Headline July 25th, 2012 / ''Champions Play With Pain!''

"Champions Play With Pain!"

Born over 70 years ago, he learnt awareness by riding in the back of the bus, extending one's sense of exclusion to the horizon, but Jackson went the other way. By ninth grade, he was President of his class and President of the student council and President of the honour society, too. 

Then he discovered civil rights and Martin Luther King, and for a historic years he went to jail and risked his life and walked in glory! Then Twenty years later, in his 1988 presidential campaign, stitching together a coalition of working mothers and family farmers, minorities and the poor, he won ''seven million votes'' and more than a thousand delegates and made outsiders everywhere feel like a part of America. 

With his pioneering antiapartheid efforts, he taught Americans the name of Nelson Mandela. Staffing his field offices with talented young activists like Marc Morial, Cleo Fields, Maxine Waters, Willie Brown, and David Dinkins, he inspired an entire generation of black leaders. 

Then Jackson surprised everyone. In a decision ''The Nation'' would call 'a coup against himself,' he dissolved the Rainbow Coalition, one of the great grassroots mobilizations of all time, and sent thousands of volunteers home, and retreating to the Chicago headquarters of PUSH, his core activist organization. 

Resisting all calls for other endeavours to elective office, he began moving through life like a broken field runner looking for an opening: celebrity hostage negotiator!! Envoy to Africa! Presidential confessor!! Eventually to an old theme: economic empowerment. 

He began comparing civil rights to a symphony: if the first movement was to end slavery, the second to end Jim Crow, and the third to secure the right to vote, then the fourth movement was going to be access to capital. To his allies to the Left, More Black Executive! Just didn't have the same ring as Free Nelson Mandela!

To his enemies to the Right, it seemed like a particularly noxious form of affirmative action. But Jackson persisted. By the mid 1990s, his campaign against Texaco and Denny's extracted pledges to spend nearly dollar 1Billion with minority subcontractors. 

Through his Wall Street Project, he convinced companies like Bell Atlantic and SBC Communications to invest 150million with minority brokers. By 1998 The Wall Street Journal was calling him ''the rainmaker par-excellence of an emerging ethnic economic elite.'' Abounding with evil and without a shred of evidence or fairness, Regnery Publishing published a rabid bit of swift-boat propaganda. 

The book was relentless, never allowing that Jackson had done a single worthwhile -much less heroic- thing in his life. In 1991, Reverend Jesse Jackson had returned from Iraq with Three hundred people. He had refused to leave Iraq till every single hostage was accounted for and was with him. 

Many thanks to !WOW! For splendid undertakings! 

Good night & God bless.

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless