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 published—from 1953 until today—visit 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 because—in addition to a guarantee of
over 700 jobs for blacks and marketing more black businessmen's products—the
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 week—either boycotts or special "buyins."
PLAYBOY's Associate Articles Editor,
Arthur Kretchmer, who conducted this interview with Jackson, describes the remainder
of a recent meeting.
"After
Breadbasket's projects were out of the way, a frail old lady, whose face was
ravaged by time and much else, was given the stage. In a quiet voice, and with
great dignity, she briefly described the humiliation she had suffered during an
interview with a welfare worker the previous week. Then she said she had come
to the meeting to gain the strength that would enable her to block her door in
the future. 'They can starve me,' she said, 'but I'll die before they come back
with their damn forms and their damn questions.' With that, she slowly raised
her fist in the black-power salute and the audience gave her the most
sympathetic ovation I've ever heard.
"Then
Jackson was introduced—and greeted by ten minutes of standing, clapping,
stamping love. He is a big man with an imperial manner. The head is leonine and
the facial expression at once fierce and sullen. He was dressed, like a Mod
black emperor, in a brilliantly colored dashiki,
bell-bottom jeans and high-top country shoes. Biologist Desmond Morris has
written that a leader never scrabbles, twitches, fidgets or falters, and
Jackson qualifies. For over an hour, he delivered a passionate sermon that
described the black man's plight in white society. It was filled with street
talk, down-home slang and quotations from the Bible—but its effect was Greek
tragedy with soul.
"The
sermon was punctuated by piano and organ riffs similar to a rhythm section's
backing of a good jazz soloist. Halfway into an eloquent plea that blacks not
waste their energy fighting among themselves, he called on one of the choir
members, Sister Theresa, to sing 'I Can See the Promised Land,' because 'I need
it,' he said. At one point in the sermon, he paused, clearly exhausted, and
turned to the audience to say, 'Yes, I'm tired.' An old woman's voice called
out, 'Take care of him, Lord. We need him too bad for You to let him die.'
"Everyone
around Jackson is acutely aware of his poor health. He has suffered this year
from traces of sickle-cell anemia and assorted viruses brought on by lowered
resistance. He's been hospitalized a half-dozen times but never missed a
Saturday at Breadbasket. It is common for a parishioner to greet him with, 'Hello,
Reverend Jesse. Are you taking your medicine?'
"After
Jackson finished the service, the Operation Breadbasket orchestra played a
dozen choruses of a syncopated, soulful 'We Shall Overcome,' while all 6000
people in the audience—a number of whom were white—stood holding hands and
swaying back and forth in one of the oldest, most moving rituals of the civil
rights struggle. The effect of the morning was catharsis and rejuvenation. I
don't think anyone who entered the theater that morning could have left without
shedding some of the despair that seems to be afflicting the black liberation
movement.
"A
few moments later, I had a completely different, but indelible, impression of
Jackson's impact. I was waiting to see him in a small dressing room. He was
resting in an armchair, talking to a very pretty, shy black girl of about 20
who was standing near him. She said to him, with some embarrassment, 'Reverend,
I just want to tell you how much you mean to all of us.' He slowly raised his
head and said, 'Hell, that's just a lot of talk. If I was really important to
you, you'd take pity on my old tired body and invite me home, so your momma
could fix a fine meal for me.' She was immediately flustered and said, 'Oh,
Reverend. You're just having fun with me. You don't mean it. You wouldn't come
to my house.' He looked at her with a stern expression that he couldn't quite
prevent from turning to a smile and said, 'You tell your momma I'm coming over
Thursday night. Tell her to do some fixin'.' She looked at him, trying to tell
if he were serious, and her eyes widened, her hands began to fuss and her jaw
dropped open. Finally, she said, 'Would you really? Would you really
come? If you do, I'll charge my friends admission at the door. A half a dollar
to see you and a dollar to touch you!' Jackson looked at the girl and then at
me, laughing his appreciation. Actually, on those rare occasions when he's in
the city, Jackson is well taken care of by his beautiful 25-year-old wife,
Jacqueline—and harassed by his three energetic children."
Because
of Jackson's heavy schedule, Kretchmer couldn't get enough time with him until
both took refuge in a rural retreat where the "country preacher" was free to
explore at length the militant new mood of the black struggle and his own role
in it. Since Dr. King's death had seemed for many to signal the end of the
nonviolent phase of the civil rights movement—a philosophy Jackson continues to
champion—the interview began with that topic.
PLAYBOY: Though the mood of blacks
has changed markedly since the death of Martin Luther King, are you still committed,
as Dr. King was, to nonviolence as the only way to win racial justice?
JACKSON: We will be as nonviolent
as we can be and as violent as we must be. We should not choose violence first,
because it is an inhumane way of dealing with problems. We also do not have the
military resources to deal with the American power structure. There's no sense
in facing tanks with a .22 pistol. Our circumstances and terrain would not give
us the freedom to use a violent strategy. The ghettos are built like a military
stockade. America never needs to actually come in. The lights can be turned
off, the water shut off and the food supply stopped. We could be eliminated in
the ghetto without anyone even crossing the railroad tracks to get us.
PLAYBOY: Do you mean to imply that
if you did have the military resources, you would wage war against white
Americans?
JACKSON: I am just pointing out
that there is a strong pragmatic case
for nonviolence. I am philosophically committed to nonviolence because I think
it is the creative alternative and should be used as long as it helps protect
and sustain life. It is a creative alternative to the Pentagon, for example.
Just as there are forces in this world with a design for killing, so must there
be forces with a design for healing.
PLAYBOY: Stokely Carmichael and
Eldridge Cleaver, among others, say that unless
blacks create their own design for killing, they are going to be killed
themselves. Is this an irrevocable split in the black movement?
JACKSON: No. The competition to
nonviolence does not come from Stokely or Eldridge; it comes from America's
traditions. It comes from little children seeing cowboys solve their moral
problems by killing. The competition to nonviolence comes from the military
draft, with its nine weeks' training on how to kill. The trouble is that
nonviolence is so often defined as refusal to fight, and that is the American
definition of cowardice. In fact, marching unarmed against the guns and dogs of
the police requires more courage than does aggression. The perverted idea of
manhood coming from the barrel of a gun is what keeps people from understanding
nonviolence.
PLAYBOY: If your life were
endangered, could you use a gun?
JACKSON: Yes. Nonviolence does not
demand that one develop an absolute, universal commitment to pacifism. That old
notion of being in a dark alley and having a man step out with a gun does not
apply. Of course, I am going to do whatever I must to get rid of the man and his gun. I preach nonviolence
because it's the better alternative. In that alley, there is no alternative. But peace is the alternative to war, and
nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its
opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.
It is the most sensible way to combat white society's military oppression of
blacks.
PLAYBOY: Do you think white
America is actually waging war on black America?
JACKSON: Yes, it's a war.
Sometimes it's waged by a white army in full military gear, as any weapons
count among special riot police would show. But it's also a war of attrition, a
siege, in which the violence takes other forms. To me, violence is starving a
child or maintaining a mother on insufficient welfare. Violence is going to
school 12 years and getting five years' worth of education. Violence is
30,000,000 hungry in the most abundant nation on earth. White America must
understand that men will steal before they starve, that if there is a choice of
a man's living or dying, he will choose to live, even if it means other men
die. These are human reactions, and we cannot assume that black people are
going to be anything less than human.
PLAYBOY: Is there a point at which
you feel violence would be justified?
JACKSON: If I saw that there was
no other way for us to be liberated, yes.
PLAYBOY: For many white people,
the most disturbing incident of potential black violence this year was
portrayed by a news picture of armed students at Cornell. What do you think
about their use of weapons?
JACKSON: They didn't use them, except in the symbolic sense of warning groups
that had threatened them that they were capable of their own military defense.
I have doubts about the enduring success of the technique of military defense,
but I appreciate the feelings that brought such a desperate mood into
existence.
PLAYBOY: Another group that has
endorsed violence as a tactic is the Black Panthers, which J. Edgar Hoover has
called "the greatest threat among the black extremist groups to the internal
security of the United States." Do you support the Panthers?
JACKSON: I'm very sympathetic to
the Panthers. They are the logical result of the white man's brutalization of
blacks. The remarkable thing about them is that they have not conducted any
military offenses. They have not gone to downtown America to shoot up
white-owned stores. The Panthers are a defense for justice, just as the Ku Klux
Klan is an offense for injustice. That's a qualitative difference between
picking up a gun to keep from being brutalized and picking up a gun to inflict brutality. As far as Mr. Hoover's
opinion goes, I don't think that his perspective is relevant when it comes to
the problems that are facing this society—which is surprising, when you
consider all the good information he gets. He certainly knows what I'm thinking
about and talking about most of the time.
PLAYBOY: Does the FBI keep you
under surveillance?
JACKSON: Yes. It's admitted
tapping Dr. King's phone, and I used to speak with him at least twice a week.
The persons he spoke with were also frequently tapped, and I don't imagine they've
untapped me, as my activities have increased since his death. But anything they've
heard me say, if they come around, I'll be glad to repeat out loud to them. I
want to add that I consider Mr. Hoover himself to be one of the greatest
threats to our national security. His wire-tapping and other surveillance
methods violate the principles of democracy. The FBI director doesn't account
to anyone, not even to the Attorney General; and, in reality, he heads what is very
nearly a secret police.
It's on this subject of abusive police power that the Panthers are
profound. No white community in America has a majority of black police, but
black communities are militarily occupied by white police. The Panthers are
right to say that the white police should be gotten out, just as the Americans
were right in saying, "Get the Redcoats out." We are saying, "Get the bluecoats
out."
PLAYBOY: Aren't you really saying,
"Get the white bluecoats out"?
JACKSON: No. We don't want white bluecoats,
but we don't want black bluecoats, either. We don't want to be policed by a
supreme white authority, even if the agents of the authority are black. We're
saying that the black community should police itself; the authority for the
police should come from the home area, not from city hall, which is alien to
us, has never been sympathetic to us and openly supports the police who oppress
us.
PLAYBOY: Do you think, as some
radicals seem to, that America is a police state?
JACKSON: For black men, it is.
Nobody in the black community who's had the experience of being made to
spread-eagle over a car for no reason, or because of a simple traffic ticket,
would disagree with that. Some black folks disagree, but that's because of
their lack of experience. If they just keep on living, they'll confront the
reality soon enough. The reality is tyranny, and the tyrant must be opposed.
Whether we are called Operation Breadbasket or Black Panthers or niggers, we
know who the enemy is. We will gain our freedom by being more willing to die
for it than the slavemaster is to die to keep us enslaved.
PLAYBOY: Do you agree with the
controversial Panther demand that all black prisoners be released from prison?
JACKSON: Yes, but there are
probably some black men who have been so broken, whose lives have been so
twisted that they would be dangerous to all other men, both black and white,
and I suppose they should not be released from confinement, though I would hope
that genuine rehabilitation would replace detention. But just as the black
community is a colony of white America, and those of us within that colony
should be liberated, so should those of us who have been especially victimized
by the viciousness of the colonial rules, and tried by the white slavemaster,
be released. All of the black community should be liberated, and that includes
those behind steel bars as well as those behind economic and social bars.
PLAYBOY: The subject of black
crime preoccupies white America and, in the opinion of some commentators,
helped elect Richard Nixon President. Many whites feel that their fears of
black crime are completely justified, particularly in the light of your
previous statement that black prisoners should be freed. How would you respond
to that?
JACKSON: The Crime Commission
appointed by Lyndon Johnson showed that most black crime is against blacks. The
white folks who exploit us are as safe as a baby in a womb. The black man's
hostility comes from the deprivation and frustration and tension of the ghetto.
Most people handle that hostility surprisingly well; and those who don't, take
it out on the nearest target—other blacks. Another reason black men hurt other
black men is that the punishment is less than when you hurt a white man. The
price for hostility against whites is too high. To talk back to a white boss is
to be fired. And to make violent gestures against white people is to invite
instant death. So the hostility that is bred in the ghetto leads to suffering—but
mostly by blacks, not whites.
PLAYBOY: The incidence of property
crimes by blacks is very high and is increasing. Do you think the white middle
class is wrong to be concerned about protecting its possessions?
JACKSON: That property usually
belongs to blacks, not whites. It is the ghetto resident whose home is robbed,
sometimes two or three times in the same month. Black crimes against property
are the result of desperation. I said earlier that a man will steal before he
starves. Black crime is crime because of need; whites commit crimes of greed. Black folks do not set up
elaborate kidnappings for a million-dollar ransom. The financial value of all
of the Property crimes committed by blacks in one year doesn't equal the money
lost in the famous salad-oil swindle. Blacks are not out for a big score; they
are out to stay alive. And when he's caught, the black man can't afford bail
and a good attorney. Already wounded and probably crippled by the system, he
spends more time than whites inside the jail system, where he is further
destroyed by it. His criminality is molded by the police state. I was
especially aware of this in the South, where I grew up. The police were an
absolute power; they were not merely enforcers of the law; they were the law.
They could do anything they wanted, because the judges and the legal system
were thoroughly racist.
PLAYBOY: Do you have any
recollections of personal confrontations with the police when you were young?
JACKSON: I remember that they
seemed to get a kick out of breaking down the front door if you didn't answer
quickly enough. When I was a little kid, we'd run and hide under the house at
the sight of a police car. Later on, they locked us up for things like vagrancy
or cursing. In time, they would kill a few of the guys I grew up with, and it
was always "in the line of duty." There were some humorous incidents, too. One
cop in Greenville, South Carolina, became famous for locking up a black man for
"reckless eyeballing"; he had been staring at a white woman about 100 feet
away. And I remember we weren't allowed to stand around the store windows while
they were changing clothes on the white store dummies. My Northern friends get
a big kick out of that, but it's symbolic of the awesome pattern of Southern
oppression.
My own most frightening experience, though, didn't involve a
policeman. There was a store on our street run by a white man named Jack. The
customers were all black, and it was a comfortable place. Jack used to play
with us kids all the time, and we'd run errands for him. One day, I went in and
the store was full of people, but I was in a big hurry, the kind of hurry a
six-year-old is always in. I said, "Jack, I'm late. Take care of me." He didn't
hear me, so I whistled at him. He wheeled around and snatched a .45 pistol from
a shelf with one hand and kneeled down to grab my arm in his other fist. Then
he put the pistol against my head and, kneading my black arm in his white
fingers, said, "Goddamn it! Don't you ever whistle at me again, you hear?" I
didn't think he was really going to shoot me, even then; the thing that got to
me was that none of the black people in the store did or said anything. My
impression of the superpower of whites to do absolutely anything they want and
get away with it right in the middle of blacks was a traumatic experience that
I've never recovered from.
PLAYBOY: Are such experiences for
blacks still part of the Southern heritage?
JACKSON: Yes, but less frequently,
and I think Dr. King is the reason for the change. The significance of his
movement can be seen only against a Southern background. He taught us that even
if the police—the law—say you can't sit down, sit down anyway. In most communities
until then, there weren't five men who had that kind of courage. He challenged
us to stand up to the police we used to run from. In Montgomery, Alabama, the
cradle of the Confederacy, he rose up and declared that black men deserve their
full rights of manhood. There wasn't enough money to buy him, and there weren't
enough jails to hold him. Death itself isn't enough to stop black men from
being free, for crucifixion leads to resurrection.
PLAYBOY: One of the seeming
ironies of the civil rights movement is that while the Southern black has gone
far toward winning freedom, the ghetto black in the North is in an increasingly
frustrated mood. How do you explain this?
JACKSON: The Southern movement
fulfilled some of the hopes it raised. We achieved our goals in the bus
boycotts and the freedom rides. The public-accommodation and voting-rights
bills were passed. We haven't had corresponding success in the North. The
Northern black has seen some
progress, but his advancement doesn't compare with the advancement of white
society. The economy quadruples while blacks creep along with unemployment as
high as 35 and 40 percent in some black communities. When the white
unemployment rate was 20 percent in 1933, it was a Depression that required
massive aid. But the black unemployment rate is ignored.
The most frustrated are those who have worked hardest but remain
unrewarded. A black man in Chicago with a master's degree earns less than a
white man with a high school diploma. You can't tell a man who has been to college
that he's not educated enough to qualify for a job that goes to white high
school dropouts. If you do, you castrate him. And the Northern black is more
frustrated because the indifference of white colonialism in the North is more
vicious than the paternalism of the South. The Northern industrialist doesn't
have any emotional relationship with the black; he maintains only economic
contact. In the North, you get white smiles while the shops are open, but the
hypocritical charade is over when the shops close and whites take the money out
of the ghetto. It's no coincidence that those stores are the primary targets in
a riot.
PLAYBOY: Los Angeles mayor Sam
Yorty once stated on television that he thought riots were caused by the mass
media. He said that blacks rioted in imitation of the disruptive behavior they
saw on television and that if there had been no television coverage of Watts
during the first hours of the trouble there in 1965, there would have been no
riot. Do you feel that's true?
JACKSON: That's absurd. The riots
are expressions of the unheard. The rioters are the mass of black people who
invest hard labor on nasty chores—they are floor cleaners, shoeshine boys,
hospital attendants—and they find that they have almost no share, no
investment, no dividend in a 900-billion-dollar economy. Riots are a reaction
to pain and a sense of hopelessness. There are black people whom no President's
program has ever reached. My grandmother has lived through every President from
1900 to 1969, and the sum total of their grass-roots programs has not been able
to teach her the 26 letters of the alphabet. Riots do not solve problems, but
they indicate what those problems are. It is the responsibility of an aching
man to tell the truth about his pain. It isn't to his advantage to give the
appearance of happiness when he is hurting. In the past, we passively accepted
the immoral acts of white society to prove that we were nice, decent folks, but
that was our foolishness. Black folks assumed that Pharaoh was going to help
them simply because it was the right thing to do. Now we know that Pharaoh's
commitment is to property, not to persons. He must be made to do the right thing.
PLAYBOY: It has been alleged by
some observers, however, that the riots reveal a kind of death wish on the part
of blacks.
JACKSON: It's true that there is
in the young generation an inclination toward nihilism. To challenge a police
headquarters with a handful of bricks is a suicidal act, but it is also a blow
for freedom. What the riots really reveal is the beastliness and sadism of
white police. Nearly all of the people who died in riots were blacks killed by
whites whose ethics dictate that nickels and dimes are more important than
flesh and blood.
PLAYBOY: There are whites who say
that activists such as yourself foster the riots, that without you, there'd be
racial peace.
JACKSON: White folks don't want
peace; they want quiet. The price you pay for peace is justice. Until there is
justice, there will be no peace or
quiet.
PLAYBOY: At the time of Dr. King's
death, many blacks said that white America had lost its last chance to solve
the race problem without destroying itself. Do you think that's true?
JACKSON: No, I don't, although I
was one of the first people to make that statement. It seemed to me then that
Dr. King's death ended America's last chance to be redeemed. But it is not for
us to determine the chances of redemption. There are still people being born
with hope, still people fighting with hope. God has not yet damned this
country, though one may wonder how long the wicked will prosper. America at
this point is the most violent nation in the world.
PLAYBOY: Isn't that a cliché? Don't
other nations have wars and assassinations?
JACKSON: Of course. But no other
nation wants so clearly to be the world's policeman. No other nation comes down
so consistently on the wrong side of every revolutionary movement for
liberation from tyranny. Wherever there is a rebellion, our conservative
industrialists are helping to end it, whether it's in Angola or Venezuela. Any
place we buy oil or rubber, or sell a little Coca-Cola and chewing gum, we've
got to protect the old order. We spend $900 per second to kill the Viet Cong
but only $77 per person per year to feed the hungry at home. We maintain
soldiers in 20 countries around the world, yet we always talk about the Russian
threat or the Chinese threat. China does not have a standing army outside of
China; Russia has two. Yet we assume that someone's after us, that the "free
world" is threatened simply because people want the chance to control their own
economic market so they can participate in the world decision-making order.
They don't want to go Communist or to crush democracy; they just want to end
their serf status; and that's all blacks want here at home.
PLAYBOY: It might seem incongruous
to some that you can make this sweeping indictment of America, an indictment
that could easily serve as the lead paragraph in one of SDS' revolutionary
pamphlets, and yet, as economic director of SCLC and leader of Operation
Breadbasket, you are leading blacks who clearly want to buy into the American
dream.
JACKSON: It's very simple. For all
its faults, America is the only country with the capacity to save the world,
even at the very moment that we seem bent on destroying it. We can produce more
food, medicine, trained and educated people than anyone else. We try to export
our killers, but people have stopped wanting them; they would accept our
doctors, scientists and creators, but our armies are outdated. We could
liberate nations from their poverty and their pestilence if our value system
would allow us to do so. The irony is how close we are to being something
great. One fifth of our nation is starving, yet we have the capacity to
overfeed it. We could end the starvation in India, heal the sickness in Africa.
But the tragedy is that we are as close to destroying the world as we are to
saving it. We spent 78.4 billion dollars to kill this year but only 12 billion
to heal. Those who are silent now, or are neutral now, must make a decision
before the opportunity passes forever.
PLAYBOY: Are you encouraged by the
young white radicals who seem determined to change America's value system?
JACKSON: The issues that move them
are qualitatively different from the ones that concern blacks. Many of the
radical whites say that materialism is no good, that one must seek a new level
of spiritualism. Well, we lived for years with spiritualism but without any
materialism. Now we'd like to try to balance the two. Many of the young whites
are living on the prerogatives of the materialism they shun. They confront
their school in the winter, but in the summer, they go off to Sweden or Hawaii.
Their discussions of America's corruption take place over steaks. They spend
$5000 a year to attend the schools they shut down. We often have the same moral
ideals, but the perspective is very different.
I have also been disappointed that we were
unable to get any mass help from young whites on the hunger caravan we recently
concluded in Illinois. The students were so radical that feeding starving
people didn't constitute revolution to them, because "a man needs to do more
than eat." But while they were saying that, they were eating very well. To us,
they tend to be superfluous.
PLAYBOY: Weren't the strikes at
both Harvard and Columbia concerned mainly with accusations by white students
that those schools abuse the black community?
JACKSON: I do not mean to condemn
their creative protests. They accurately reflect Jesus' position that man
cannot live by bread alone. They come from houses with boats and cars and more
money than they can spend, yet they find their lives empty. There is beauty in
their hearing the heartbeats of other humans. What I'm saying is that there is
a lack of depth in their protest, in terms of the black community's real and
immediate needs. But I think I must reserve judgment on those whites who are
living off the prerogatives of wealth. If they are legitimately concerned, they
will take what Daddy leaves and pay back some of that money in reparations to
blacks.
PLAYBOY: Do you agree with James
Forman's proposal that the churches pay reparations to blacks?
JACKSON: Yes, and eventually the
demands will not be limited to the churches. The black community in America is
an underdeveloped nation, a victim of America's cold war against her own black
people. In that war, all of our supply lines have been cut—educational,
commercial, political and psychological. We've been the victims of an unjust
war and are due reparations from those who launched it. Business owes us
reparations, first for enslaving us, then for refusing to give us work, or
hiring us for only the lowest paying, most grueling jobs. And even when we have
an opportunity to do the same work as white men, we are paid less for it. The
labor unions, for whom we fought, owe us reparations for locking us out. The
church is also liable, because it has disregarded its own moral imperatives and
cooperated in creating and maintaining a racist society.
PLAYBOY: Do you expect these
demands to be met?
JACKSON: For the most part, no.
PLAYBOY: Then isn't the plea for
reparations a rhetorical gesture rather than a serious proposal?
JACKSON: The demands are perfectly
serious. If they were met, it would mean a great step toward unifying the two
separate and unequal societies that the Kerner Commission described after it
studied the Newark and Detroit riots. The point is that SCLC and I are not
naïve enough to think that the businessmen who control the assets of
corporations, labor unions and churches will voluntarily act from some inner
moral impetus. America's god is money. God is your ultimate concern, what you
give maximum sacrifice for, what you will die for. God is what you worship. The
American ideal is maximum profit and minimum person; there is no impulse to
share the wealth, to raise up those less fortunate. What counts is the name on
the front of the building. Well, I say what counts are the hands that do the
work inside.
PLAYBOY: Isn't money also one of
Operation Breadbasket's major concerns?
JACKSON: Yes. It's a concern
because it's a reality. But the essential purpose of Operation Breadbasket is
to have blacks control the basic resources of their community. We want to
control the banks, the trades, the building construction and the education of
our children. This desire on our part is a defensive strategy evolved in order
to stop whites from controlling our community and removing the profits and
income that belong to black people. Our programs are dictated by the private
enterprise economy in which we find ourselves. In my heart, however, I know
that the entire system is a corruption. To me, the earth belongs to everybody;
it's just a very successful rumor white folks have going that the earth belongs
to them. The earth is the Lord's, and no man creates anything that didn't come
from other things that God put here. No man really takes anything away, either.
No man can claim that he made soil or wool or milk. White folks can make
airplanes, but they can't make mountains. They can make syrup but not water. Genesis says that the Lord created the
earth and everything therein and gave man, not white man, dominion over it and
created a dominion sufficient for everyone to be able to survive and prosper.
Now the concept of Genesis has
obviously been destroyed, and it is our concern to rid America of some of her
arrogance and control of God's resources by saying that the food belongs to all
the people.
PLAYBOY: Do you think farmers and
suppliers should give their food away?
JACKSON: I don't care how the
people get food, as long as they get it. The Government can buy the food and
give it away in a large-scale version of the present inadequate surplus-food
and food-stamp programs. Or it can give the poor enough money to buy the food
themselves.
PLAYBOY: Many middle-class whites
think that the poor would only buy booze and guns if they had the money.
JACKSON: I challenge anyone with
that belief to tour the reeking, rat-infested tenements of Harlem or Chicago's
South Side and count the number of alcoholic welfare mothers. There won't be
many. Welfare people do not account for this nation's high number of
alcoholics. Nor are most guns bought by the black poor. In a home where the
children are eating wall plaster because they are hungry, a gun isn't looked
upon as an important commodity. But I don't care if the Government wants to
give out food instead of money. I would bless any device it might come up with,
as long as it does something. The
country is producing more food than it needs. There is inherent evil in a
system that induces men to plow crops under while others starve.
Not only does the food belong to the people but
the industrial profit also belongs to the people. If the employees of General
Motors left tomorrow, it would have to stop. If the entire board of directors
died tomorrow, nothing would stop. What's indispensable are the laborers, not
the directors. The laborers can rise from the ranks and direct their fellow
laborers. Because they are the basic need, they ought to reap the basic
benefits. But in America, about six percent of the people control the basic
wealth, and there's something infinitely demonic about that. It's no wonder
that America needs the largest military in the world to protect the wealthiest
superrich class from people who would rebel against it. There's no basic
conflict among the peoples of the world;
Russian bus drivers aren't mad at American bus drivers. But the controlling
groups are always in conflict with the people—whether it's the Government of
the United States, which refuses to adequately protect the poor, or the boards
of directors at GM and Ford, which encourage blacks to go into debt to buy
automobiles but don't allow blacks to participate in the profitable manufacture
and distribution of cars.
PLAYBOY: Can blacks afford to buy
automobile agencies?
JACKSON: The companies will lend
us the money to buy cars, which leads
to profits for them only. They could lend us the money to buy agencies, but
they won't because that would let us profit also.
PLAYBOY: Aren't there some black
car dealers?
JACKSON: About 14 dealerships out
of 28,000. We are grossly underrepresented in all areas of the economy. There
are no black TV stations, for example, and only seven black radio stations.
Most of the stations that are beamed toward the black community and play black
music are white owned. We can't get FCC outlets, and I'm convinced that there
is a conspiracy to keep us from communicating with one another on a mass scale.
PLAYBOY: Do you mean that the
Government fears a nationally directed riot?
JACKSON: I don't know what they
think; all I know is we can't get licenses when we apply.
PLAYBOY: What does Operation
Breadbasket intend to do about this sort of economic underrepresentation?
JACKSON: We have the power,
nonviolently, just by controlling our appetites, to determine the direction of
the American economy. If black people in 30 cities said simultaneously, "General
Motors, you will not sell cars in the black community unless you guarantee us a
franchise here next year and help us finance it," GM would have no choice. We
can affect their margin of profit by withdrawing our patronage and resisting
the system instead of enduring it.
PLAYBOY: Can this really work?
And, if so, why hasn't it been done already?
JACKSON: It hasn't been done
because we weren't sophisticated enough to see it. This is a step that we haven't
been ready to take. But it will certainly be done now, because we are
organizing to do it. Black people purchase about 35 to 40 billion dollars'
worth of goods each year. We represent the margin of profit in many industries.
America depends on our cooperation with her economy, and we shall become the
enemies of those businesses and industries that work against our interest by
unfair hiring practices, by discriminating against black products, by not
making investments in the ghetto to correspond with the profits taken out of
it. There is an analogous situation in politics: The black people have not yet
realized that we can determine who gets elected President; in 1960, it was the
South Side of Chicago that turned in the vote that made John Kennedy President.
The newspapers all said that Mayor Daley had once again come through with his
Cook County machine, but that vote was black. The ghetto, however, has seldom
voted in its own self-interest. It has even voted for black politicians who are
contemptuous of blacks.
PLAYBOY: Why does the ghetto vote
so inefficiently?
JACKSON: Because it's so easy to
intimidate or con the poor; they have no recourse. On Election Day, the
precinct worker comes around and says that if you don't vote his way, he'll
have you thrown out of the housing project or he'll have your welfare check
canceled. Or, if he's a benign type, he'll buy your vote with a chicken. The
poor are also frightened out of coming to freedom meetings. But the poor
themselves must learn that food is a right and not a privilege. We are marching
to gain a subsidy for 30,000,000 hungry Americans who represent a human
resource that is more important than any of the mineral resources that this
nation subsidizes.
PLAYBOY: What form would that
subsidy take?
JACKSON: A guaranteed annual
income based upon the Government's own estimate of the amount of money people
actually need to live adequate lives. They say that a family of four in a large
city in the United States in 1969 requires $5994 per year for minimum
maintenance. If that's what's needed, then that's what they should get.
PLAYBOY: Wouldn't that be
expensive, especially considering the present high tax burden?
JACKSON: The Senate committee on
poverty headed by George McGovern stated, after doing field research throughout
the nation, that it would cost ten billion dollars per year to feed the poor
and fulfill their basic health, clothing and housing needs. I would guess that
that's a low estimate. Let's double it and say that the cost would be 20
billion dollars per year. That's less money than we're spending to kill the
Viet Cong. It's less money than we're about to spend on the ABM system. It is
less than a third of the defense budget. If we wanted men to live as much as we
want to see them die, we could do it without any new taxes.
PLAYBOY: But what motivation does
the Government have to subsidize the poor?
JACKSON: Out of a spirit of
humanity, one would hope; but that is naïve. Our job is to create enough
pressure to force the Government to
act. It is certainly not going to do so on its own. The imbalance of Southern
power in the Congress has led to important committees being headed by pathological
killers and by men with public commitments to racism. These men—such as Mendel
Rivers, Russell Long, Jamie Whitten and Richard Russell—are the black man's
burden. The truth is that the Mafia is probably better represented in the
Government than blacks are. And numerous other special-interest groups are well
taken care of. The situation on the agriculture committees is particularly
loathsome to me because of the millions of dollars that are given away to
gentleman farmers who don't farm, while children are starving. Contrast that
with the Black Panthers' national breakfast program. They are serving thousands
of people free food every week, and the only qualification is that the
recipient be hungry. If the Panthers can serve breakfast to 3000 children a week
in Chicago or 1500 in San Francisco, with their lack of resources, what could
those cities' governments be doing if they had the same interest?
PLAYBOY: If you were the mayor of
a major American city, what would you do?
JACKSON: I would declare the poor
communities in a state of emergency and deal with the unemployment rate, the
high mortality rate and the high t.b. rate. I would set up medicine tents on
the streets, and embarrass the Federal and state governments into opening up
their food storehouses. I would declare war on disease and hunger. I would
enlarge all the city departments that feed and heal people. The welfare of all
the people would be attended to before any new golf courses or monuments or
stadiums were built. I would force the Government to call out the National
Guard to deal with the existing injustices, which make the ghetto a permanent
disaster area. There's no reason why the Army couldn't be coming down the
street with bayonets, looking for slum landlords. The Army would force trade unions
to allow the minority groups in. And those who did not pick up the garbage
would themselves be picked up. An Army like that wouldn't have any trouble
getting volunteer soldiers because it would be engaged in a relevant war.
PLAYBOY: Is that statement a
reference to Vietnam?
JACKSON: Let me just say that
Vietnam is not a relevant war. It is a war in which the black poor are paying
with their lives to protect the investments of a small, rich elite whose Asian
investments are threatened by Hanoi.
PLAYBOY: Whatever interests are
being served in Vietnam, do you think that you, as a citizen, have the right to
pick the wars in which you will fight and those in which you won't?
JACKSON: Of course I have that
right. I must reserve the right to decide which wars are just. And I would not
fight in a war that I thought was unjust. Nor would I approve of anyone else
doing so.
PLAYBOY: Would you encourage
drafted blacks to refuse to go to Vietnam, even if it means jail for them?
JACKSON: Yes. And whites, too.
Fighting in Vietnam is a step back into slavery for blacks, and into barbarism
for whites. The road to jail has often been the road to freedom. Many men—Gandhi,
Jomo Kenyatta, Dr. King—have learned that.
PLAYBOY: Although a
disproportionate number of blacks have died in Vietnam, there have been few
blacks active in the peace movement. Why?
JACKSON: To blacks, the peace
movement is a luxury that presupposes you have the time to save somebody aside
from yourself. Blacks are just too occupied with their own survival. They have
not even been sophisticated enough to know that they can oppose murder. A black
man can be easily seduced; it's a revolution for him to go from one meal a day
to three. Sometimes I think that blacks are so locked away from information
that we could be duped into fighting in South Africa for apartheid, if America
told us to do it. We certainly were down there shooting our Dominican brothers.
I saw televised scenes of Dominicans lined up against a wall while black GIs
held guns on them. But this is not because of ignorance but because of cultural
suffocation and improper education.
PLAYBOY: Malcolm X once proposed that
the UN send observers into the American black community to determine if blacks
were being treated humanely. Do you think that's a practical idea?
JACKSON: Only for symbolic
purposes; the UN doesn't have any power and is subject to the American veto.
PLAYBOY: Wouldn't exercising the
veto prove so embarrassing to the U.S. that it would refrain from doing so?
JACKSON: I doubt it. And the
countries that one might expect to pressure America into dealing humanely with
its black minority—the countries of Africa—are themselves too dependent on
America's trade and financial aid to wish to antagonize her. It is not in the
enlightened self-interest of those countries to rise up in indignation when we're
shot up in Detroit or Watts, because we don't affect their essential
relationship with the world markets or the World Bank.
PLAYBOY: Both Malcolm and Dr. King
worked to mobilize a world-wide conscience against racism before they were
struck down. Do you share the view of some that both murders were part of a
plan to deprive blacks of their leaders?
JACKSON: Not a single elaborate
conspiracy, but it's clear that as we have moved closer to America's nerve
center, closer to a position where we could vote men out of office, the
killings have increased. And I don't think America has done anything to
indicate that she is on the side of Dr. King rather than of his killers.
PLAYBOY: You used the plural. Don't
you think that James Earl Ray acted alone?
JACKSON: I would be surprised if
it wasn't a conspiracy involving many others.
PLAYBOY: Do you have any evidence
to support that belief?
JACKSON: I think the circumstances
were very suspicious. As you know, I was with Dr. King when the assassin's
bullet was fired. We were talking with Operation Breadbasket's music director,
Ben Branch, about songs for the next day's rally. Dr. Abernathy, Andy Young,
James Bevel and Bernard Lee were very near. When Dr. King was shot, I hit the
ground, along with the others. We scrambled toward the steps where he was and I
looked back over my shoulder, because I was afraid that more shots were going
to be fired. I saw so many police coming from
the direction of the shot that I actually threw up my hands, thinking that
the shot had come from one of them and that I was going to be killed, too.
There were hundreds of police in the area, some jumping from the hill where the
shot had come from. I tried to tell them that the bullet came from that way.
Now, the hotel that Ray was in—if Ray was the killer—is next door
to the fire department. With the shot having been fired and all those police in
the area, the usual thing during an emergency in a Southern town would be for a
siren to go off that stops the lights and traffic on Main Street, where the
hotel is. It was six o'clock in the afternoon, the busiest time for traffic,
and it all could have been brought to a halt. But no siren went off, traffic
wasn't stopped and Ray escaped through downtown Memphis. The distance he
subsequently traveled indicates to me that he didn't do it by himself and that
he may have had some very highly placed help. But, of course, finding Dr. King's
killers is secondary to getting at the roots of America's violent atmosphere—an
atmosphere in which you conform or are broken, in which you take your subordinate
place in the industrial hierarchy or are destroyed.
PLAYBOY: What do you think Dr.
King would be doing if he were alive today?
JACKSON: Dr. King would still be
dealing with the problem of finding a job for everybody; he would still be
raising the questions of medical care for everybody, of a full-employment
economy. He would still be on the basic issues, still be pointing out the
stupidity of the war. He would be in general conflict with Nixon. He would
still, as we say, be on the case.
PLAYBOY: Will there ever be
another black leader as important as Dr. King?
JACKSON: I don't think so, though,
of course, no man can say. But it was Dr. King who crossed the frontier, who
made a permanent break with the past. I grew up in the period from 1955 to
1965, and that time was dominated by his courage and strength, as opposed to
the previous mass docility of black men. Dr. King was a surprise for a lot of
whites who had conned themselves into believing that Negroes were really
inferior. He was intelligent, moral, eloquent and courageous. The contrast of
his eloquence with the lack of it in those whites he was forced to deal with
gave us a rallying point. Even more important was the way he stood up to white
military power in the South. Dr. King wasn't afraid of the cop's billy stick,
guns or dogs. He overcame the stigma of jail cells; in fact, he dignified the
jail cell and wrote great words from it. He was willing to die for black
people, and finally did die, not on some lofty mountainside or in the company
of ambassadors but kissing garbage men, trying to set them free.
PLAYBOY: In the weeks before he
died, did Dr. King express any particular optimism or pessimism about the
future of the movement?
JACKSON: He expressed both. SCLC
was at that time involved in making its decision about the Poor Peoples'
Campaign in Washington, D. C., that ultimately led to Resurrection City. Many
of Dr. King's friends and some board members said that we should not go to
Washington because of the possibility of a riot. The final decision was his. He
was going through a bad time and he showed it at one of the last staff meetings
he would ever attend. He was despairing that morning and Andy Young tried to
tell him to relax, that things were going to get better. And Dr. King told
Andy, "Don't say 'Peace, peace' when there is no peace. The country is swinging
to the right and our President is obsessed with the war. Maybe I ought to turn
around," he said. But then he stopped; and when he continued, his voice was
more firm. "But we've gone too far to turn around. There were dark days during
the sit-ins, and in Selma and Birmingham. We've come too far."
Then he changed again. "But I'm still disturbed by the division in
the country. Maybe I ought to just fast. And when I get to the point of death,
perhaps we could have a summit meeting of blacks. Maybe that would bring us
together." But then he seemed to resolve the argument in his mind. He said, "I've
seen where we've got to go. We are going to fight the good fight; we are going
to liberate our brothers and raise up the poor. We're not going to turn around.
It's all very clear to me now." And I think Dr. King at that moment was as sure
as he had ever been of the ultimate victory of his movement. Once you've been
to the mountaintop, it doesn't matter if James Earl Ray is in the bushes
waiting for you.
PLAYBOY: Do you share Dr. King's
vision?
JACKSON: In my stronger moments, I
have no doubts. I'm even able to love those who persecute me. There must be
some force that's committed to redemption, even though it's painful. The
alternative is that we will destroy ourselves—"die together as fools," as
Dr. King said once. He and Gandhi and Jesus reached a spiritual state that
liberates the self. Dr. King did not represent ordinary men. That's what made
people love him so much. But what finally happens to the extraordinary men is
what happened to Jesus. We admire them but we don't follow them, and finally we
kill them because they become such a threat to us.
PLAYBOY: In what way?
JACKSON: Most of us cannot live up
to the ideal of the noble and virtuous. Such men make us aware that we must
settle for the real and the expedient. We are diminished by their purity, which
is a threat to our self-esteem. The idealist keeps our consciences awake, but
the pressure on our conscience is so great that it can be relieved only by
murder.
PLAYBOY: Dr. King was criticized
for placing too much emphasis on conscience. David Halberstam wrote that Dr.
King left Chicago in 1966, for example, because he could not inspire a moral
consciousness, and Mayor Daley was able to dissipate his campaign with
high-sounding but unspecific resolutions. Do you think that Dr. King was too
concerned with the moral rather than the tactical aspects of the civil rights
movement?
JACKSON: No, I think that even as
recently as 1966, Dr. King was correctly analyzing his problem as the need to
change the psyche of the black man. You couldn't impress black folks unless you
impressed white folks first. Dr. King had to make the movement as large as
possible in white eyes to get respect for blacks. I think that we are inclined
to lose perspective on how much things have changed since 1955. There was no
black consciousness then. Dr. King was dealing with "Negroes"—put quotes around
that—whose minds, desires, ambitions and images were white inspired. Aretha
Franklin couldn't have made it in 1955. It was Dr. King who moved the "Negro" farther
and farther out; and the farther he got from that white shore, the blacker he
became.
Dr. King had the most national influence of any black leader, and
his concern was to change national policy. The strategy was always to form a
coalition of conscience between the black community and a segment of the white
community. An issue had to be defined along moral lines, because the white
community will split on the basis of moral against immoral, liberal against
conservative. Without that white help, there is no chance for us to have an
impact on national policies. Dr. King used to point out that there is not a
black college in the country that could remain open six months on black
contributions. That's a reality we must face. Even now, there is no civil
rights organization of any consequence that functions on black money.
PLAYBOY: Does Operation
Breadbasket accept white money?
JACKSON: SCLC accepts any money,
and it finances us. But we get more black money out of Chicago than any other
civil rights organization has ever gotten out of the black community.
PLAYBOY: What does SCLC think of
white participation in the leadership of Breadbasket and other programs?
JACKSON: We discourage it. We need
and want to encourage the technical and financial aid of whites in the civil
rights movement, but we should make our own decisions. Whites should spend
their physical energy liberating white
America, because white folks need someone to help them understand blacks or
they're going to continue to be paralyzed by their paranoia. Whites suffer from
nightmares and irrational anxiety. When a black family moves onto a white
street, the white girls are not magically impregnated by a black boy. Those
fears are unreal. But whites do not allow enough communication with blacks to
learn the truth. So other white folks must defend our humanity, even though our
skin color is different and our hair grows differently and we have a different
heritage.
PLAYBOY: Why is there a
preoccupation now with black studies and Afro styles?
JACKSON: The so-called natural
movement is simply trying to say that I may not know who I am psychologically
and historically, but I'm not going to be defined by white folks any longer. I
want to see how I'd look if I just grew. If I didn't use anything white folks
gave me to fancy myself up with, what would I look like? Most of us have never
given ourselves a chance to find out. We're in search of our existence as a new
people—Afro-American. White people forced us to suppress our beauty: now we
want to glorify it. The fact that our natural selves conflict with the
comfortable, stereotyped white image of the black man is not our problem.
PLAYBOY: But this new emphasis on
blackness seems to lead to some paradoxical situations. In spite of the need
for expanded opportunities for blacks to attend college, a number of strikes
were initiated last year by black college students who demanded black-studies
programs at their schools. Are black-studies programs so important that it's
worth closing down a school to get them?
JACKSON: I think so. History plays
a large role in a people's growth. The white man took away our history because
it was one more way for him to control us. Without a group identity, we had no
group loyalty; we were separated from our past to make it easier to control us
in the present. It is one thing to see ourselves as a people only 300 years
old, born as slaves and moving toward freedom. But, in fact, our forebears date
back to the origin of man, and we have always been a creative and productive
people; we were enslaved, but now we are returning to freedom—and it's good to
come back home. We need the pride and dignity of knowing that we are part of a
great continuum. Anthropologists say that mankind originated in Africa. We are
the people who carved out the great civilizations of Kush, Songhai, Ghana and
Mali. We smelted iron; we mined copper and gold. For us to know this is to know
that we can look forward to a great destiny.
PLAYBOY: It's the idea of
exclusively black studies that bothers many white people. Other ethnic groups
don't have special study programs, do they?
JACKSON: But they do, and the
schools recognize them as such. If you are an Italian, for instance, your
history courses will cover the entire history of early Rome and then
Renaissance Italy, and they will stress the worth of the Italian contributions.
But no ancient-history courses emphasize the blackness of the great early
civilizations. And American-history courses generally ignore the black man. If
the schools had done their job, they wouldn't have the problems they are now
confronted with—and richly deserve.
PLAYBOY: Many athletes and
entertainers—Bill Cosby, for example—have adopted Afro hair and clothing
styles; but aside from this sort of symbolic identification, do you think
successful blacks have been as involved as they should be with the movement?
JACKSON: I think the symbolism is
important; it shows a new sensitivity. The black athletes and entertainers who
are wearing natural hair styles and Afro clothes are specifically defying the
white measurement apparatus. But the fact is that the black artist has never
been as far away from the black community as the white press sometimes portrays
him. Every black man, for example, knows where Sammy Davis' heart is. The black
entertainer moves into a white community because the houses are bigger and
better there. He is just taking advantage of a new freedom. Historically, the
black athlete and entertainer have been in a precarious position where, if they
overidentified with the racial situation, they couldn't play in the major night
clubs, couldn't get into a movie or were blackballed from a league. Black
athletes who take a militant position on the race problem endanger their jobs,
even though teams are dependent on their participation. Jackie Robinson broke
into baseball in 1945. In 1969, blacks dominate the game. The stars of the
National Basketball Association are nearly all black, as are many in the National
Football League. But we'd be doing even better in sports if there were not
still some discrimination there.
PLAYBOY: What kind of
discrimination?
JACKSON: Before I entered college,
I was offered a contract to pitch for the Chicago White Sox. They wanted to
give me less money to sign than the white boys I was striking out. I'm sure
that's generally true, and many black boys can't afford to leave the farm or
the factory to try to make it with a team. More indicative of the racism still
alive in sports is the fact that in all of major-league baseball, there isn't
one black executive or manager.
PLAYBOY: If a black baseball
player clearly shows himself to be managerial material, don't you think he'll
get a shot at a manager's job?
JACKSON: What does that mean? Is
every white manager "managerial material"? Then how come they're always being
fired? In America, a white man, no matter how dumb, is expected to boss a black
man; but no black man, no matter how highly qualified, is allowed to give
orders to a white man. If a white ballplayer like Eddie Stanky is argumentative
and aggressive, he's considered fiery. Therefore, he's a managerial prospect.
But Jackie Robinson was fiery as hell, only they called it arrogance. He was an
"uppity nigger." When Robinson left baseball, his accumulated knowledge about
running bases, pitching, hitting and fielding went with him. It was a waste of
a great baseball mind.
PLAYBOY: You seem to be saying
that unless a black man is docile, he can't survive; yet the mood of young blacks—including
you—is anything but docile. Haven't the times changed?
JACKSON: We have changed; I don't know about the times. White society still
tries to impose a different code of behavior on blacks than on whites. What to
me is an expression of confidence is to white folks an expression of defiance.
The country is so used to black people smiling and bowing and acting unsure of
themselves that when whites meet someone who confronts them and challenges
their standards, they make harsh judgments. Now things are changing so fast
that the hostility of white society toward a black man may lead to respect for
him from the black community. For a white man to embrace you is for a black man
to hold you suspect.
PLAYBOY: You have been accused of
cynically manipulating that new mood in your personal choice of dress and hair
style. Do you think that if you didn't wear sideburns and a dashiki, but dressed conservatively and
looked somewhat like a young Martin Luther King, that you could make it as a
black leader today?
JACKSON: Style—whether it's Afro
or Ivy League—isn't crucial. Hell, there are kids around who look like Ché
Guevara, but they still need their mommas to get them across the street.
Because of all the losses we have suffered, black people are looking for winners; that's the only way to get
their respect. And a winner is someone who successfully defies white America.
The reason Joe Louis will always be respected in the black community is that at
a time when other blacks couldn't even talk back to white people, Joe Louis was
beating them up, knocking them down and making them bleed. When I do a TV show,
I'm aware that every black watching is scoring me against the white opposition,
as if I were in a fight. Every black man who has won the loyalty of his
community has indicated some expression of defiance for the white man. Malcolm
X is a good example. He could look Whitey straight in the eye and tell him he
was lying. And Malcolm showed that even the most brutalized experience could be
overcome.
PLAYBOY: You obviously don't agree
with those who felt that Malcolm was a disruptive force.
JACKSON: Malcolm had become an
apostle of peace after his trips to the Near East. America has a knack for
killing her men of peace, while men of war continue to thrive. Malcolm's death
also pointed up the futility of thinking in exclusively white-black terms.
Blacks killed Malcolm, just as a black man betrayed Marcus Garvey and a black
woman once tried to stab Dr. King. Black is not always good, just as white is
not always bad. We confirmed that lesson at Resurrection City, where white
Appalachians shared the mud with us while some blacks on U Street were asking
The Man to run us out of town. And it was a black woman who started many of
Adam Powell's troubles.
PLAYBOY: The consensus among white
liberals is that Adam Powell deserved his fate—and that he was a hindrance to
the civil rights movement. Do you disagree?
JACKSON: Absolutely. First of all,
and to set the record straight, as head of the House Education and Labor
Committee, Adam Powell was responsible for passing over 60 pieces of
significant social legislation—more than any other of his virtuous colleagues
have ever done. But Adam is even more important, for a depressed black psyche,
as a defier of white rules. Something happened to my dad in World War Two that
illustrates this. He was serving in France and Strom Thurmond came to speak to
his all-black regiment. The Senator's message was that they were there to fight
the War, that they were not to bother any women; they were to know their place.
In other words, it was all right for my father to risk his life to serve
America, but he was still a nigger. So when Adam Powell walked down the halls
of Congress with two white women on his arm, just the outrageous defiance of it
gave us gratification. The appeal of that defiance will never be lost.
PLAYBOY: That story touches on the
strong sexual aspect of racism. Both Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver have
expressed elaborate theories in which white sexual fears are cited as a
fundamental cause of race hatred. Do you agree?
JACKSON: Although sex is a crucial
underlying cause of prejudice and racial hatred, it is not relevant to the
black liberation movement. We will not allow the white man's sexual problem to
stand in the way of our freedom.
PLAYBOY: Can you just ignore it?
JACKSON: Let me explain it with
some awful history. In the South, when a slave ran away—thereby expressing his
manhood and independence—and he was caught, the punishment for his first
offense was whipping or branding. If he ran away again, which was the clearest
way for him to assert himself, his punishment was likely to be castration. The
slave was told that he was inferior, less than human and completely unappealing
to the white woman; but The Man still castrated him. That says a lot about the
psychosexual dilemma of the Southern white male. The other part of that dilemma
was that because of his fear of black men, the white man had to desensitize
white women. The white woman had to spiritually kill herself. For a white woman
to see Jim Brown and not think of him as an attractive male means that the
nerves are dead within her being. She dehumanized herself, because white men
wanted it that way. But when the white man destroyed his relationship with his
women, he got his satisfaction from the pursuit of money. So the white man
perverted himself and his women.
If some great psychoanalyst had emerged 300
years ago, he might have solved some of the white man's problems and prevented
the brutalization of blacks by whites. But we were not rescued, and the
intervening 300 years have served to diminish the importance of sexual antagonisms
and replace them with a more crippling form of racism. Today, racism is
integrated into the ideology of capitalism. I said that the sexual aspect is
irrelevant because even if sexual tensions disappeared tomorrow, capitalism
would still require a racist ideology in order to maintain a cheap labor base.
Racism provides a mechanism by which the slave-master assures that society will
have a ready supply of inferiors who can serve as slaves. Racism is as
important to America's domestic colonialism as it was to foreign colonialism;
it is an excuse to exploit and enslave a people because they have been defined
as inferior. Colonialism is not built upon emotions; it is built upon behavior
patterns that are designed to get a profit.
PLAYBOY: Do you think, as some
revolutionaries do, that capitalism will have to be destroyed in order to end
racism?
JACKSON: It is futile for us to
think about ending racism; that is a psychological problem that seems beyond
our attempts to affect it. We are fighting to end colonialism—oppression and
exploitation. That requires power. The civil rights movement is a lifetime
struggle for power. A man who is impotent, no matter how courteous and pleasant
looking he is, is told to wait in the lobby. But if you have power, you can be
an illiterate boor with tobacco juice running down your face and they will open
the door for you. As I said earlier, we are going to organize to exert power on
the big corporations. We are going to see to it that the resources of the ghetto
are not siphoned off by outside groups. Right now, black exterminating
companies don't even get the contracts to kill the ghetto's rats. But that's
going to change. If a building goes up in the black community, we're going to
build it. And we're going to stop anyone else from building it. If we can't get
into those construction unions, they're not going to get into our
neighborhoods.
PLAYBOY: But other neighborhoods
don't control their business according to ethnic separation. They try to become
part of what is traditionally called the American melting pot.
JACKSON: I hear that melting-pot
stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't been melted. We've been
getting burned on the bottom of the pot. We don't want anything that's
different from the experience of the other ethnic groups. If you go into an
Irish neighborhood, most of the businesses are run by Irishmen. The same is
true in a Chinese or Jewish or Italian neighborhood. The difference between all
of them and us is that they are all separate and independent groups, while we
are separate and dependent. We want
to control the vital elements of our lives: the school boards, the churches,
the businesses, the police. The other groups are separate and control
themselves, but they are separate and control us as well. That is a colonial
situation. And the slums will exist as long as the colonists continue to turn a
profit on them. As in any other revolution, we must fight for our independence.
PLAYBOY: But Dr. King once said
that his aim was to "break open the city," so that ultimately there would be no
separate black and white communities. Have you forsaken that goal?
JACKSON: No. But we recognize that
a major part of the black community must first gravitate around itself, as
other ethnic groups have done. In these areas, where our living together
provides collective security, we ought to have the right to control it. But
just as we have the private right to stay where we choose, we should also have
the public right to participate in the public arena the way other people do. A
man should choose where he wants to live, based on his income, or the fact that
a house is close to his job, or because there's a good school nearby; he should
not be refused because of his color. He should not be afraid of being bombed
out by white bigots or of being harassed by police when he returns from work.
PLAYBOY: Aren't the open-housing
laws changing this?
JACKSON: No. There is still
segregation. In Chicago, blacks are 30 percent of the population, but they live
on ten percent of the land. That congestion is inhuman and a prime target for
exploitation by slumlords. People are cramped in body and spirit, and those who
can't afford it are paying more for the space in which they live. We are locked
away from the resources of the community. Black children who are sick are
untended and left to play in their own filth in understaffed, ill-equipped
hospitals. Four- and five-year-olds who were lucky enough to enter Head Start
programs substantially raised their learning capacity, only to have it fall
again as soon as they entered public school. Yet the teachers call the children
incompetent. We have no choice about schools and hospitals, because public
mobility is denied us. When a white mother decides to move because her
neighborhood doesn't serve the needs of her children, the broker asks her where
she would like to live; when a black mother faces that problem, she knows where she can live—and where she
can't. In white communities, there are about 3000 people per square mile; in
the ghetto, there are 30,000 people in each square mile. The overcrowding
produces bent and perverted people. They are made to suffer so much pain that
they feel no need to conserve themselves or their neighborhoods, so they decide
to destroy. These are the unheard—until they riot.
PLAYBOY: The majority of those who
have participated in riots are in their teens or early 20s. Why?
JACKSON: These kids have an awful
lot of reasons for hating America. Their experiences with the dominant culture
are nearly all negative; whether it be in school or a courtroom or applying for
a job, they are being either deprived or discriminated against. This sense of
resentment is acute, and it's just a matter of time before they give up on
themselves and this country. Many of them already have. If Richard Nixon really
cared about America's future, he'd be showing up at Operation Breadbasket
meetings and offering to join us in the fight to reclaim these kids' minds and
souls, because they are going to have a large effect on that future. He might
at least give us equal time and attention with the moon shot.
PLAYBOY: Weren't you impressed by
the moon landing as a scientific achievement?
JACKSON: The only thing that moon
shot did for me was turn my stomach. I was in a migrant worker's shack in
Georgia a few weeks before the launch. It was about 115 degrees inside in the
daytime. It had no toilet—not even an outhouse. No refrigerator, no running
water. There was greasy butcher's paper over the space where there should have
been windows. The shack was temporary residence for a family of four and they
actually paid rent for it. If they hadn't rented it, they wouldn't have been
allowed to work the harvest. They were all hungry. The kids' bodies were
bloated and discolored. And they suffered from worms. This was good time for these people. When the
harvest ends, they have to move on and they have nowhere to go. That Sunday night
of the moon walk, in my mind's eye, I could see those poor, broken people
walking four miles to the company store to watch the two astronauts jump
around. Each step Armstrong took cost enough money to feed that family for 100
years.
America has spent 57 billion dollars since 1957
for the ego gratification of planting her flag on top of everyone else. One tenth of that was spent in the same
period to inadequately feed the hungry. The psychological state of this nation
is revealed by the fact that the men whose egos are swelled by putting a flag
on a dead rock would not feel the slightest sense of accomplishment from the
more humane task of feeding hungry people.
PLAYBOY: Are you encouraged by
Nixon's proposals about black capitalism?
JACKSON: Not very much. It is a
limited vision to make a few people rich, whereas SCLC's Poor Peoples' Campaign
proposes a decent economic base for all people. Dr. King died talking about
raising the level of dignity for all men. The difference between Dr. King and
Mr. Nixon is the difference between a prophet and a politician. I don't believe
the Government has plans for the extensive development of the black community.
If it did, then the Job Corps would not have been curtailed recently. Even more
serious is the Government's lack of understanding of the problems of the
potential black businessman and its failure to develop programs to help him.
PLAYBOY: White businessmen object
to such demands on the grounds that blacks don't deserve Government
considerations that aren't extended also to whites.
JACKSON: The Government aids white
businesses all the time—in the areas in which they are endangered. It
subsidizes airlines and railroads. It sets up tariffs to protect textile
businesses from cheap foreign imports. The black man is endangered as a
businessman because of his substandard education, and the Government should be
offering technical and advisory services to blacks.
PLAYBOY: What kind of services?
JACKSON: There are some basic
areas where the black businessman can use Government help. One is feasibility
studies that will tell a man if his idea is sound. Another, of course, is
capital, which should be lent according to the soundness of a business idea,
rather than withheld reflexively in accordance with impossibly strict notions
of what constitutes "a bad risk." If a black man came up with the idea for the
next generation's Xerox, he probably couldn't get the money to develop it.
Next, the Government should help him get his foot in the market's door, so that
the black man can at least have a fair chance. This is one area in which
Operation Breadbasket has been very successful; we've gotten chain stores such
as Jewel and A & P to give shelf space to black products. Then the
Government should provide real vocational training. Even if a black kid, who
never intends to go to college, graduates from high school, he can't fix the
wiring in the house, can't run a machine, can't lay a brick.
And the vocational training should apply also to
those who are already running a black business. We helped increase a black man's
business from $12,000 to $160,000 in four months. But he couldn't grow with it.
He had to pull his business back down to the size of his mind; he had to feel
the money, count it in his hands. He couldn't handle a balance sheet, couldn't
write notes for working capital before his receipts came in. That man can't go
to Harvard Business School—but if the Small Business Administration and
President Nixon were serious, there'd be an operation Head Start for the black entrepreneur.
The way it is now, a black with talent has to choose to work in the security of
a big white company. And his sapped spirit will never produce anything on its
own. Black businesses, on the other hand, are a step on the road to freedom.
Black products are a focus for a pride in black ability. We can't just consume
what the white folks decide to make for us. Consumption leads to fatness, but
production leads to freedom. A producer is free to make decisions, but a man
who only consumes is a prisoner whose decisions are made by others.
PLAYBOY: Breadbasket's aims, if
fulfilled, seem likely to create more middle-class blacks. Do you think there
will be strong class divisions between black middle and lower classes as the
former get farther away from the ghetto?
JACKSON: I don't think we will
have significant class divisions. No matter how wealthy he gets, the black man
can rarely buy a house where he wants to; he is still subject to the whim of
any white policeman who doesn't like his looks; he is still going to be tried,
if accused of a crime, by a jury of his white nonpeers. And these facts bind
him firmly with his destitute brother.
PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the
young militants' derisive notion that every successful black is an Uncle Tom?
JACKSON: I think, it's important
to be sensitive to who Uncle Tom is. Uncle Tom is not our enemy. He grew up in
the ghetto; he went to bad schools. He's a successful black hustler who bends
and smiles before the white man in order to provide for his children. He's not
a man who sits around thinking up ways to hurt black people. There's nothing
wrong with a Southern boy who grew up in a shack with an outhouse wanting a
real home. The jobs we once picketed to get are now being derided as Uncle Tom
jobs. But the black bourgeoisie is
still very close to the roots, if for no other reason than the fact that in the
colonial system, he can't get too far. Blacks don't move to white society for
joy, fulfillment, good music or tasty meals. They move to get away from bad
schools and apartments where the trash isn't collected. They aren't moving away
from blacks but from the rats.
PLAYBOY: Are you saying that there's
no disunity among blacks?
JACKSON: There is an unfortunate division among blacks
now that is set off by a certain self-righteousness, a competition for being
the blackest. But we must never forget that Nat Turner was middle class, as
were Frederick Douglass and Dr. King—and even Stokely Carmichael. We will not
be trapped into glorifying ignorance and poverty. That will not improve the
lives of black people.
PLAYBOY: Do you agree with young
radicals who feel that blacks who are assimilated into the economy will become
new cogs in the corporate machine?
JACKSON: We want to create a new
value system that will produce a generation of black liberators, not
exploiters. You can't ask a black man not to work because America's value
system is perverted. But I would hope that when the black man gets a job in a
company that is part of the military-industrial complex, he will organize in a
union that is as concerned with basic values as it is with decent wages.
Instead of producing war matériel for an unjust and immoral war, the union
could pressure the company into producing goods that will help and heal people.
The virtuous and vicious aspects of our economy are interrelated. We produce
more food and clothing—and guns—than we need; we have the capacity to save more
people from malice and disease than any other nation in the history of the
world, and to kill more people than
any other nation in the history of the world. No one attacks our ability to
build X-ray machines or washing machines. Our national priorities are the real
problem.
PLAYBOY: Can blacks change them?
JACKSON: This is the challenge of
Operation Breadbasket. The businessmen we help, for example, are discouraged
from getting rich and leaving the ghetto. We develop profit sharing; we try to
make it our company as much as the owner's. We encourage a dialog between owner
and employee, and we encourage participatory democracy.
PLAYBOY: Can Breadbasket help
blacks outside the ghetto as well as within it?
JACKSON: Yes. Let me give you an
example of how it can work—a case of real soul power, where blacks had the
integrity to stick out a crisis and aid one another over thousands of miles.
When the most recent Voting Rights Bill was passed, black Alabama farmers found
that they weren't able to find markets for their products anymore. Whites were
retaliating for their new political power. On top of that, George Wallace prevented
them from borrowing money, so they couldn't expand economically, because of the
combined pressures of racism and capitalism. There were 1500 of them—all
farming small plots. Instead of quitting, they formed the Southwest Alabama
Farmers' Cooperative. They planted and harvested their crops and then brought
them to Chicago. We at Breadbasket then went to the supermarkets in the ghetto
and told the owners that they would either put the brothers' products on the
shelves or face boycotts. They accepted the produce. The brothers in Alabama
could farm there and have an open outlet in Chicago. We were able to do this
out of a sense of "peoplehood." That's my kind of black nationalism—blacks
helping one another on a national scale.
PLAYBOY: Isn't it one of the great
fears of Southern whites that blacks—who out-number them—will usurp their place
in society if they ever win enough economic and political power?
JACKSON: The problem here is that
the poor white and the poor black have mutual fear. Poor blacks fear that if
poor whites aren't eliminated, they won't be able to eat, and the poor whites
feel just the same way in reverse. The historical difference is that poor
whites in the South have controlled the police and the military and have
thereby maintained power over the blacks. We in the Poor Peoples' Campaign
believe that the basic anxiety of whites is an irrational fear of extermination—a
fear that can be removed with a guaranteed income, with guaranteed medical care
and education. Dr. King was firm in his resolve that black power must be
secondary to peoples' power. When the economic base of all the people is
raised, racism will decline. As the Poor Peoples' Campaign gets stronger,
racism will lose its hold on the consciousness of the white poor.
PLAYBOY: Do you honestly think, as
Dr. King did, that there's going to be a movement of the poor that will include
whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Indians?
JACKSON: It's inevitable. If our
good sense doesn't connect us through affirmation, then America's greed will
lock us together by negation. False racial pride has divided the lower class,
but we must stop defining and separating ourselves because of skin color. We
should define ourselves by our economic position and shift the fight from a
horizontal confrontation of poor black versus poor white to a confrontation of
"have" versus "have not." Dr. King could have been the suture that connected
the various bones of the bottom classes. Just two weeks before his
assassination, there was a meeting of a dozen representative ethnic groups in
SCLC's Atlanta office. That was the beginning of something really new, and it
is continuing. For just one example, Dr. Abernathy marched with Cézar Chávez
and Operation Breadbasket supports the grape strike as if it were our own project,
by boycotting and picketing Jewel Tea and other stores where California table
grapes are sold.
PLAYBOY: But do you really think
that the white poor are going to join you?
JACKSON: The white poor have
always been distracted from demanding their rights; they've been too
embarrassed to admit their deprivation. They've nourished themselves on the
meager psychic diet of racism. But during the Illinois Hunger Campaign, we
offered poor whites food and they digested it. In East St. Louis, Illinois, a white
man named Hicks addressed a congregation of hunger marchers. Mr. Hicks has nine
children and works five and six shifts of day labor a week but still can't make
enough to feed his family or even to put a shack over their heads. Mr. Hicks
and his family were taken in by black folks. They shared equally, and it was
the first time in his life, he said, that he felt any sense of security. There
are a lot more Mr. Hickses out there who just haven't realized yet that they
don't have to suffer alone, that a massive cooperative effort by the poor class
is the only answer. United in a class struggle, we can force the redistribution
of wealth in America.
PLAYBOY: The idea of class war,
hot or cold, has always been associated with the theories of socialism. Do you think
of yourself as a socialist?
JACKSON: I adhere to the ideals of
my religion—that the earth is the Lord's and its food was intended for all men.
The trend of the world today—in Sweden, Guinea and Britain, for example—is
toward some form of democratic socialism, where men eat because the ground is
fertile. America stands in conflict with that trend by allowing a few people to
control and distribute the food, rather than letting people eat because they
are living. The truth, of course, is that this same America, where socialism is
such a dirty word, is already operating in a sophisticated state of socialism
for the rich, while the poor live in a crude state of classic capitalism.
PLAYBOY: Please explain that.
JACKSON: The people in this
society who follow the Protestant ethic and work long hours by the sweat of
their brow are the poor. They work at the hardest jobs and often still don't
get enough money to pass the poverty level. Even when they try to break out, it's
an attempt to start a street-corner business, where the rules of classic
capitalism prevail. The poor storekeeper, for example, doesn't control his
market through advertising; he can't float a bond issue and use other people's
money to run his business. But the rich man has socialism. We've got 6536
farmers in this country who receive $25,000 not to work. That's socialism. The
campuses expand, chopping pieces of land out of black neighborhoods, with the
financial help of the National Education Act. Even wealthy schools for rich men's
sons are state supported. The interstate highway program, none of which
benefits those who can't afford a car, is 90 percent Federally financed. There
wouldn't be a trucking industry without Government help. The list is endless
and includes the oil companies and their depletion allowance, the railroads,
the airlines and airports, the power companies. The rich talk about tax
shelters and tariff protections, while the poor talk about sweat and blood.
PLAYBOY: But isn't welfare a form
of socialism for the poor?
JACKSON: As it now stands, welfare
is a form of humiliation. It is demeaning and dehumanizing. Men use money;
welfare recipients use stamps. Men have privacy; welfare recipients have no
privacy and can be visited any time of day or night. Their most intimate relationships
can be called into question by people who are indifferent to them. Instead of
abusing the poor, this nation has to understand that the welfare recipient is a
product of the success of our economy. The unskilled black man whose job has
been lost to technology today will be joined shortly by the unskilled white man
whose job will be lost to the next technological advance. Either we see these
men as having been freed by technology, perhaps to fulfill a creative role, or
we see these men as having worked hard only to find themselves enslaved in
poverty by the same technology. Whichever perspective one has, we must evolve a
subsidy that will preserve these precious human lives, not destroy them as
welfare has.
PLAYBOY: Were you encouraged by
President Nixon's new welfare proposals?
JACKSON: I was thoroughly discouraged. I watched Nixon the night
he delivered that welfare address. My anger was tempered only by my incredulity
at the immensity of his con job. He lied for nearly an hour and didn't even
crack a smile. He asked the country to think of him as a great humanitarian,
but we weren't fooled. Behind all those promises is the single fact that the
states are going to retain control of most of the Nixon program. When the
states had the power, black people couldn't vote, couldn't ride in the front of
a bus, couldn't drink from any public water fountain, couldn't use any John
they wanted. Now Nixon says to Thurmond and Stennis, "Take care of them poor
folks." Right this minute, there are 40 states violating the welfare laws. We
don't need a redistribution of welfare-disbursement stations in this country;
we need a redistribution of wealth. The President challenged the poor to go to
work, without saying what he would do to improve the lot of those who can't work. I'll be encouraged when the
President challenges the rich to show their humanity and grant to the poor
their basic rights as human beings.
PLAYBOY: The white lower middle
class is becoming quite vocal about its opposition to welfare in any form for
those they characterize as too lazy to work. What's your reaction?
JACKSON: The fact is that the poor
work the hardest and have always done so. We made cotton king, cooked other
people's food when we had none of our own, stooped to clean bathrooms. Now we
are unskilled, because the schools don't teach us, because less money is spent
on the education of blacks than is spent on whites. A state of despair has set
in for those in the black community who have been told no too often, and
perhaps they can never be healed. When white people say they know a man on
welfare who is too lazy to work, I say that may be so. But the man they see is
a dried-up prune. I ask them, "Did you see that man when he was a boy? Did you
see him when he said, 'Momma, do you have a piece of bread?' Did you see him
before hope was snuffed out by despair?" The white middle class is paying less
tax money to support welfare mothers than it is to support the farm industry. I
don't hear them complaining about that. The bulk of their tax money goes to
subsidizing the rich and fighting wars abroad—wars fought by the sons of
welfare mothers, not by the middle-class kids who go to college. The middle
class invests in America with its tax dollars, but the poor have to invest
their lives.
PLAYBOY: Is it possible to raise a
family on the funds provided by welfare? Many claim it isn't.
JACKSON: Let me put it this way:
If I give you 22 cents for a meal, you know pretty well what you're going to
get to eat. I thought I knew what poverty was all about until I went on our
hunger campaign. I saw children eating red clay. Doctors call it pica when
people who don't get sufficient food eat things that have the appearance of
food. I saw a mother give her child saltines and onions for breakfast and send
her off to school on that. I saw a white mother with four kids, one of whom, a
boy, had leukemia. He drank all the milk the family was allotted on a
food-stamp supplement, and it wasn't enough even for him. She took him
everywhere in a little wagon, the kind kids play with. He was frail and
helpless, and the mother was exhausted; the entire family looked bloodless and
frightened, as if they would never have a moment's joy. I can understand why
they might feel that way, living as they must with the fact that there is a ceiling
on the welfare allotment but no ceiling on the rent or the food prices or the
amount of tragedy a family can suffer. The insufficient welfare funds are
especially damaging to babies. Eighty percent of the brain develops during the
three months immediately before birth and the first three years of life. The
minds of welfare children, who cannot get enough to eat, are stricken early.
PLAYBOY: Why don't welfare
allowances provide adequate support?
JACKSON: Welfare allotments tend
to be about one third of the minimal standard of living as defined by the
Government. In Texas, New York and California this year, even that meager
appropriation was cut. Furthermore, rents and food prices are higher in poor
areas than in middle-class areas, so the poor must spend more, even though they
have less. The result of this deprivation is that the black child goes to
school without breakfast, cannot afford lunch at school and cannot look forward
to a decent supper at night. His hunger is such a distraction that he is not motivated
to learn. All of these elements combine to place him farther and farther behind
in school. He has no goals, no hero images, no sense of purpose or identity. He
is physically weaker than his white contemporaries and probably sickly, because
he doesn't get medical care.
PLAYBOY: Earlier, you referred to
the dominance of professional sports by black athletes. That doesn't fit with
the image of physical weakness you just presented.
JACKSON: Some men will thrive even
in a prison camp, so it isn't surprising that you'll find an occasional black
youth who overcomes his poverty. But the important reason for the dominance of
black athletes is that a high proportion of black men—both those who ate well
and those who didn't—directed themselves toward athletics because the field was
more open to them than any other. More blacks tried to be boxers because there
was no point in trying to be a bookkeeper or a mathematician. A black man whose
mind might have had great aptitude for math wouldn't have been trained by a
ghetto school. It made more sense for him to try to be a ballplayer, even a
third-rate one, because it was so unlikely that he'd have a fair chance to be
anything else.
PLAYBOY: A persistent part of the
white stereotype of the black man is that he runs faster and jumps higher than
whites. But some anthropologists have claimed recently that there actually are
genetic differenced between white and black. Will this new evidence worsen the
relationship between white and black?
JACKSON: It won't affect us. The
black man has never needed to believe that there are differences; that's a
white man's problem. Our natures are the same. Our urges and drives as people
are the same. Mankind has one father, and that's time. It has one mother, and
that's nature. Both of these life processes are sound and consistent and
universal. The third process is brotherhood, which is all messed up, because
white folks have tried to withdraw from it. The eternal existential dilemmas of
fate and death, guilt and condemnation, emptiness and meaninglessness are the
same for all men. But our relationship, based upon distorted information
peddled by white folks who reject the humanity of others, has been perverted.
PLAYBOY: What are the
psychological and cultural differences between white and black, if any?
JACKSON: Slavery is our cultural
heritage and it should have been a thoroughly destructive one. But instead of
seeing ourselves as slaves from Africa brought over to serve the lusts and
wants of white people, a providential way of seeing our slavery is that we are
missionaries sent from Africa by God to save the human race. Who else is in a
position so close to the Pentagon, the greatest threat to the world's existence?
Who else is in a position to literally redirect the most powerful economy on
earth? Who else in the world is in the enemy's kitchen and his schoolroom? We
are, perhaps, the only ethnic group in the world that has the power to redirect
the destiny of white America. Neither China nor Russia nor France nor England
could do it. I don't look for white folks to give me any direction. My
experience has taught me that white people are spiritually impotent, by and
large, because all they've really produced is a lot of goods and services and a
lot of death.
PLAYBOY: That's a sweeping
condemnation. Would you say that the late Norman Thomas, to name one of many
men, was spiritually impotent?
JACKSON: No, he was certainly a
spiritual man, and you could find others. The point is that such a man is not
representative of the white American culture. In fact, the secondary roles that
genuinely humane white people are forced to play is indicative of what I'm
trying to say. Black society chooses to be led by its prophets, white society
by its hustlers. The men of highest sensibility in white society find
themselves rebelling from it—just as blacks must rebel. America is known not
for her capacity to love and heal but for her capacity to organize and kill.
America has an aristocratic, military definition of man. American men judge
themselves by their wealth, status and power, not by their intelligence,
compassion or creativity. That's why the idea of looking for racial equality
here is a farce. To become equal to white folks would be to become part of the
greatest tradition of killing in the history of the world.
PLAYBOY: That might sound to some
not only like a blatant overstatement but like a proclamation of black
supremacy.
JACKSON: I don't know what it
sounds like, but I know what the record will indicate. There is no evidence of
Africa invading Europe, of her early advanced civilizations killing or
enslaving other nations. Historically, blacks have not been the aggressors in
war, not even here in America. We did not mobilize to go to war for our
long-overdue justice, but there have been wars of injustice waged against us.
The profound men in this culture have been black—Frederick Douglass, for
example, who was more pertinent than Lincoln on the subject of slavery and the
liberation of mankind. And the crusader for justice in Mississippi was Medgar
Evers, not Jim Eastland. In New York, Malcolm was pertinent, not Nelson
Rockefeller, who did not bat an eye when he approved the welfare cuts. The one
who cried out for peace in the world and meant it was not the white leader,
president Johnson; it was the black leader, Dr. King. During the past 15 years,
Dr. Abernathy has been more relevant than any American President. Blacks have
striven for moral dignity and, by contrast with America's state of immorality,
we appear to be moral supremacists, not black supremacists.
PLAYBOY: The war in Biafra seems
every bit as brutal as any other war. Black life there seems to be as cheap to
blacks as you say it is to whites in this country.
JACKSON: The Nigerians and
Biafrans are fighting with white men's weapons. They are fighting a war that is
based on a white man's division of Africa, and the cause of the division was an
earlier economic colonialism. The war is an unfortunate aberration and the
signs of white meddling are everywhere in it.
PLAYBOY: During the 1968 teachers'
strike in New York City, there was evidence of deep-rooted black hostility
toward Jews. Is anti-Semitism consistent with your claim of black moral
supremacy?
JACKSON: In the first place, there
were really few examples of black anti-Semitism, and these examples were blown
out of all proportion by the teachers' union, which benefited by the
dissemination of fear. More significantly, though, I don't think you can
characterize blacks as anti-Semites. We have never been obsessed with the Jew
as Christ killer. But our relationship with the Jew has changed as the black
movement has changed. When blacks began to confront the Southern white power
structure, most of which was WASP Baptist and Methodist, Jews gave us great
support, both financial and moral, and a real kinship developed. But once the
movement moved North and the problem was defined not just in terms of social
segregation but in terms of economic colonialism, the Jew began to be revealed
as landlord and shopowner. Of course, he is more conspicuous than the
Protestant, because his name is likely to identify his ethnic background. And
he is also more sensitive: It is much easier to embarrass or humiliate a Jew
than either a Protestant or a Catholic, because, unlike the others, the Jew
immediately identifies with suffering.
As blacks have emerged, the Jew has been there
as teacher and shopkeeper, and there has been an inevitable friction. But I
think the mood of the blacks is more one of anti-colonialism than of
anti-Semitism. For blacks cannot afford to be anti-people; no matter who the
people are, they must be anti-evil. I think the Jews who are most concerned about
anti-Semitism, however, should keep in mind that blacks have not exploited Jews
at all. We have not owned anything in
the Jewish community—no clothing stores, banks, food stores. The Jewish
community, like most others, has a left and a right wing—some who operate in a
tradition of justice and others who violate that tradition. Rather than develop
a persecution complex, perhaps it ought to expend some of the energy it spends
complaining about black anti-Semitism on the Jewish merchants who are known to be
exploiters and tend to pull the reputation of the Jewish community down.
PLAYBOY: Jews, along with Irish,
Italian and other immigrant groups, are often held up as an example that the
blacks, if they were industrious enough, could emulate. The premise is that
those groups were poor and lived in ghettos but were able to overcome that
experience and join the American mainstream. Why hasn't that happened to
blacks?
JACKSON: First, those groups came
here voluntarily and were always free. We came here involuntarily and are still
not wholly free. The other immigrant groups are white and could lose their
identity and merge with the majority when it was necessary; with a few technical
skills or a decent education, it was a simple matter for them to bypass
prejudice. Their families were not destroyed and their sense of historical
continuity was preserved. Most importantly, they did not suffer the tremendous
color stigma of the white man.
Historically, there was a conspiracy to hold us
down. We were enslaved, then locked into plantations, as we are now locked into
ghettos. When America finally released our physical bonds in 1865, it was as if
we had been in jail for 200 years and were let out without a road map or a dime
to go to the city. There was no attempt to help us overcome the psychological
or economic hardships of slavery. Many blacks didn't survive; and of those who
did, most had to pervert their natures—become invisible men, as Ralph Ellison
wrote, become hidden, for it was too dangerous to assert one's real identity,
one's manhood. No other ethnic group was faced by a hostile white society that
wanted to castrate it both physically and psychologically.
PLAYBOY: Then today's black
militance is a quest to resurrect that manhood.
JACKSON: One thing that I have to
say right off is that there's nothing to be learned from the white man's idea
of manhood. An American man is identified by his weapon, by what he controls.
American men are obsessed; they are gratified by making money they can't even
spend, which is a kind of emptiness of the soul. Real manhood should be defined
by the ability to help and to heal, by an extension of the mind, by knowledge
exerting its power over ignorance. Real manhood comes from helping others be
free, by breaking the bonds of slavery.
PLAYBOY: Do you mean that
metaphorically?
JACKSON: Only partly. Many of us
have internalized slavery and behave like slaves, responding to the slavemaster
when he calls. In some communities, we must fight our own people because they
maintain the slave institutions. They are still in awe of Pharaoh and are
afraid to confront him. That is a form of slavery. The slave psychology works
on a subtle level that warps the black mind. It has been drummed into blacks
that whites are the creators and producers and thinkers. Blacks whom we might
have respected were taken from us. George Washington Carver's image is one of a
docile creature—an old man in a laboratory, bowing to a white child. The fact
is that he developed over 300 elements from the peanut and almost
singlehandedly revived the Southern economy. A black man, Daniel Hale Williams,
was the first open-heart surgeon. There are many, many other examples, but the
point is that blacks never knew about them. It was easy to preserve the image
of the dull-witted, slow-talking and -thinking black bumbler. There is still a
need among blacks for white validation of their efforts. If Tommie Smith and
John Carlos had a race tomorrow and both broke their records for the 220-meter
dash, and the race were held on a black campus, where all the judges were
black, black people wouldn't believe it—and neither would whites. But if it
were a white track meet, there'd be no problem. As for our churches, they gave
up their soul—and I mean that in both senses—to copy white church styles. That's
why at Operation Breadbasket meetings, which are deeply based in religion, we
have a band and a Gospel choir and consciously try to capture the rhythm of our
people.
PLAYBOY: Is the slave psychology
the reason for your own fieriness and emotionalism when you address a black
congregation?
JACKSON: Certainly. I am seeking
converts—not necessarily to religion, although there's that, too. But I want to
make my people realize their own selfhood. I begin each service with a chant
that says, "I am somebody." It also
says, "I may be poor and I may be on welfare, but I am somebody." Because black people have to learn that they have rights
just because they're alive. They've got to stop putting themselves down because
of an induced inferiority complex. The slave psychology was apparent when Dr.
King came out against the Vietnam war. He had all the credentials you could ask
for: Nobel Prize winner, an international leader, a scholar and a Ph.D. but
blacks said he had a lot of audacity; he's a preacher and should confine
himself to civil rights. But when Robert Kennedy and Senator McGovern took the
same position, then it was all right. And after Memphis, when SCLC's James
Bevel expressed Dr. King's contempt for capital punishment, he was scorned by
the black community. He said Dr. King would have wanted James Earl Ray
rehabilitated, would have said to fight hatred but spare the hater. Bevel also
pointed out the irony of trying to obtain justice by sacrificing a two-bit
waiter for a billion-dollar black prophet. But blacks said he was crazy. Then
Ted Kennedy said that Sirhan's life should be spared because his brother Robert
was against capital punishment. The black community immediately cited Teddy as
a great man of justice who didn't become vindictive in the face of personal
tragedy. This is a painful indication of our self-contempt. We must stop
looking to whites to validate our worth; we must look with-in for beauty and
strength and courage.
PLAYBOY: Your own self-confidence,
as contrasted with Dr. King's humility, seems to be of formidable dimensions,
and you've been accused of messianic impulses. Do you see yourself as the next
great national black leader?
JACKSON: First of all, Dr. King
was not humble; he was forthright and audacious. He was killed for challenging
white power. As for me, I am confident of my abilities as a social analyst, but
I have no illusions of grandeur. My job is to proclaim liberty, to preach
unity, to bind up broken hearts. I am just taking care of my assignment.
Besides, anyone in public life in this violent society who would make such
long-range plans is a fool.
PLAYBOY: You certainly expose
yourself to the risk of assassination as much as any man. Do you think that you
may be subconsciously seeking martyrdom?
JACKSON: I want to live. I've got
no hang-up with that. But a man must be willing to die for justice. Death is an
inescapable reality, and men die daily, but good deeds live forever. An
assassin believes that you can kill the dream by killing the dreamer; that is
an error.
PLAYBOY: Would you have any
special message to leave with black people if you were killed?
JACKSON: Yes. Don't send flowers.
Don't come around with your tears. Picket. Go to P. T. A. meetings. Fight for
higher wages. If I die tonight and you wake up tomorrow, make the most of it.
PLAYBOY: You've been quite sick a
few times this year, once with a form of anemia, and also with some very
debilitating viruses. Yet you hardly let up on your activities, rarely sleep
and constantly drive yourself toward exhaustion. Why?
JACKSON: Because I have a sense of
urgency about what has to be done. It is not the thought of death so much as it
is the crying need for justice. Perhaps both facts motivate me simultaneously.
I do feel that I have to fulfill my work in an appointed time. I would like to
sleep, but ideas come to me in the night and wake me. I think I'm drawing my
stamina from a spiritual source that has been allotted to me; for that reason,
I have no choice but to keep on driving. You can't devote the energy necessary
to confront Pharaoh unless you are spiritually consumed by the need for
liberation. But that is social consciousness, not a messianic need to be
worshiped. There are some aspects of glory attached to having the privilege to
lead, but none of the agony ever gets publicity, because television cameras don't
record people tossing and turning in their beds at night.
PLAYBOY: Inasmuch as the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference is basically a religious group, it's
understandable that religion plays a large role in your life. But what appeal
can the church have for a cynical 20-year-old kid from the ghetto?
JACKSON: The black church is
relevant because it has provided a home for our rebellion. It has cherished our
people. The white church, on the other hand, worships worship, not Christ nor love nor brotherhood. God is very sick
here; the God of justice and liberty is almost nonexistent. Christianity is
universal, but the American flag flies higher than the cross in American
churches; and when wartime comes, universal love goes out the window. If
Americans had a true God consciousness, they could not leave the church on
Sunday and shield their eyes from the hungry.
But there is extraordinary relevance in the
actual teaching of Christ. If you love people, you will not destroy them in
war; if you love deeply, you will distribute the goods of the earth that the
Father provided, so that people will be fed and housed. That is the Jesus I
identify with. His was a program for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and
giving company to the lonely.
PLAYBOY: In the past, some critics
have regarded Christianity as an impediment to black liberation; blacks were
supposed to have been content to get their reward in heaven. Did you
consciously evolve this activist approach to Christianity?
JACKSON: My religious philosophy
can be summed up in an old Southern story about two farmers. One farmer was
most concerned about his duty to God. He attended church every day and worked
his fields in the afternoon. His neighbor never attended church and never paid
any attention to religious rituals. The first farmer was just eking out a
living; the second farmer was getting twice the harvest from a lot the same
size. Finally, the first farmer said to the second, "Brother, I don't
understand. I've been working this land and doing my duty for God and asking
His help. I go to church each day. Yet I can't get ahead at all. You never take
care of your religious obligations, yet you're getting all the bounty. What am
I doing wrong?" The second farmer answered. "I don't know what you're talking
to God all the time for. He doesn't know anything about farming. This place
didn't produce anything when He had
it all to Himself." That's the whole thing. God made it but man has to go out
and do it.
PLAYBOY: In our interview with Dr.
King four years ago, he said the aims of SCLC were removing the barriers of
segregation, disseminating the creative philosophy of nonviolence and total
integration of the Negro into American life. How much have things changed since
then?
JACKSON: Four years ago, SCLC was
a Southern movement primarily concerned with social segregation. Blacks were
defined as less than human and were not allowed to participate in public. We
were "boys" and our goal was to be recognized as men. That drive was aimed at
creating a moral consciousness, and one of our slogans was "Save the soul of
America." I think that one of the reasons for impatience among blacks today,
and the reason for the appeal of violence, is that we never before knew just
how awful the secrets locked in America's soul really were. We didn't know then
that America would bomb a people to pieces and side with the oppressors in
order to preserve her financial investments. We didn't know then that the
Northern liberal had better manners than Bull Connor but that his institutions
were no less thoroughly racist. And we didn't know then that the capitalists
who slandered us with cries of "Communist" were living high off the Government
hog, while we were starving in the streets.
This education of ours has led to a change of
mood. Our first concern now is not white America's soul; it is black America's
body. We are justified in our impatience, because that body is hungry. When
Moses had his illumination and realized that he could confront Pharaoh, the
Bible says that Moses had to take his shoes off, because now he was on holy
ground and the bushes were burning. Actually, the bushes were not burning; Moses
was burning. His eyes were aflame—the skin had come off them. Black people
today are burning; the skin is off their eyes. The movement is now in a
resistance phase and we will no longer cooperate with the white slavemaster.
Either we are going to live or America is going to die. The ghetto experience
has not been a satisfying or a useful one, but it has given us inner resources—the
ability to do much with very little.
I read in the white press how black people are
dispirited and confused. White editorial writers claim that the civil rights
movement is fragmented. That is not true; the movement is very together: The
NAACP, which just saved the Voting Rights Bill, is doing its thing in Southern
courts; the Urban League is doing its thing in industry; the Panthers are
feeding kids in the streets; SCLC just had a political victory in Greene
County, Alabama; Operation Breadbasket is thriving. It is white America that is
at the crossroads. If she does not join us in the resurrection of her soul, in
the fulfillment of her dream for all her people, then I foresee a day when
little children in a schoolroom on the moon read in the history books about an
empire that crumbled because all her power and might of arms could not cure the
immoral greed that diseased her spirit.