primaries fostered had been generally if not totally dispelled, what Jesse was gonna get, the payoff had taken up much of the conversation since. This was the essence of Walter Fauntroy long-time civil rights activist, was saying when I first ran into him. And a host of others, it was obsessional but right on it. What, indeed would be payment for giving up your self-determination? Even in the closed context of black America relationship to the major imperialist parties. You had to get something. So what was it you was getting? In exchange for us, in exchange for these peepas behinds which you done give to the man.

This was the essence of what Farrakhan was asking, and the dissenters at the split rally. The Dukakis negroes’ press conference had even broken down into that. And Mayor Hatcher, an old friend since way back in ’72 and the National Black Assembly meeting in Gary, had even put the whole discussion in perspective by citing what Dukakis could not do, legally, so we could think more clearly about what he needed to do. In terms of demonstrating to the African American community that our support for him was not just an act of giving up our self-determination!

So it was one late night after many meetings that talking to an old political friend might give deeper insight into this whole process. This brother had been with Jesse since before Gary. In fact as far back as Operation Breadbasket, which was the Jesse break-off Chicago hook-up ostensibly a SCLC chapter but mostly Jesse. Probably even back before that. But certainly when Hatcher became 1st black mayor of a major US city, this brother was there, and so was Jesse. That’s when Jesse and Hatcher got tight as well.

But now in a discussion of what we was gonna get, or what Jesse was asking for and what it meant to the rest of us the brother started telling me that Jesse had gotten rid of all his old comrades in arms on his negotiating council with white folks. He said the campaign structure had not only excised many of the old heads, but replaced them with the folks who were almost the antithesis of what Jesse was saying earlier. The apotheosis of which was the white campaign manager, Gerald Austin, who personally fouled up a huge rally we put together at SUNY Stony Brook, in which several thousand students waited at the perimeter of our outside amphitheater while Gerald Austin, a few minutes before Jesse was to appear, and just a few miles away from Stony Brook decided to bring Jesse in. He put out some garbage about Jesse being ill, but he had spoken at several stops on Long Island before the Stony Brook Cancellation and a few stops afterwards.

This is the same manager who a few weeks after the convention was bragging about how much money he had made while he was in the campaign, but how he never believed in the campaign or agreed much with Jackson. But that the money had made it all worthwhile. One wants to know in the first place why was this dude even there? There are black electoral technicians across the country by now, who have been hugely successful. What is the Why? to that one wonders?

And now standing in the half lit rising quiet of last straggler hotel lobbies talking earnestly and quietly to an old friend, there is a sense of grim wonder. Is it a hollowness to us, that we cannot sustain what is required for our own self-determination? What is it in a white campaign manager that says so much about the whole process of Jesse Jackson’s run for president, once it really got to be that and his own mind was infected with that real fantasy, that he was running for president.

But it must be the Double Consciousness Du Bois spoke of, it cannot be anything else. So we must embrace any poisonous confection as “good for us” when actually it’s good for somebody else, it’s just that we’re seeing the world through that somebody else’s eyes and not our own. Otherwise the question of Self-Determination would be less misunderstood among us, and there would be less “misdefining” it so it seemed fantastic or oppressive to somebody else, or generally without merit.

So now I was being told that Jesse had stripped his inner circle of those forces who knew him from the Gary/Black Power days. From the days when Jesse had risen in the National Black Convention making a resolution that the assembled pursue the idea of putting together a Black political party.

“Even Mayor Hatcher is gone now,” the brother was telling me.

“Hatcher?” I couldn’t believe it. There was nobody anywhere who was more of a Jesse supporter than Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana. In fact, in the last few years when one mentioned Hatcher, one thought of Jesse Jackson.

“Why?”

“They said he was ‘too strident’,” the brother was saying.

“Too strident? What the hell you talking about? You know Hatcher, he doesn’t even talk loud…”

“Well that’s what they said…He was too strident.”

“Who the hell said that?”

“Bentsen,” the brother said, and this was someone who certainly would know.

“Bentsen?” I remember there in the darkening hotel lobby I actually started to weep.

Had it gone that far? Was it really, literally about mass denial and opportunism, again? Surely Jesse could not stand up in front of these millions and be seen as the committee of such an outrage. Hatcher?

Had it gone that far? Was it really, literally about mass denial and opportunism, again? Surely Jesse could not stand up in front of these millions and be seen as the committer of such an outrage. Hatcher?

This is the first time I was given any rundown on Ron Brown, like Dukakis himself, a product of a Special Products Division of Teddy Kennedy, Inc. Any checkout of the RB vita will show that Ron ain’t been around to many bloods in his rise to we know now. In Atlanta I simply wondered how he had got so far so fast, but with this fill in it became clearer. And certainly with Brown’s helicopter like rise to Democratic party chairman, the plot not only thickened it congealed into something ugly and nasty.

But dig this, Brown is sent into Jesse’s camp very late as the connection needed to raise up the Jackson (Negro & Black/Progressive) demands to the level of human understanding. All that grunting about Self Determination and Black Power wouldn’t do. We all saw where that stuff leads. Next thing you know, niggers be walking around taking about what they think and shit…!

But than once Brown gets the colored imprimatur, viz the “wit Jessse” then he shows up as leading contender for the Dem party chair’s job, whereupon the first thing he says is that he don’t represent no niggers in the first place, never has and never will! Whew! Slick as a derringer.

Then we see him later speaking at the New Orleans summit a sad reprise of the ’72 Gary convention and he is there selling the Democratic party and actually has the mammy tappin temerity to mention Fanny Lou Hamer’s name and how he is standing on her shoulders. No, he is defiling her memory and insulting all the rest of us, that’s what he’s doin.

To add insult to injury the Lefts I had been running with sent a person to see me saying they had to talk to me. There was some further bric-a-brac through a phone call, and finally late late at night, they, about five, arrived at my room for pow wow. From the outset of the convention I had not been close to them. Their whole stance seemed to me too much of a tail of the tail on the stumbling racist donkey. And this after years of struggling with them to see that electoral politics is relevant in the U.S., that it is a suitable arena for the genuine Left. That this is bourgeois democracy, unlike China or Russia. And that the legal struggle, voting &c., as Mao taught must be carried all the way to the end. For instance all these black mayors and black politicians ought at least to be passing Anti-Klan laws in these cities of black plurality and majority and even where we are the minority. They should be passing anti-Racism laws, making it a jail offense with a fine, say, for practicing racism. Even the calling of names should be treated like an assault, and the Anti-Racism law would see these folk doing some time. I mean it is absurd to me for people to talk about revolution and can’t even elect someone to a local school board.

But climbing into the dirty arena of bourgeois politics, whether electoral politics or trade union work does not mean you are converted to bourgeois politics. But so much like the classic definition of the middle class, these folks were going from one extreme to another, just like an unbalanced middle.

So now fresh from nixing electoral politics altogether for the last eight years they now wanted to worship the sacred behind of political mediocrity. At the ’80 convention in San Francisco they were made tail-ready, and now here they sat trying to get me, in the name of “democratic centralism” to turn into the tail’s tail, and they themselves had become sad tales of opportunism.

The gist of their jive was that now they would not nominate Jesse as Vice President. Their evaluation of the Dukakis-Bentsen nausea was that the main tails were going to get Bentsen to change his position on some of the key issues. For instance they thought that he would change his position on Contra aid as well as aid for the notorious South African puppet Jonas Savimbi.

As far as tailing the tail the transformation was almost complete. The group sat there trying to convince me that being a tail’s tail was revolutionary work.

I caught up to Jesse that next day finally at an SCLC event at one of the hotels, presided over by Rev Lowery, SCLC’s current president. The dais bristled with SCLC bigshots, plus Ben Hooks, head of the NAACP.

Waiting for Jesse to enter, I went to the dais to talk to Hooks and Lowery. I asked about the tv program where Dukakis came to speak after the Bentsen nomination and missed phone message racism. Hooks had maintained his invitation to Dukakis for this major NAACP function and many black people criticized him for it. Many even carried signs at the dinner itself criticizing Dukakis and putting Jesse’s name forward. So many that Hooks had to scatter them to save a little face.

But Hooks h ad made some statement in his introduction that this constituency wanted Jesse but that Bentsen should not fear because they were open minded, &c. That was smooth, I began, how you handled the Dukakis appearance at your dinner. Hooks was acknowledging his smoothness when Lower piped in. “That’s because he’s such an expert in Tomming…” Lowery was cracking up.

“But I learned everything I know about Tomming from you Reverend. “ And the laugher got bigger. It was all loose and friendly, but at the same time there was a worn out spot of contention lingering easy to spot, from several paces away.

These were rivals, contenders, in a sense. And they both reveled in the fact of their being that, that there was such a field in which to “rival” each other, but at the same time each had a body of real experience and information about the world, and a serious position in human society to show for it.

I suppose also, since I was a licensed militant, this was Lowery keeping his franchise warm at Hooks’ expense. Though it should be said now, that given the nature of that gathering, Jesse coming to claim that ex officio throne of SCLC, not for any formal position, simply the most worshipful spot, Hooks acquitted himself one of the bunch in a way I hadn’t known. After Lowery and Fauntroy singing his standard, “The Impossible Dream” and Rev Willie Barrow, Jesse’s associate preacher at PUSH and before the Operation Breadbasket, Hooks came on like Zora Neale’s Rev Lovelace. Mean he actually like they say, low down preached. But then he knew he was setting the stage for Jesse.

When Jesse came in, I was making all kinds of gestures and sending notes telling him I wanted to talk to him, and finally though I could see he did not seem particularly overjoyed about it he was nodding his head from the stage up and down, yes.

Secret Service folks were collected like they do. And after Jesse’s speech getting up through them to the stage was a major piece of work.. We shot out the back door, and while photographers were taking his picture, a large group of employees, kitchen workers, waiters, all gathered in the tiny space just behind the hotel where we stood as Jesse’s picture got taken, Jesse was posing and didn’t see them at first, but I pointed at the people there and he turned and lit up like a Christmas tree. He began talking to these people, answering questions, the cameramen snapping away. And it was real, 1st that the black masses do or did adore Jesse. I say did because I do not think that adoration is as high today as it was before the Dukakis insult or before the convention. 2nd, Jesse does genuinely feel what he says when he would sing out, “Yes, you domestic workers, truck drivers, cab drivers, waiters, workers on the assembly line, when I get to be president, you’ll have a friend in the white house!”

And that is a powerful implication in this land of corporate domination and workers exploitation, for a presidential candidate to say and mean that…a friend in the white house for working people, particularly black working peolpe. And gradually over the campaign when the zig zag smoke of color was occasionally pierced, you could hear the establishment complaining as much about Jesse’s “leftist – radical – non-mainstream” position on the issues as about his color. It was Paul Robeson, I think who summed up his position, and the position of black activists in U.S. society in general, saying, “Two things the establishment doesn’t like about me are my nationality and my opinions!”

But it was just this legitimate and authentic relationship between the black masses and Jesse Jackson that was his real strength, no matter what the dull candidates or the corporate stooge media had to say. From Super Tuesday on, all the black masses wanted was someone to stand up for them or stand up with them. Someone to speak on their behalf, some leader who genuinely had their interests, all of our interests at heart.

And Jesse has always had the problem of balancing his genuine feeling for black people with his own personal needs and projections. He said elsewhere he wanted to be a workhorse not a show-horse. But how to keep those priorities and principles on top and straight ahead, …not compromised into submission and non-existence. This is one of the abiding contentions about Jesse, that his candidacy this last time had seemed to put to rest. So that even though the “hustler” slander was dropped on Jackson by the legalized dope now in the white house, made you wanna call his momma the real hustler, still to be for real that put-down had plagued Jesse since Operation Breadbasket.

And the question now was how did all this get finally to be about the Democratic party? It didn’t begin about them. Certainly in the 1972 Gary Convention, calling for a black political party, it wasn’t about the Democrats or the Republicans, it was about Self Determination for the African American people. This is the question that was rising through the community now: was there something Jesse was getting to go along with Dukakis and company? Dukakis had been nominated and aside from Jesse’s speech, a glittering anthology of Jesse’s greatest hits, what had we gotten? Had Jesse gotten something, and the rest of us, as usual (like the Democratic convention in Miami in 1972, or any other time) been left in the dust blown up by our politicians gum bumping?

And now tonight, the vice presidential showdown was roaring towards us. What would Jesse do now, where would all of us be, as a result of this? These things were blowing through my mind as I stood watching Jesse be photographed with the workers exchanging words and banterings in a kind of breathless joy.

In the limousine, with Jesse and Ron Walters, the Howard University political science teacher, and one of Jesse’s key advisors as well as an old comrade in struggle from the National Black Assembly, and Walter Fauntroy, I rode in the jump seat facing Jesse, my questions scrawled out on a steno notebook. This was going to be the interview, on the way to wherever on Jackson’s monstrous schedule.

Nothing was said directly about last night’s intro to Mainstream American Mythology via the speech or the fallout. Although the 1st ecstasies were already giving away to a coarser evaluation in terms of the old form vs. content saw. As the car sped through downtown Atlanta, people recognizing Jesse and the ss folk in their accompanying cars would smile and wave, or jump up and down and point, or stare relevantly.

I had to talk fast because of the way this was going down. In the car on the way to somewhere else, I came on like a reporter. Essence Magazine, the magazine of Black Women. Although our relationship, all of us in the car, could not be leapfrogged so that the dialogue was completely tactful or completely tactless. “What effect do you think Dukakis’ naming of Bentsen as his vice presidential running mate will have on black voters?”

All of us had thrown that question around, and had come up with many answers. Even in the Black Democrat press conference I had asked that. That night when Dan Rostenkowski, the Chicago congressman was begging for white Democrats to come back and I had sneaked behind Moynihan and asked him if he thought that strategy would work? His “We think so,” sounded extremely white breadish.

Our opening cross banter had centered directly on What was we gonna get, as a very fat and bottom line question I had relayed to him directly from the folk. So as I whipped out the pad and told him I had about four solid questions I wanted to ask. He began by answering the exchange knowing exactly what was on my mind. “You know the question in the street is what are we gonna get, what is Dukakis gonna give up in exchange for our support?”

“Well, you know it can’t all come out, and a lot of people don’t understand the process of political negotiations. But we have got something, something real. For instance, Conyers’ On Site Voter Registrations bill was passed (in the Democratic platform committee) you know that is important, and will put thousands of new voters on the books, bring thousands of new Democrats into the field.”

He talked about this bill as if I didn’t know that Conyers had put this together as far back as the 1972 convention. In fact as he cited the legislative pluses black folks were receiving I was struck by how much of it did come out of that historical 1972 meeting of 8000 black people. It also brought Dick Hatcher back to my mind, and my own tears of the night before.

“The Dellums South African sanctions. This would knock 50 to 100 billion dollars out of that racist economy. That’s what we can do.”

“The D.C. bill will mean two senators from the District of Columbia, and thousands of jobs, and increase our ability to influence domestic and foreign policy.”

“But what effect will Dukakis’s choice of Bentsen, someone directly opposed to both these planks, and a whole lot of other things you’ve talked about have on black people?”

“Dukakis will have to earn black people’s vote. I earned it, I convinced them I would represent their interests. But Dukakis will have to go the areas. Gain a certain comfort level. Learn to speak to black people…”

I wanted to press him on the main question. “But what about the Vice Presidency. A lot of people want you to be nominated, think that’s the only way we would have a real voice…”

Jesse did not pause, “If I run tonight (for VP nomination) I would win.”

So it was not that he didn’t think he could win. I thought perhaps it was that.

“But win in July lose in November…”

It sounded like he had put both feet down in the Democrat party ark.

“You wouldn’t run independently? People don’t know anything about any Bentsen.”

“Bentsen would be able to recover lost Democrats. I have a block of voters, assumed. He has to revive his.”

Yes, now its clear we both know that. And the others riding in the car. And a whole other bunch of other folks. So why this direction, this going along with the Donkeys?

“But we have a legislative agenda. Bentsen in the senate supporting D.C. statehood. Things do change. His record does make us uneasy. But we think we can get him to pledge no Contra aid (in Nicaragua) and the support of D.C. statehood. It would mean a net shift of 2 senate seats. That’s real power.”

Plus, you don’t make Thursday decision on Sunday. We have to deal with n ow. The power available now. And we have to use it in a mature away. Zogman raising the Palestinian question. So that becomes a reality on the planks. We can get support on that now. There’s a price for winning.”

“But talking about Bentsen. Suppose the Democrats lose in November anyway?”

Without batting an eye, “If the Democrats lose in November, I’m running in 92.”

“But don’t you think the Vice Presidential nomination would be a means of consolidating some real power?”

“I’m not encouraging the Vice Presidential nomination.” This was an absolute reversal of what the preening Lefts had told me previously. I was sure too that they knew it, that they had been told. And in response simply zipped up their tail suits all the way up around the ears and eyes.

Jesse was giving his justification. “That would play directly into Reagan & Bush’s hands. I think it’s a political option we should avoid. We would have no access to Bush.”

The question of What? Jumped into my mouth again. But Jesse went on. “We have Democratic party leadership within our grasp. Eight at large seats on the Democratic National Committee Friday? Now that’s different!” He was laughing and the rest in the car laughed. Different meaning that was the real power, that was the great What?

“Black folks gave the U.S. Senate back to the Democrats. We have to study politics as a science, not emotionally or romantically, or trading our integrity.”

It seemed the last statement was aimed at not only the unhip black masses but for militants like your reporter who was still wanting to know what all this had to do with real self determination.

“But there has to be a tension between your platform planks and Bentsen’s…”

“South Africa as a terrorist state.” He was reciting the Whats? Again. Conyers’ Voter Registration bill. Make the anti-terrorist bill applicable to South Africa. Companies can be ordered out of a terrorist state. We don’t trade with a terrorist state. And all the definitions of a terrorist state must now apply to South Africa.

“Our plank about no first use of nuclear weapons. Our plank about fair taxes. Taxing the rich not the middle class and the poor. We’re developing the power of negotiation. The tax plank is gaining favor with the convention. Eleven out of fourteen of the minority planks will be accepted. Eighty percent of our delegates have reached the convention. We have to show consistency not schizophrenia. But we have to be Eternally Vigilant,” he was putting a heavy emphasis on it because we had reached the hotel. “Otherwise everything could turn to garbage. any contract is only as good as your ability to enforce it.”

There was more, ends and threads. In the main a boastful declaration that Yes, indeed, black people and progressive people were going to get something out of Jesse’s decision to go along with the Democrats. It could even be rolled around in your mouth to sound like it had something to do with Black Power. But I felt nothing. I had been talking to a politician. One I had known a long time, one I even loved in many ways, but now what he said was not convincing to me. Also, I had noticed as the convention came up and certainly afterward on the confused trail toward the November election, Jesse talked less and less directly about the issues: Comprehensive Budge, Fair Taxes, Military Spending. The Middle East, Central America, Africa, Women’s Education, Health Care, and began to compact all of his inspirational platform to the throwaway slogan, “Up with Hope, Down with Dope!” As if that was the key to black self determination and equality. As if it was crack that had brought us here on the slave ship. Dope that had stripped us of self determination and put us on plantations and now the big city ghettos which were just continuations of the plantation slave quarters. As if it was dope that deprived us education, employment, housing, dope that made us victims of polite brutality and white supremacy.

Certainly in a Dukakis Bentsen world Jesse claiming he was the general in charge of the war on drugs was preferable to Jesse talking about the U.S. one sided pro-Israeli policy in the Middle East, or U.S. corporate support for fascist South Africa or no contra aid. And Jesse had already begun to comply, at least it seemed that way to me and some of the other kindred sourpusses I held my non-stop discussions with.

Earlier in the year, in Iowa, Jesse had pleaded with me to come with his campaign to be one of his fighters. I was one of his fighters, but I didn’t think then I could be part of the campaign. I wondered what would have happened had I accepted his offer and worked with the campaign, I would suppose in the capacity of a writer and organizer. What would it have been like facing these questions with answers very different from the ones I was getting from Jesse? But that seemed a long time ago now, and our concerns had pushed us apart I thought. Was this same process going on with the large masses of black people? And how would that be registered?

With some more banter and back and forth and a promise to get back together I got out of the car with them at the Marriott and we went our separate ways. Tonight would spell it all out much more clearly.

So “tail” was the name of the game that black folks and the Rainbow were supposed to play. I had heard it from the horse’s mouth. However it was described to me, what it still seemed like was like those slaves before they let us fight in the civil war trailing behind Sherman’s soldiers. They thought that was the safest place.

Even worse, the so called Left has approached me late that night, even after my weeping fit over Hatcher and in a tiresome and chauvinist display of opportunism demanded allegiance from me to their careerist cavorting. Since the chosen few of these folks had already gotten jobs with the campaign or elsewhere the Rainbow touched and these jobs seemed their goal, their reinforced importance.

At one point I wanted to know why only the nonblack folks had gotten such jobs, but this is the subject of another very serious contemplation. I asked at another point what did they think the Palestinians must think of these so called progressives who openly betrayed them on the floor and agreed not to raise the Palestinian question, so as not to upset the backward racists who ran the Democratic party. “The Palestinians agreed,” they shot.

“The Palestinians got a bourgeoise too,” was all I could say. Even as oppressed, even as the African American people were oppressed and still at the same time had a bourgeosie like as not willing to joyfully cavort with the instruments of their oppression squealing with bought pleasure.

What it all did was reveal that already there was a built in lie for this truth we sought. Just as in every development of black music, there was always a commercial shadow, a paid lie to cover it, to hide the history of meaning, the philosophy of that aesthetic that might help change the whole society, so Jesse’s campaign, the rainbow, all of it already had a co-opt factor, a false aspect, a contradiction that grew up with it, that would try to make us believe that there was nothing possible but nothing and as usual, our enemies owned that, and would give us a taste if we promised to play dead.

At the convention the next night I went from delegation to delegation pushing the line of nominating Jesse for VP and thus overturning the sad line of co-optation and opportunism white supremacy had put together for us to swallow.

I went to those delegations that had the largest concentrations of black people. And from each almost in rote I heard. “Jesse told us not to.” Just as he said he had. Urging them to nominate him anyway did no good. From Jersey, New York, Mississippi, South Carolina, Michigan, on and on, came the same answer.

“If you ever see me one night dead drunk and naked walking up the midle of the street babbling out of my mind,” I told two ranking folks in the New Jersey delegation and some of the New York folks who were passing anti-UNITA leaflets around, as opposition to Bentsen’s pro-UNITA, pro-Savimbi (a South African puppet) position. “Take me inside, off the street, no matter what I tell you, hear?”

But then there are street coaches of drunken naked foolishness, who are slick tonight, who sparkle tonight, whose names are colored names, whose skin is colored, whose teeth are very white though and send signals to their masters on call. Look, they are here amongst us shaking hands, skinning and grinning, clean as new money. There as Wonder Woman tries to sing “…the rocket’s red glare” while Donna Felisa Rincon de Gautier, former mayor of San Juan, awaits to be recognized. While George McGovern whiffs and pumps like speech after the medley by the high school bands. The Democrats are using John Philip Sousa so we will not understand at first that these are not picnic band songs but the invitation to the same conflagration “The Reag” urges us to. Picnic Martial!

Negroes named Ron and Willie and Sharon and Charlie and Percy have our lives in their hands amongst the Babbits who look like Donald Sutherland as elegant yuppie of the breadbasket. There’s Bill Bradley a jock yup, he’s a good guise used to play remember with the nigs. Hey, and there’s Superman, I mean Clark Kent, uh, Gore in mufti glowing like an ubermensch.

Then Barbara Jordan in to praise Bentsen and the Democrats her elegant baritone now somewhat shaky, beaming on the 100 foot screen. Two weeks later she almost died from the effort.

“Barbara, Barbara,” they’re calling. I’m standing among a group of paraplegics in wheelchairs poised at the edge of the huge crowd.

She sounds like Jesse, like what is rhetorically appropriate. “We must take the moral high-ground. Lloyd Bentsen is sensible, logical, rational…We must temper our emotions.”

James Forman talks to me like a distant ghost. He is saying. “Support the party…” I’d wanted a hotdog, and there was a line. But “…the party?” No, he’d said “….the ticket.” But there was no ticket.

Jesse had told me. “Imamu, there’s no room…” And it was not just to me he was talking.

Forman was saying, “I support Dukakis because of his firm position on peace in Central America.” This was an old comrade in struggle. He was smiling like it beat memory away from him, in stiff stubborn geometrical curves. Walking away he was even more shadowy, and I loved him for it, for just being in the lobby fading into the hotdog buyers and not on the starry platforms among the Dutch Moriels and Tom Bradleys. There’s my old friend Mickey Leland, Texas congressman, used to be in the N.B.A. He’s introducing…

Maybe it was Senator Glen who said the separation of church and state was what the people needed not Mathew, Mark, Luke and John as interpreted by Bush, Meese and Reagan…Swaggart and Baker. He said if they wanted more years “maybe they could get ten to twenty.”

That was funny, but I forget just how it was said. There were billions of red, white and blue balloons, crepe paper, hats, raps, images, and most of all lies. Swinging, being blown and waved. Covering the truth then being the truth. There was nothing else. That was the truth. The black people mostly grinned and were beat down overwhelmed by the cardboard box and ribbon, the noise makers and their brothers and sisters clean as Ho’s teeth in charge of the charge backwards.

And finally that is what it was, by the Democratic party certainly and by those black folks charged by us all with coming away with some direction some indication some clue as to where we move for self determination, without which there is no democracy.

Throughout the night both lifting toward the Bentsen bomb, his appearance, Rostenkowski heralded, at least as vulgar as the racism that made it necessary, and all that came after, heading toward the supposed orgasm of Dukakis coming, live, it all seemed a rising tinsel of swelling scream, but on a tin horn. A cheap horn. Maybe because of the endless J.P.Sousa caress that makes all thought cheap.

And I had already seen on the front page of the Atlanta newspaper young black militants crying when Jesse spoke, and I knew if you talked to them about it they would have explanations. A shrug that acknowledged raw emotion and backhanded political clarity and principle. But this was this time and not another. A time when backwardness clogged all entrances and only death was alive and well.

I remember Ted Kennedy and the balloons being released. A stage full of banners and big Jennifer Holliday singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Jackie Jackson inside the sea of flags and Jesse next to Mrs. Bentsen. And Mike and Kitty looking at each other. I remember Jesse’s family arrayed the night before he spoke the deference to the children yet it is not too out of line to suggest that the worst weight of all this long march has been on his wife. You could see it when you talked to her and when you saw her that night on tv, or this night among the white stars of this tacky firmament.

And then Dukakis was speaking. He was laying out his cold curt remedy for paper illness and paper regard. His cold cereal and cold supper. Of high standards and justice of the Ayatollah and Bentsen and Jesse’s children being intelligent (unlike most of black ours!) and of his new grandchildren and of Bush and Reagan and of a new era of greatness in America, which now we know to be drum majored in by Bush and Quayle, when here we thought vaudeville was over a long time ago.

Dukakis was saying, “We will never bring disgrace upon the country, by any act of dishonesty or cowardice…” but hadn’t it all been done already? It was dishonest to suggest that Dukakis was a better candidate than Jackson and it was cowardly for the party not to acknowledge Jesse as a legitimate Vice Presidential candidate. And since Jesse insists on valorizing the Dems with his “me too” ism he is implicated as well.

The question of a black presidential candidate and even a black president is not so much at issue as the question of black democracy, self determination and equality in the United States. The ex-slave is still displaced after emancipation and without reconstruction. The 30,000,000 African Americans will still have not even a representative in the Senate, though, many now question whether there should even be a senate with two senators for Utah as well as New York, that’s hardly one man one vote.

Jesse’s decision to go along with the Democratic party’s description of him as a non-being means that the will and self determination of the African American people is still being suffocated under the weight of white supremacy.

The peculiar description of Jesse’s role during the Dukakis-Bush campaign, problematical and racially polarized is clear indication of this. Jesse’s retreat from the issues to just the servant’s yodel of “Up with Hope, Down with Dope” is more.

But our push for Jesse is part of our push for ourselves. We do not just want another famous Negro famous for being with white folks. We want democracy in America, we want equality. Jesse represented our desire for Self Determination, the shaping of our won lives with the same opportunity possessed by any other American. But Jesse’s great run ended with ignominious confirmation of our continued slavery. The convention finally, I could understand, was just the big house during holiday season. And now the house negroes did sing and dance and clap their hands. And were it not for the fact that there was an outside to the house, and the night real and moving way in all directions, in which real people lived and desired, all of these goings on would not seem like utter foolishness. But there is, and they did.

July 1988 – June 1989, Atlanta/Newark

From May, 2009

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