Jesse Jackson rallies to stop black-on-black carnage
By DeWayne Wickham
The telephone call came from an aging activist whose voice lacks the resonance it once had, but whose words still pack a punch.
“Out with guns, in with jobs,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said to me in his trademark gravelly voice. “We’re going to march in 20 cities” hard hit by the gun violence that has made the streets of America a bigger killing field for young black men in the United States than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been for U.S. troops.
For Jackson, who turned 70 in October, ending the black-on-black carnage in this country could be his last big campaign.
“Each year … about 7,000 African Americans are murdered, more than nine times out of 10 by other African Americans,” Jackson said in a painful acknowledgment of a crisis that for too long has received “drive-by” attention from most black leaders. But beginning with the marches his Rainbow PUSH Coalition will hold in cities from Baltimore to Tulsa the day before Father’s Day, Jackson said ending this slaughter will be a major goal for him.
Long road ahead
“If a foreign foe took these lives, we would mobilize armies and armadas to stop them. But here, because much of this violence is contained in racially concentrated neighborhoods, there is too much resignation and too little outrage,” Jackson said.
Understanding as he does the depth of this problem, Jackson has to know that it will not be solved easily — or quickly. He sees the roots of this racial fratricide as crowded neighborhoods, high unemployment, bad schools, drug abuse and a proliferation of guns. Jackson wants to use the marches as a starting point in his efforts to get the nation to respond to this problem in much the same way it has tried to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We sent a lot of troops there to end the violence and then rebuild those places,” he said, referring to the kind of pacification programs being used to end decades of bloodletting and stabilize those places with the construction of new schools, the creation of work opportunities and the rebuilding of civil society.
Jackson, who is fond of noting that the hands that once picked cotton have now picked a president, believes that an energized black electorate can bring about these changes, too.
Still on a mission
For many people in this country who still believe Barack Obama’s election as president ushered in the post-racial era, Jackson is a relic of a bygone era of racial protest and social activism. He is a guy whose time has come and gone. He is an annoying reminder of things they want to forget. So for them, it is easy to blow off his new campaign.
But for the thinking people among us, it would be a mistake not to rally to his cause — just as it would be an error for Jackson not to also attack one of the root causes of black-on-black homicides that black leaders usually duck: the broader problem of black criminal behavior that makes so many black neighborhoods unsafe.
Jackson’s cause ought to resonate with anyone who understands that a major ripple effect of this carnage is that more money will have to be poured into the criminal justice system, funds that could be spent on improving education and creating jobs. And Jackson must speak as fervently for the need to combat those blacks who gun down other blacks as he does for ways to keep guns out of their hands.
If it turns out that ending the pandemic of black-on-black killings is Jackson’s last crusade, history, I’m sure, will remember that it was his biggest challenge. And if he succeeds, it will be remembered as his greatest triumph.
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