Jesse Jackson Turned the Civil-Rights Cause Into an Industry

7/19/23

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by Jason, Riley,

from The Wall Street Journal,
7/18/23:

Refighting battles the movement had already won helped ensure poor blacks would stay impoverished.

Mr. Jackson likes to bask in the glow of King, but comparisons between the two can be overdone. When King died, blacks were far better off than they had been before, thanks to his intimate involvement in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mr. Jackson has done well for himself, financially and otherwise, but can the same be said for the black Americans he claims to represent?

On some level the question may be unfair. The needs of black Americans in the King era were manifestly different from the problems the black underclass has faced since the 1970s. Mr. Jackson and other activists, from Al Sharpton to the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, have modeled their activism in many ways on King’s, but it has been in the service of battles for basic civil rights that had already been fought and won. Hence, the diminishing returns.

“After the 1960s, any understanding of the role of black leaders was cast in the context of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership, with the implication that African Americans can rise in American life only through direct-action protest against the political order,” wrote historian and Booker T. Washington biographer Robert Norrell. “To be sure, that confrontational approach accounted for King’s great success, but as the sole model for group advancement it has not always worked, because it does not apply to all circumstances.”

After King’s death, black America didn’t need another King. It needed a leadership that would focus on helping the black underclass develop the skills, attitudes and behaviors necessary to take full advantage of the rights King had worked to secure. What emerged instead was a leadership that shifted the focus from equal rights to racial favoritism and blamed all racial disparities primarily on racism.

Mr. Jackson helped turn the civil-rights movement into an industry that has boosted the fortunes of blacks who were already better off but he has done little to help the black poor. Worse, by advocating an ever-larger welfare state that creates incentives not to work and subsidizes counterproductive behavior, Mr. Jackson and his political allies have inadvertently helped to keep the black poor impoverished.

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