“There has developed among many, for sure, a kind of attitudinal air-barrier of cynicism” around Jackson, Marshall Frady, a journalist and the author of Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, once said. “Part of it is, no doubt, a reflection of the abiding, if not steadily deepening, racial schism in the country since the ’60s.” Jackson was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest lieutenants; he came of age when many considered racial injustice history, an issue the country had already dealt with. He reminded Americans that King’s dream had not yet come, and that created for him enemies. In hindsight, it seems strange that people would assume that the effects of centuries of slavery and segregation would be entirely wiped away in fewer than two decades. Jackson had grown up in poverty in the shadow of Jim Crow segregation; it must have seemed even more absurd to him.
It was common for right-wingers to refer to him as a “race pimp” or “race hustler.” He did himself no favors when, in 1984, he used an anti-Jewish slur—calling New York City “hymietown”—in a conversation overheard by a reporter. Jackson apologized for the ugly remark, but it followed him for the rest of his life—in mainstream media, the incident was practically a second appellation, right after “the Reverend.” In 1989, the Fox News founder Roger Ailes, then an adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral campaign, placed an ad in a Yiddish newspaper with a photo of Giuliani’s rival David Dinkins next to Jackson—the two were friends. The clear implication was that Dinkins was an anti-Semite, just like Jackson. In this way, Jackson became an easy shorthand propagandists could use to terrify white people into voting Republican.
Yet this caricature of Jackson as an anti-white, anti-Semitic demagogue never reflected the man. The entire point of Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition,” his vision of Americans from all backgrounds coming together for social justice, was overcoming such differences. Jackson’s political vision was always inclusive, always multiracial, and always opposed to bigotry and prejudice of all kinds, even if the man himself sometimes fell short.