A Footnote on Jesse Jackson

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 20, 2026

 

I am skeptical about ineffable qualities ascribed to the high and mighty—“presence” and “star power” and such things—but the Rev. Jesse Jackson had something about him that had a lot more in common with Clint Eastwood than with Al Gore. Even in 2012, when we had a short conversation at the Democratic National Convention—when Jackson was a somewhat diminished man and one who had been thoroughly surpassed—there was a kind of aura of historical significance about him. Hillary Rodham Clinton pretentiously titled her memoir Living History, but Jesse Jackson seemed like an example of just that, like a man who should have been photographed exclusively in black-and-white wearing a skinny tie.

 

One expects that history will extend to Jesse Jackson the same indulgence it has extended to his mentor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and to such figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and (to a lesser extent) Thomas Jefferson—he was on the right side of the immensely important issue with which he was most intimately associated, and, while that is not everything, it is enough. And that is an excellent prospect for the reputation of Jesse Jackson, who, like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi and (to a lesser extent) Thomas Jefferson, had a lot of bad political ideas and some positively daft economic ideas, some of which got worse over the years. He slid into bigotry from time to time—it wasn’t just his dismissal of Jewish New York as “Hymietown”—and was less than exemplary in the conduct of his personal life, being, as the diplomats used to politely put it, a man of commendable vigor, fathering an out-of-wedlock child at the age of 57.

 

Jackson’s low-key antisemitism was, for a time, important enough to constitute a subject of New York Times headlines and Lou Reed songs. Beyond the noted business with his casual deployment of anti-Jewish slurs, Jackson—the Reverend Jackson—kept some rough company. He conducted freelance foreign policy, embracing—literally embracing—the terrorist goon Yasser Arafat and his so-called Palestinian Liberation Organization; he maintained a long and warm relationship with the antisemitic crackpot Louis Farrakhan, one that was more extensive than even Jackson-style racial realpolitik required and that lasted until the political cost became too heavy, the moral cost never having been considered; he was a mentor to the Rev. Al Sharpton, a cynical trafficker in antisemitic tropes and a man with Jewish blood on his hands in the matter of the Crown Heights riots and the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. Jesse Jackson was the second-most-notable antisemite (after the more outrageous David Duke) in the 1988 presidential race.

 

Antisemitism has been a part of radical African American politics for about as long as there has been such a thing. For the better part of a century now, survey data has chronicled strong antisemitic views among African Americans, with antisemitism being more pronounced among younger and more educated African Americans. Eunice Pollack of the University of North Texas has compiled some illuminating findings: A 1970 survey identified antisemitic attitudes among 35 percent of African Americans aged 50 and up—but 73 percent among African Americans in their 20s. A 1981 survey found antisemitic beliefs among 42 percent of African Americans, more than twice the rate of white Americans; in a 2005 report, the incidence of “strong antisemitic beliefs” among black Americans was four times that of white Americans; a 2020 study found that 15 percent of white liberals held antisemitic views—and 42 percent of black liberals. In the 1980s and 1990s, some of that antisemitism took on a patina of academic respectability (as in the work of Leonard Jeffries) and a bit of glamour thanks to its association with black celebrities. As Pollack reports:

 

Despite all the evidence of enduring Jew-hatred, few Black leaders openly condemned it, with many taking refuge behind the formula voiced by the African American novelist James Baldwin in 1972 that “the powerless, by definition, can never be ‘racists.’”… With this license, Black student activists provided the platforms from which militants/nationalists regularly delivered antisemitic harangues in arenas jammed with cheering—and a few jeering—students. At the University of Maryland in 1986, Kwame Ture (formerly, Stokely Carmichael) instructed, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist!” When Jewish students protested, the Black Student Union responded by inviting him to speak again—for an even higher honorarium. In 1989, “Professor Griff,” “minister of information” of the rap group Public Enemy, claimed in an interview that Jews were responsible for “the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe,” elaborating that Jews “have a grip on America, [and] a history of killing black men.” Ignoring Jewish groups’ protests, Columbia University’s Black Student Organization provided him a podium on campus, where he could extend his reach. Black students generally defended the speakers’ rants, one stating categorically, “Everything he said had a foundation in truth.” “Jewish people control all the money in the United States—that’s true, that’s not being prejudiced.” Having absorbed the message about the invidious Jews, one concluded in a Black students’ magazine that “Caucasian Jews” continue to “defile and trash and defecate on the rest of the world,” and warned that “Caucasian Jews … should not expect anyone to respect or protect their humanity or even shed a tear when something catastrophic happens to them.”

 

That tendency remains very much with us: It is queasily ascendent on the Palestinian-aligned left side of the political spectrum, as exemplified by the rise of Zohran Mamdani, while the online right increasingly accepts and at times champions a more familiar but substantially similar brand of antisemitism historically associated with white Christians.

 

The Rev. Jackson might have been a valuable voice confronting the rising tide of antisemitism. But he was busy with other things. In 1982 he was busy organizing a boycott of Anheuser-Busch, complaining that there were not enough racial minorities in the beer business; by 1998, a group led by two of Jackson’s sons took ownership of a lucrative Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Chicago. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, the terms of the sale were not disclosed, but Anheuser-Busch stock went down 75 cents. Another Jackson son, Jesse Jackson Jr., went from Congress to federal prison after diverting some $750,000 in campaign funds for personal consumption, including the purchase of a $43,350 (in 2007 dollars!) gold Rolex. (What is it with cheap politicians and expensive watches?) Jackson, a pastor without a church, grew wealthy enough for people to notice. The comedian Chris Rock opened an interview with Jackson asking archly: “What do you do?”

 

“I am a public servant, not a perfect servant,” was Jackson’s favorite reply when pressed about his shortcomings. No one demanded perfection of the Rev. Jesse Jackson–he could have been forgiven an ordinary politician’s opportunism, vanity, petty venality, or other imperfections. What the times demanded of him was to forgo undermining the important—and historic—work to which he dedicated the early part of his career, staining it with his philandering, grifting, and bigotry. Perhaps it would have been better if he had gone to law school or started selling real estate after his critical work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Instead, Jesse Jackson was a twice-haunted man: haunted by the ghost of his canonized mentor and by the ghost of the man he himself might have been.

 

History will judge him kindly, as it should. But there will be footnotes.