“Do Black Americans Still Need Black Leaders?”

That was the punchy headline on a recent commentary piece in a major U.S. daily. It was attention-grabbing, to say the least, but a bit misleading as well, due to the headline writer’s eagerness to capitalize on what the writer had to say.

The column itself, by Wall Street Journal editorialist Jason L. Riley, was provocative enough on its own merits without overstating his case. He raised persuasive new doubts about the moral stature of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the wake of some disquieting disclosures that kept leaking out about Jackson’s personal life and public persona.

Riley, in fact, left open the door to a creative new kind of black leadership at the local and regional level, something more in tune with the changing times than Jackson is able to muster. Fanatic Jackson loyalists no doubt viewed it as patronizing. But Riley zeroed in on the key sticking point which the nation’s media elite had been afraid to ask up until then: Do African-Americans still need a high-pro- file, race-specific leader like Jackson—or, for that matter, like the Rev. Al Sharpton, the chief pretender to his throne?
Much of that media elite, which leans predominantly to the left, is still reluctant to address that irksome question.

Since black Americans share most of the same worries and hopes as their white counterparts—job opportunities, safe neighborhoods, viable schools for their kids—Riley’s key point was that they no longer need a single, identifi- able national leader, any more than do U.S. citizens of German, Italian or Jewish descent.

In light of the flaws that have shown up regularly on Jackson’s record, it’s hard to dispute the point. If the Jackson era is not yet at an end, it is largely because lapdog white cheerleaders at media powerhouses like CBS
and the New York Times have been so willing to follow the reverend down the Yellow Brick Road toward the Oz of utopian liberalism in racial relations.

In the 1990s, the Rev. Jackson lent a sizable assist to Bill Clinton and Al Gore in helping to redefine LBJ’s Great Society for a new century. It included, among other things, liberalism’s unwavering demand for an ongoing public-school tax monopoly, preferential treatment for select minorities in the workplace and on campus, rigid federal control of Social Security pension funds for working people, and increasing influence for high-priced tort lawyers addicted to class-action lawsuits as the best way to achieve “fairness” in the medical marketplace of our time. Add to that mix the most upscale, fanatic obsession of all in the new Land of Oz: the “reproductive right” to impose death on an unborn child.

It may surprise young people in particular these days to learn that Jesse Jackson, who has long since become enamored of “a woman’s right to choose,” once viewed legalized abortion as a potential form of genocide in the late 1970s. When presidential ambitions seized him in the early 1980s, however, the reverend apparently decided the genocide risk was an acceptable price to pay for seeking the support of feminists and foundation fat cats, the very people who invented the safe and-legal abortion mindset.
Jackson was determined to “grow” with the times: His new vision made preborn black children equal-opportunity heirs to the right to die in the womb.

So perhaps it’s time to ask: Who is the most polarizing black leader in America today?

Civil-rights leaders and trendy analysts in the media, from National Public Radio to the New Yorker, have long sought to assign that role to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. But the facts belie their case. The high court justice has kept a relatively low profile ever since his Senate confirmation fight in 1991, and is still best known to close associates and friends for his studied civility in public life.

From the beginning, the attack on Clarence Thomas was an obsession based far more on leftist ideology than on Thomas’ personal qualifications as a judge, just as growing public skepticism about Jackson’s leadership lately has far less to do with white resistance to correcting civil-rights inequities than with a kind of common sense that crosses racial lines. For more than a quarter-century, Jackson was known as one of the more crowd-stirring orators in American public life. Lately, he has become known more and more for his ability to demagogue an issue. At his best (or worst?) he has become a master of red-eyed hyperbole and ad hominem attacks on political adversaries in an effort to advance his own cause of the moment.

He tipped his hand again in an all-out effort to help Al Gore engineer a belated election victory in the wake of the 2000 presidential race. Crisscrossing the state of Florida, the embattled reverend hurled a series of political thunderbolts at Gore’s victorious GOP rival, alleging widespread disfranchisement of black voters and the use of “Nazi tactics” (Jackson’s own phrase) by the Bush forces to “steal” an election.

But then, moderation in public debate was never one of Jesse Jackson’s strong points. Florida’s Republican governor and secretary of state soon became the fall guys for any and all of their state’s election irregularities.

Yet there was scant evidence to prove any case for racial bias. A post-election review and report issued by the leftleaning U.S. Civil Rights Commission proved irksomely long on accusations and short of any real evidence for a state-sponsored conspiracy to disfranchise black voters. Even in areas with an above-average black population and a higher-than-expected rate of ballot rejection, evidence of voter illiteracy was far more prominent as a cause of ballot- box problems than any sign of official bias. Some of the most hotly contested counties, in fact, had Democratic officials in charge of local elections. Yet Jackson’s partisan barnstorming almost guaranteed the larger challenge of voter education would be brushed under the rug in an orgy of post-election “spin.”

Reforms since undertaken by Florida itself are likely to do far more in the long run to correct the state’s voting problems than either hell-raising over vote recounts or a heavily slanted civil rights panel’s report.

Ironically, Jesse Jackson’s early leadership in the civil rights movement helped to define him as a man of varied talents and a thirst for justice. Vestiges of white racism clearly lingered in key areas of American culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s—as signified, for example, by unresponsive inner-city public schools and workplace resistance to the hiring and promotion of black employees. But progress since then has been undeniable, just as the recent slippage in Jackson’s public image and personal moral reputation has been unmistakable. It has crept into parts of the media like a thief in the night.

There was the fathering of an illegitimate child by a woman on Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition payroll— a scandal admitted by Jackson himself only after he learned it was about to be aired in public by a woolly supermarket tabloid. There was the relocation of the mother and baby to an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood, assisted by lavish Jackson-authorized moving expenses that would make the typical American worker envious. Fox News Channel and other news sources concluded that taxpayers had helped to cover a generous annual living allowance for mother and child ever since—with direct or indirect help from one or another of Jackson’s nonprofit, tax-supported ventures.

Nor was the December 2000 circus in Florida the only other sign of his sliding credibility as a public figure. Consider his ill-conceived effort to portray a black teen’s hanging as another Southern white lynching in a small Mississippi town—before outside investigators determined it was very likely a suicide traceable to rejection by a girlfriend. (No apology was ever forthcoming for the implied defamation of the townspeople’s reputation.) Then there was Jackson’s fervent attempt to treat a half-dozen
black students as “victims” of an oppressive school system in Decatur, IL.—after they had launched a grandstand scuffle that led to a near-riot at a high-school football game. Several have since gotten into even more trouble with the law.

A report also surfaced in the Chicago press of a behindthe- scenes pact between Jackson negotiators and Anheuser-Busch officials to improve black representation in the brewing industry. The multibillion-dollar brewer
had set up two of Jackson’s own sons,Yusef and Jonathan, with an exclusive—and highly profitable—beer distributorship on Chicago’s North Side. With executive sensitivity to the damage that allegations of racism could cause to their public image, the A-B capitulation to Jackson’s deal
fed a growing suspicion among many observers that the nation’s leading civil-rights icon had come to bear a strange resemblance to a shakedown artist.

Most of the media elite adopted a defensive reaction to Jackson’s skill at manipulating race as a public issue. Despite Al Sharpton’s link to the Tawana Brawley hoax, he still plays second fiddle to Jackson as a polarizing figure in exacerbating racial tensions.

From the standpoint of race relations, however, the recounting of errant chads in Florida may prove to be a blessing in disguise. Ironically, it may work to the longterm benefit of both the nation’s African-American minority
and the pro-life movement. The tipoff came at Senate hearings that followed the nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general, when Ashcroft was quickly turned into a “controversial” (i.e., conservative) nominee by his severest critics in the Democratic Party. In particular, they knew Ashcroft was—horrors of horrors!—staunchly antiabortion.

But notice what happened. While the hard left did its best to caricature Ashcroft like it did Clarence Thomas, a virtual Who’s Who of conservative black leaders suddenly surfaced from coast to coast in support of Ashcroft: neighborhood development specialist Robert Woodson in Washington, D.C.; Roy and Niger Innis of CORE in New York; historian Shelby Steele at the Hoover Institution in California; radio host Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medger Evers, in Mississippi; and St. Louis lawyer Jerry M. Hunter, an Ashcroft appointee who served as state labor chief during Ashcroft’s earlier tenure as Missouri governor.

For pro-lifers the hidden benefit was this. While Ashcroft’s black supporters were not known best for their links to the anti-abortion movement, they represented a segment of black culture that is, on balance, far more likely than its liberal counterpart to join pro-lifers in defense of human life and the unborn child because of the moral principles at stake. Ashcroft’s backers were far from alone in breaking out of the Jacksonian mold recently. A sizable phalanx of new black leaders—more conservative than Jackson or Sharpton but just as socially conscious—has been steadily crossing over the line from obscurity into the public eye.

The Rev. Eugene Rivers, a black preacher and former gang member, organized a group of Boston ministers into the Ten Point Coalition in the early 1990s in an effort to reduce violence on inner-city streets. His coalition parted company with the black establishment early in the second Bush administration to support its new faith-based initiatives for tackling the nation’s social problems. In Seattle, the Rev. Johnny Hunter of the Life Education and Resource Network is a passionately pro-life black pastor dedicated to reversing the harm that falls disproportionately on black women and children as a result of permissive abortion. And there are others out there like Rivers and Hunter.

What they are demonstrating is that the Jackson notion of “cultural blackness” may be rapidly outliving its usefulness as an asset to black Americans. That cultural concept, tacitly accepted but never clearly defined, has not only been embraced by much of the white-dominated media elite for years, but by the Rev. Al Sharpton as well. It springs from an ideological bias that automatically disqualifies the “wrong” kind of black leader—people like Clarence Thomas or Shelby Steele—from membership inthe club.

The historic strength of that concept had its origins in the NAACP’s ability to fight the good fight for its constituents by aligning their interests closely with the party of FDR and LBJ and the sweeping government solutions they tested in an effort to eradicate poverty and other social ills that were an unwanted legacy of racial prejudice from the past. Its present weakness lies in the fact that the chief enforcer of cultural blackness today is an itinerant, globetrotting preacher pushing a narrow political orthodoxy on a people who once survived slavery—even though they did so more on the strength of their religious belief in a just and merciful God than because of their political affiliation.

Traditionally, Jackson was able to convince his adherents they were better off by hitching their hopes to the lure of group political power as the best way to pursue the goal of personal independence. To maintain his hold on his flock, however, he has increasingly downplayed the dignity and honor of individual achievement while he intensified the outmoded signs and symbols from an entrenched racism in the past as the focal point of social conflict for a new millennium. That approach ignores any sign of progress in between. Therein lies the risk: Jackson has done his followers far more harm than good by exhorting them to identify their religious faith with the utopian politics of the left.

Or as Robert Woodson once put it so well: “JesseJackson is a black American. He is not Black America.”

Jackson and the NAACP nonetheless succeeded admirably in keeping black voters firmly in line with establishment thinking in Florida. Yet two seemingly peripheral but enlightening facts should be kept in mind, involving a priceless link between generations: (1) Crisis pregnancy centers nationwide, like Our Lady’s Inn in my own area of South St. Louis, have consistently found pregnant young black women, even unmarried ones, receptive to the pro-life message (OLI, incidentally, caters to a largely black clientele in a majority white neighborhood); and (2) public opinion polls have repeatedly shown black parents view family-choice educational options like tuition vouchers and charter schools even more favorably than white parents.

In other words, a natural preference for nurturing the life of an unborn child and for expanding school choice for a grown child are matters of urgency for most black families. Yet an irksome political reality keeps intruding on their dreams: Jackson’s longtime political haven, the Democratic Party, holds a diametrically opposed view of “the right to choose” on both matters. Many black voters have simply not caught up to how much the Jackson factor entraps them in blind support for “the party of abortion,” the party that also doggedly defends the public-school tax monopoly, despite its track record of educating so many inner-city kids so poorly. Toeing a single party line inside the voting booth has helped sabotage the black child’s best interests in the world outside.

Historically, the GOP is partly to blame for that. While the Democrats have often been accused of taking black voters for granted, the Republican Party until relatively recent times took it for granted that the black vote was safely in the hip pocket of the Democrats already, so it was pointless to reach out to African-Americans for support.

Notwithstanding the damage to his reputation, it’s probably too early to count Jesse Jackson out of America’s national debate. Yet the recent release of a new book on Jackson by investigative journalist Kenneth Timmerman, Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, hits the reverend where it hurts, precisely because it so carefully documents Jackson’s connections to former gang members, his persistent manipulation of corporate largesse to boost the marketplace profile of close friends and family members, and his shameless propensity to play the race card to advance his own narrow definition of the civil-rights cause.

Yet the problem of how the public perceives Jackson may well persist. During a recent appearance on the powerhouse KMOX-Radio in St. Louis, Timmerman thanked interviewer Charles Brennan for the chance to publicize his work on an outlet with a broadcast signal that reaches more than 40 states. For the most part, Timmerman told Brennan, he and his book have largely been ignored by the nation’s media elite. Best guess is that his portrait of Jackson clashed too violently with the liberal orthodoxy
that has shaped much of the media’s fawning adulation of Jackson, and his longtime role in deciding what’s right and wrong about race relations in America.

Yet clear-cut signs of the increasingly egocentric tilt to Jackson’s leadership can only diminish his stature further. One notable case in point was his free-lance intrusion into the explosive tension between America and Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Jackson’s brassy but ambiguous mediation “offer,” publicized by his office as a response to a Taliban request, was quickly recognized and skewered by both the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard as little more than a con job. When a Taliban denial that it ever made such a request hit the wire services, Jackson cavalierly dismissed the question of who initiated the contact as unimportant. Once again, the enterprising reverend came off looking like a leader on the prowl for another high-profile media event to redeem his tarnished image.

It all adds up to one thing: There is much work yet to be done, both by the pro-life movement and by dissident black preachers who have already made a radical break with the spellbinding oratory—and the deeply flawed moral leadership—of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. From an anti-abortion perspective, the “other” black ministers and leaders have shown Black America to be a fertile field for evangelization with the gospel-of-life message—to borrow a pregnant turn of phrase long familiar to American Catholics like me, as well as to some of our Evangelical friends.

A pro-life link to black conservatives is a promising one that offers much cause for optimism. It is a matter of time before both sides recognize its full implications.