Jesse Jackson: A Candid Conversation with the Civil Rights Leader

In February, America celebrates Black History Month. As such, each Monday this month Playboy SFW will re-publish seminal interviews with 1960s civil rights leaders. This week, we feature our November 1969 conversation with Jesse Jackson, who at the time appeared to be the heir apparent to the slain Martin Luther King, Jr. Enjoy the story in its entirety, and to read every article the magazine has ever publishedfrom 1953 until todayvisit the complete archive at iplayboy.com.

In the 19 months since the murder of Martin Luther King, only one man has emerged as a likely heir to the slain leader's pre-eminent position in the civil rights movement: Jesse Louis Jackson, the 27-year-old economic director of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Reverend Jackson's first national exposure, in fact, came as a result of his closeness to Dr. King. He was talking to King on the porch of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when the fatal shot was fired and cradled the dying man in his arms. The very next day, at a Chicago City Council meeting, Mayor Richard Daley read a eulogy that pledged a "commitment to the goals for which Dr. King stood." The Reverend Jackson had flown in from Memphis without sleep to attend the ceremony; he stood up in a sweater stained with Dr. King's blood and shouted to the assembled Chicago political establishment, "His blood is on the hands of you who would not have welcomed him here yesterday."

That gesture demonstrated both the militant indignation and the dramatic flair that mark Jackson's charismatic style. The New York Times has written that he "sounds a little like the late Reverend Martin Luther King and a little like a Black Panther." It added that "almost everyone who has seen Mr. Jackson in operation acknowledges that he is probably the most persuasive black leader on the national scene."

Jackson's personality is possibly even more in tune with the present black mood than Dr. King's was, because, as Richard Levine pointed out in Harper's, "Dr. King was middle-class Atlanta, but Jesse Jackson was born in poverty in Greenville, South Carolina." Jackson calls himself a "Country preacher," but he combines his down-home style with a sharp intellect. He attended the University of Illinois for one year but dropped out in 1960 to attend the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina in Greensboro, where the first black sit-in had taken place earlier that year. He was an honor student, quarterbacked the football team and organized civil rights demonstrations. After graduation, Jackson went North to study at the Chicago Theological Seminary, where he devoted most of his extracurricular time to local civil rights work.

It was Dr. King himself who originally spotted Jackson's leadership potential during a massive civil rights drive in Chicago in the summer of 1966 and appointed him to head all of SCLC's economic projects in the North. In the three years since that appointment, Jackson has concentrated most of his efforts on the Chicago-based project called Operation Breadbasket and made that pilot program the most impressive demonstration of black economic and political power in the United States. Breadbasket's organizational methods are now being applied under Jackson's guidance in 15 cities ranging from Los Angeles to Brooklyn.

The project's primary goals are to create jobs for blacks and to encourage them to own and operate businesses. Boycotting, or the threat of it, is Breadbasket's most potent weapon. The effectiveness of this technique was most evident in a breakthrough victory over the huge Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which operates 40 stores in Chicago's black ghetto. To avoid the financial loss that a boycott would have caused, the A & P signed a pact guaranteeing jobs for blacks and the distribution of black products on A & P shelves. As Business Week reported in a story about Operation Breadbasket, "Nationally, the organization's efforts have resulted in about 5000 jobs and $40,000,000 in annual salaries to Negroes. But the Chicago campaign [against A & P] represents Breadbasket's most significant victory, for it is the biggest settlement with a chain, in a single city, and set a precedent for other food chain negotiations across the country."

The A & P pact was especially significant becausein addition to a guarantee of over 700 jobs for blacks and marketing more black businessmen's productsthe company also agreed to use black owned janitorial and exterminating companies in its ghetto stores, to bank in black-owned banks, to advertise in black media and to have black construction firms build its ghetto stores. Monthly meetings between representatives of A & P and Breadbasket are designed to assure that the company is not shirking. On the personal level, sensitivity seminars attended by A & P executives attempt to awaken management to the existence and effects of prejudice. Similar agreements have been signed with more than half of all the major food distributors in the ghetto.

The Reverend Jackson created an even more far-reaching program last spring, when he initiated the Illinois Hunger Campaign. Believing that hunger is the one issue that could unite the black and white poor, Jackson led a caravan to all of the poverty areas of Illinois, ending with demonstrations at the state capital in Springfield. The pressure this exerted on the Illinois legislature was so great that a planned cut of $125,000,000 in welfare funds was restored at a time when New York and California were making sizable cuts in their welfare payments. An impassioned appeal by Jackson, from the steps of the capitol building, inspired a bill to provide school lunches for all of the needy children in the state. Jackson also extracted a promise from the state legislature to prevail on Washington for special surplus-food allotments for the poor. The Illinois Hunger Campaign was conceived by Jackson as an extension of the Poor Peoples' Campaign begun by Dr. King, and there are plans for similar efforts in other states next year.

No matter what his other commitments may be, Jackson always attends the Saturday-morning meeting of Operation Breadbasket. The location has been changed three times this year, because the congregation continually outgrows its premises, and Breadbasket presently resides in a 6000-seat movie theater on Chicago's South Side. The lobby of the theater is filled with tables displaying black merchandise, and the auditorium itself is hung with signs that exhort the gathering to BUY BLACK PRODUCTS and USE BLACK SERVICES. The first hour of the meeting is devoted to Gospel music by the Operation Breadbasket orchestra and choir, interspersed with the business for the weekeither boycotts or special "buyins." PLAYBOY's Associate Articles Editor, Arthur Kretchmer, who conducted this interview with Jackson, describes the remainder of a recent meeting.

Read this article:
Jesse Jackson: A Candid Conversation with the Civil Rights Leader