Jesse Jackson and the politics of race.

• Author: Weisberg, Jacob

Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race.

Thomas Landess, Richard Quinn, Jameson, $17.95. Jesse Jackson was standing in the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee at the moment Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by an assassin's bullet on the balcony upstairs. The next day Jackson stood before television cameras in Chicago, invoking King's name and wearing a shirt that he said was stained by the martyr's blood. But according to most independent accounts, Jackson was nowhere nearby when King died in the arms of his colleague, Ralph Abernathy. Witnesses say that the bloody shirt must have been a fraud.

Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn choose this sickening story to begin their account, since it embodies for them the central themes of Jackson's ensuing career: opportunism, demagoguery, and prevarication. What follows is not so much a biography as a 250-page indictment, drawing upon every charge that any critic has ever leveled against Jackson. Most of the allegations are well-supported, but the authors fail to transcend their laundry-list approach by placing Jackson in historical context or offering a convincing interpretation of his character. Halfway through the book Landess and Quinn tell us that Jackson is half the son of Martin Luther King Jr. and half the son of Elijah Muhammed, which makes him a "blood...