By David Masciotra
January 30, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "
Counterpunch"
-- “The bottom of the Empire,”
was Reverend Jesse Jackson’s description of
who Martin Luther King was seeking to serve
with his politically revolutionary ministry
of the 1960s. Jackson was standing in the
Reverend Martin Luther King Legacy
Apartments on the West Side of Chicago to
give a press conference on, what would have
been, King’s 93rd birthday,
January 15, 2022. Joining Jackson were
representatives from the Chicago Coalition
for the Homeless and the Illinois Union for
the Homeless. The city of Chicago has
transformed the lobby of the King Legacy
apartment building into a small museum,
showcasing the governmental-capital
conspiracy that created the “ghetto.”
Through decades of redlining and other
discriminatory lending practices, public
infrastructural programs to preserve
segregation, police enforcement of
residential borders, and “neighborhood
covenants” among white homeowners and
landlords to never sell or rent to Blacks,
Northern cities became white fiefdoms.
The Great Migration occurred when Black
Americans fled the state sanctioned
terrorism and apartheid of Jim Crow and mass
lynching, hoping to find freedom and
opportunity outside the Confederacy. While
cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and
Detroit certainly offered marginal legal and
economic improvements, they also introduced
new networks of oppression – the loan
officer eager to deny every Black applicant,
the hiring manager evaluating every job
seeker according to skin pigmentation, and
the armed defender of Empire prepared to
punish any Black dissenter with the
nightstick or smoking gun. If a Black family
managed to overcome the odds of oppression,
and seriously consider moving into a “white”
neighborhood, they would receive a visit
from a community representative. As Lorraine
Hansberry brilliantly captured in her
classic play about a Black family attempting
to integrate a Chicago block, A Raisin
in the Sun, the white representative
would smile as he makes the nature of his
threat clear: You are not wanted, and if you
try to move here, we will make your life
uncomfortable.
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In late 1965, Martin Luther King, acting
on the advice of Jackson and the Chicago
Freedom Movement, a coalition of
organizations fighting for fair housing,
decided to spotlight the Union variety of
white supremacy by temporarily staying in a
slum tenement in one of Chicago’s most
neglected and exploited neighborhoods. King
and his family found, and introduced a
formerly disinterested media, to housing
units with asbestos, no running water,
appliances that did not work, stairs that
collapse, rats running through the hallways
and sneaking into the furniture, and a
rancid and infectious colony of insects.
“The slums are the handiwork of a vicious
system of the white society,” King said,
“Negroes live in them, but they do not make
them, any more than a prisoner makes a
prison.” The “vicious system” that King
identified and sought to dismantle included
all of its leading institutions – both the
instruments of capital and the iterations of
the State. During his forceful condemnation
of the Vietnam War in an speech
at Riverside Church in New York, King
described the need to conquer the “triplets
of evil” – “racism, militarism, and
materialism.” All three were on stark and
hideous display in the Chicago slums – the
racism of making Blacks prisoners to
subhuman conditions, the materialism of
white society profiting from Black misery,
and the militarism that would come in the
domestic form of police brutality, and the
international crime of drafting young men of
all races, but disproportionately Black,
into the military to fight an unjust war in
Vietnam. From the bomb crater in Hanoi to
the burning cross in Birmingham, and
stretching to the slum of Chicago, the
brutal devastation of, what King called, a
“thing oriented society” was revealing
itself.
During one of the conversations that I
had with Revered Jesse Jackson for my book, I
Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters,
he said that the resistance he and other
protestors faced in the South Side of
Chicago, during King’s stay in the slums,
was the worst they had ever confronted.
While marching for fair housing laws,
Jackson remembers, “We never saw hatred, not
even in the Deep South, as severe as what we
encountered in Chicago with the ethnic,
Catholic whites.” He explained that in
Alabama, for example, the fear was always
that the Ku Klux Klan or the police
themselves, as in Selma, would turn violent
on the protestors. In Chicago, it was as if
the entire white majority was overcome by
wicked mania, acting out their psychosis
without shame or restraint. Ordinary
civilians, from school teachers to auto
mechanics, were charging the marchers,
attempting to intimidate and assault them.
The violence was so shocking that King
cancelled a second march planned for the
nearby suburb of Cicero. Richard Daley,
then-mayor of Chicago, was hardly an ally,
nor was he an opponent of political
violence. Three years later, he would
distinguish himself by giving a “shoot to
kill” order to police during the riots
following King’s assassination in 1968.
Daley, a Democrat, was the kind of “law and
order” fascist that President Nixon, and
later, President Trump would lionize and
emulate in an effort to demolish the promise
of multiracial democracy.
Reverend Martin Luther King convinced
Daley to adopt a number of fair housing
policies, but it proved merely a nominal
victory. Daley did not fund or authorize the
enforcement of his promises, and Chicago,
like most cities, did not make any progress
on housing until the federal government
forced its hand with the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1968, which “prohibited
discrimination concerning the sale, rental
and financing of housing based on race,
religion, national origin, or sex.” While
more effective than Daley’s empty promises,
the federal law still failed to prevent
racist and segregationist assaults on Black,
Latino, and Native aspirations of
citizenship. Redlining persisted throughout
the 1990s, and even as recently as 2008,
Black applicants for home mortgages,
regardless of respective qualifications,
were far likelier to receive disastrous sub-prime
loans than white applicants.
In the brilliant and important new book, White
Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and
Segregation in the Age of Inequality,
Georgetown law professor, Sheryll
Cashin, identifies and condemns three
methods of white supremacy at work
throughout the United States: boundary
maintenance, opportunity hoarding in the
form of commercial exclusion and educational
apartheid, and stereotype-driven
surveillance.
A young and precocious Jesse Jackson
confronted these complex mechanisms of
oppression, alienation, and injustice as the
director of Operation Breadbasket, a
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
campaign that, in 1971, Jackson morphed into
an independent organization, Operation PUSH.
As acting president of PUSH, Jackson, his
staff and volunteers initiated a series of
consumer boycotts, protests, and media
efforts to strike a blow against the
apartheid economy of Chicago. Even
businesses in Black neighborhoods often
refused to hire Blacks for anything beyond
menial labor, trade unions routinely denied
admission for Black workers, and grocery and
retail stores would not stock products from
Black-owned companies. PUSH’s project was
successful beyond most observers’
expectations. Blacks secured thousands of
jobs, and millions of dollars in ancillary
income through product placement and
entrepreneurship made possible only because
of PUSH’s pressure on banks and other
lending institutions to grant commercial
loans irrespective of race. Due to PUSH’s
triumphs, Chicago became the 1970s and ‘80s
epicenter of Black banking and media.
Jackson would take his economic efforts
national, managing to fight the racism of
major companies, and negotiate deals on the
behalf of Black workers and consumers with
General Motors, Burger King, and other
multinational corporations. He also
effectively mediated disagreements between
public unions and their host cities, most
especially in Chicago when the firefighters
union almost bifurcated by race. Jackson
convinced them that creating multiple unions
would only dilute their power as workers
against a municipal government aiming to cut
their salaries and benefits.
It was not the failures, but the
victories of PUSH that taught Jackson the
most crucial of political truths: No amount
of private successes could transform a
public system working against the interests
of poor and working people. Corporate
capitalism, and government that acts at its
behest, would continue to enrich the few,
while immiserating the many.
“If you have a size nine foot, you aren’t
going to fit into a size six shoe,” Jackson
said during one of our conversations, “There
is nothing wrong with your foot. There is
something wrong with the structure into
which you are trying to fit it. So, the
structure determines your placement and
movement, or inability to do either.”
Democracy, Jackson came to believe,
offered the means to transform the “tyranny”
of “corporate structures” through
governmental imposition and reformation. “We
are dealing with public districts versus
private territories,” Jackson articulated as
contrast between laws that are, at least
ostensibly, open to public inspection and
revision, and the impenetrable authority of
capital. “You can inherit a company,”
Jackson told me while talking about the
“unfairness” of capitalism, “You cannot
inherit a congressional district.”
When Jackson brought his leadership and
organizational acuity to bear on the
political system, Operation PUSH bolstered
progressive Black candidates for mayoral and
congressional offices. The Democratic
Party’s refusal to join their most active
constituency in supporting Harold
Washington’s run for Chicago mayor led to
Jackson declaring his candidacy for
president in 1984, and a second campaign in
1988. Ushering millions of first time voters
into the party, Jackson galvanized a
racially diverse coalition of supporters
with a platform of Medicare for all, tuition
free higher education, paid family leave,
full employment through massive
infrastructural projects, a public
development bank, and groundbreaking support
for gay rights. Despite acting as a docent
to expand and diversify a stale and languid
political party, and finishing second to
nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988, powerful
Democrats plotted the destruction of
Jackson’s movement, beginning with the
creation of the centrist Democratic
Leadership Committee – an organization
Jackson christened, “Democrats for the
Leisure Class.” The corporate capture of the
party culminated with the coronation of Bill
Clinton, who presided over the obliteration
of Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
the deregulation of banks and
telecommunications, and approval of the
North American Free Trade Agreement.
It is the bipartisan demolition of the
welfare state, obstinance toward an agenda
of social democracy, and constant
castigation of socialism as “tyranny” that
brought Jackson back to the Martin Luther
King Legacy apartments, 57 years after his
initial visit. “Poverty is not only an
economic failure. It is a moral disgrace,”
Jackson said from the podium.
“There are still millions of ‘working
poor,’” Jackson continued before punctuating
the statistic with repetition of the words,
“moral disgrace.” Referring to a 2019
study from the Chicago Coalition for the
Homeless, Jackson offered another set up
for his refrain, “There are nearly 60,000
homeless people on the streets of Chicago.
Moral disgrace.”
Targets for Jackson’s opprobrium included
Donald Trump, who the civil rights leader
charged with “resurrecting the ideology of
Jefferson Davis,” but also the bashful
Democratic Party. “Biden should stop meeting
with Manchin and Sinema,” Jackson advised
while referring to the two right wing,
obstructionist Senators within the
Democratic majority, “It only benefits their
egos. Instead, he should call for massive
marches of poor and working people in
Arizona and West Virginia.”
The “moral disgrace” of oppression and
privation in the world’s wealthiest county,
even as undertaxed billionaires enlarge
their coffers by the trillions,
implicates the economic system of profit
maximization at the expense of human life,
and the political system that acts as its
shield.
It was as recent as October that Jackson,
and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, applied
sufficient pressure on city, state, and
federal officials to intervene on behalf of
the residents of Concordia Place apartments
on the South Side of Chicago. The public
housing complex subjected its inhabitants to
daily torture – asbestos, mold, rat
infestation, unreliable appliances and
faucets, and as if structural and
environmental abuses were not enough –
routine sexual harassment against women
tenants from roving security guards.
The public status of the housing complex
is partially deceptive, because even though
the apartments are taxpayer funded, the
Chicago Housing Authority and HUD have
outsourced management to Capital Realty – a
private real estate firm guilty of similar
violations against the law, and fundamental
human rights, in Washington
D.C., and other cities. Rainbow/PUSH
convinced the Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development Marcia L. Fudge, and Chicago
Mayor Lori Lightfoot, to meet
with residents, and pledge millions of
dollars for repair and renovations.
“We want Concordia to become a model for
public housing,” Jackson declared, but also
struck a blow against anyone so complacent
or delusional to believe that the squalor of
its units is aberrant, “There are
Concordia’s everywhere.”
The universality of Concordia delineates
a toxic ecology of corporate capitalism and
government addicted to austerity. Still the
only developed country that does not
guarantee basic services, such as health
care, paid family leave, and high quality
education, to all of its citizens, the US
has veered so far to the right that even
formerly mundane measures, like funds for
the maintenance of physical infrastructure,
are fodder for acrimonious political debate.
A few hours after Jackson concluded his
remarks on January 15th, Donald
Trump headlined a fascist
cult ritual in Florence, Arizona. While
Jackson articulated the urgency of
“eradicating poverty,” Trump received a
standing ovation for defending the domestic
terrorists of the January 6th attack
on the Capitol, and for telling the insane
and dangerous lie that public officials are
withholding COVID-19 vaccines from white
people.
The contrast between Jackson and Trump is
iridescent, and it is as ubiquitous as
dilapidated and filthy apartment units in
poor neighborhoods. While Jackson speaks
about justice for those at the “bottom of
the Empire,” Trump personifies and projects
the crush of imperial power against the
lungs and hopes of its inhabitants.
Martin Luther King spoke at the Chicago
Freedom Festival in 1966, as part of his
Chicago Freedom Movement campaign. During
his address,
he called on anyone within earshot to adopt
a position of “divine dissatisfaction.”
“Let us be dissatisfied until every
handcuff of poverty is unlocked,” King
implored his audience. “Let us be
dissatisfied until race baiters disappear
from the political arena…Let us be
dissatisfied until men everywhere are imbued
with a passion for justice.”
Recalling his early days with King, and
applying them to the converging crises of
widespread poverty and emergent fascism,
Jackson offered a simple phrase that one can
only hope shoots through the silence and
passivity of the general public: “We need to
come alive again.”