by Sara Russo

It is a unique individual that is able to sense the climate of an age as it evolves, and exploit it to its fullest. The civil rights movement of the 1960s spawned many great changes in America, but alongside the provisions for equal access and the repeal of Jim Crow laws, that tumultuous decade created a culture so sensitive to matters of race that truth was sometimes overlooked in the quest for awareness and understanding.

Kenneth R. Timmerman's Shakedown, an exhaustively researched biography of Jesse Jackson, follows the reverend from his early days on the South Side of Chicago through his rise to become one of the most recognized minority leaders in America, and one of the men most feared by companies and politicians. The story that emerges is of a man deeply aware of his power as a black leader in a society willing to pay any price to avoid the appearance of racial bias and desperate to right the racial wrongs of past decades.

While a better man might have used this power to create genuine change for minorities in America, Timmerman chronicles Jackson's exploitation of his leadership role at every turn. Jackson's blatant willingness to distort the truth, to enrich a select few of his "friends" while ignoring and sometimes persecuting ordinary black men and women, and his flattery of foreign despots and terrorists for the sake of money and prestige are all meticulously documented in Shakedown.

Jackson's lies began during his earliest days as a civil rights leader when he claimed to have a close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in order to ingratiate himself to black pastors in Chicago. In reality, Timmerman clarifies, Jackson had spoken to King only once at this time, and "King was suspicious of Jackson from the start. The longer the two worked together, the more suspicious King became."

As it turned out, King had good reason to be suspicious. In 1969, Jackson launched Black Expo, an annual professional trade show featuring black businesses, using funds from King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC]. He promised to refund 25% of the proceeds to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta, but cheated his benefactors out of most of the funds.

The final breaking point between Jackson and King's SCLC came when it was revealed that Jackson had incorporated Black Expo as an independent nonprofit foundation, without the SCLC's approval or knowledge. Timmerman explains, "Black Expo no longer belonged to the SCLC.... It belonged to Jesse Louis Jackson and a bunch of his friends, so the SCLC couldn't take it away from them in the event of a clash."

But Jackson's biggest lie relating to King was his televised proclamation on the day of King's death that he was the last person to have spoken to the Reverend and that King "died in my arms." The falsity of this claim was eventually revealed, though it didn't stop Jackson from repeating his story. Timmerman quotes Hosea Williams, one of King's top deputies who was present at the assassination. "The only person who cradled Dr. King was [the Reverend Ralph] Abernathy," Williams said. "It's a helluva thing to capitalize on a man's death, especially one you professed to love."

As Timmerman's chronicle makes explicit, there were few if any things that Jackson failed to exploit for monetary value. The book's title, Shakedown, refers to the process by which Jackson would "shake down" or extort corporations for money, threatening to call for a boycott of their products by black Americans unless they provided a certain number of jobs to minorities and made hefty donations to Jackson's various non-profit organizations. Fearful of being labeled racists and becoming embroiled in public relations scandals, many corporate CEO's gladly acquiesced to Jackson's demands, doling out funds and rewarding Jackson's business "partners," usually wealthy black businessmen, with lucrative jobs. Left out of this process were ordinary black men and women, the ones whose collective power to boycott lay behind Jackson's threats.

One particularly obvious "shakedown" occurred in 1999 when Jackson's organization Rainbow/PUSH opposed the proposed merger of telecommunications giants AT&T and TCI, claiming that the companies had a "questionable employment record." AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong instructed his company to donate $425,000 to the Jackson-controlled non-profit group, Citizenship Education Fund [CEF]. Jackson's opposition to the merger was immediately halted. Then, when the bond deal between the companies was announced, Armstrong personally requested that the small black-owned investment bank, Blaylock & Partners be named co-manager of the record-breaking deal. Blaylock personally benefited to the tune of $1.4 million from the deal, "its biggest deal ever." Blaylock's CEO, Ron Blaylock then gave Jackson a $30,000 donation.

While the shakedown of AT&T benefited Jackson and Blaylock, it did nothing for the ordinary men and women on whose behalf Jackson was supposedly acting when he inquired about the "questionable employment record" of AT&T and TCI. "Jesse was brokering deals for a closely knit black elite, and it rankled many black businessmen who never made it into his inner circle-either because they refused to contribute to Jesse Inc. or because they simply weren't big enough to count," writes Timmerman.

Jackson was also happy to benefit from the government gravy train. When Jimmy Carter (for whom Jackson had campaigned extensively) was elected in 1976, he immediately shut down an investigation into Jackson's finances. "Within months, Jackson saw friendly faces seeded throughout the new administration, and he began to dream a new scheme: Operation PUSH would transform itself into a service provider and cash in on government welfare programs directly. His train had come," Timmerman states.

Thus, a new corporation, PUSH for Excellence, was born. Supposedly committed to reducing anger and improving academic results among inner city schoolchildren, PUSH-Excel's efforts consisted mainly of Jackson flying from school to school, exposing students to his unusual brand of rhetoric.

PUSH-Excel quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from nonprofit organizations and received a $402,000 grant from the Los Angeles Board of Education. Carter's Health, Education and Welfare secretary Joseph Califano also approved the first of many large grants to PUSH-Excel in 1978. In total, four separate government departments, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave a total of $6,677,704 dollars in grants to PUSH-Excel during the Carter years.

The amount is staggering, especially given that an audit performed by the Reagan administration discovered "massive irregularities" in the PUSH finances. It was further revealed that Jackson's programs and motivational speeches had not had any positive impact on the grades and test scores of schoolchildren. "As the Reagan administration auditors dug deeper, they found that huge sums of money paid out to Jackson for education projects in the schools had seemingly gone missing, spent without a shred of documentation," writes Timmerman. "Someone was paying for Jesse Jackson's chauffeur-driven limousines, and increasingly it appeared that the taxpayer was getting stuck with the bill….The Reagan administration eventually demanded that PUSH reimburse the government $1,455,647."

Despite the greed inherent in Jackson's pursuit of domestic monetary funds, the harm caused by such ventures was mostly financial. This was not the case with Jackson's pursuit of donations from foreign dictators. During a 1979 trip through the Middle East, Jackson met with Yasser Arafat, and was given "a hero's welcome" by the Palestinian rent-a-mob. He declared Arafat, "my friend and the friend of justice and humanity," and was captured on film kissing the Palestinian leader on the cheek. Back in Washington, Jackson met with 150 Arab businessmen who donated nearly $10,000 to Jackson's organization. At this same time, Jackson received $100,000 from the Arab League, the official league of twenty-one Arab nations, as well as an additional $100,000 from the League's secretary-general. States Timmerman, "The Arab League check accounted for 80 percent of the money the PUSH Foundation had raised that year, but Jackson claimed he knew nothing about it."

Though it is clear that Timmerman harbors no admiration for Jackson, he saves some of his most vitriolic prose for the many institutions and government officials who enabled Jackson's crusade, refusing to delve into his murky financial records and gladly handing him donations in return for the appearance of action. Less obviously at fault, but still complicit, were the many corporate CEO's who found it easier to pony up to Jackson's demand for cash, than to stand on principle and risk his wrath. The old adage that no one can take advantage of you without your permission is always in the background of the Jesse Jackson story. Jesse may have exploited those he dealt with, but he did it with the full cooperation of his victims.

Perhaps the sole flaw of Timmerman's book is that while we are constantly fed details about Jesse Jackson the schemer and Jesse Jackson the politician, we never really meet Jesse Jackson the man, never get a glimpse of why, despite the almost uncountable scandals and incidents of heinous behavior, Jackson is able to command the immense and loyal following that he does. Timmerman frequently refers to Jackson's "charisma" but while we see its results we never witness it in action.

Despite this one omission, Shakedown is a stunningly thorough indictment, not only of Jesse Jackson, but of America's mainstream press and system of government handouts. So fearful were these institutions of being labeled racist that they refused to act on the truth about Jackson's shady dealings, even when it was staring them in the face.

"As the Reverend Jackson should know, the Gospel says that the truth will set us free," writes Timmerman. "Black Americans deserve to be freed from the shakedown artists who plunder in their name. And all it really takes is the courage to speak the truth to shakedown power."