What did Martin Luther King think of Jesse Jackson? The off and on relationship between MLK and his protégé
Jackson was touted as “King’s successor” after the civil rights icon was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where the two had just reconciled.
The American civil rights movement of the 1960s lost another of its key figures on Tuesday with the passing of Reverend Jesse Jackson. A statement said that he died peacefully surrounded by his family.
Jackson was a protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. and a witness to civil rights icon’s assassination on 4 April 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The two men had only known each other for just over three years at that point, but the young Jackson had quickly made a name for himself within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) founded by King, Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights activists.
The off and on relationship between MLK and Jesse Jackson
Jackson got his start in the civil rights movement in Greensboro, North Carolina while studying at A&T College where he joined the local Congress of Racial Equality chapter. After graduating from college, he moved to Chicago in 1964 so that he could attend Chicago Theological Seminary.
The following spring, he organized a group of students to join the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama to push for African Americans’ right to vote. While there, he met Abernathy and King, and was tasked with setting up operations in Chicago for the SCLC.
Jackson was made the head of SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago in 1966, and then the national director the following year. “We knew he was going to do a good job, but he’s done better than a good job,” said King of his protégé’s effectiveness.
While King was impressed by Jackson’s drive and organizational skills, he was concerned by his ambition and focusing on his own agenda and not the common vision of the group for that nation as a whole. Jackson’s mentor sternly expressed these concerns just days before he was shot dead in Memphis.
However, the two patched things up when King asked Jackson to join him there, where he was rallying support for a sanitation workers’ strike. Jackson recalled in an interview with the Guardian that he was joking with King from the parking lot below just before James Earl Ray fired the fateful shot that killed the civil rights leader where he stood on the hotel balcony above, outside room 306.
Although Jackson had been touted as being “King’s successor” in the media, he continued on as the head of Operation Breadbasket and Abernathy became the chairman of the SCLC. The two would clash over the following years and Jackson left to set up his own organization, People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), in 1971. It is now known as the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
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