UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 5 : THE PATH TO RECOVERY : INTERVIEW : Jesse Jackson : A Community Leader Speaking for Those Who Have No Voice

The man does make his presence known. Jesse Jackson came to this stunned, riot-torn city when the fires were still burning and immediately plunged into a pastiche of meetings with groups of people who were not, at the moment, on speaking terms with each other. He talked with merchants in Koreatown, Episcopalians in Pasadena and elected officials downtown. His message was ecumenical and passionate.

It was also familiar, which bothered those in the media who tended to forget that the social problems intrinsic to the riot are also not exactly new--a dismal reality that his large audiences seemed to grasp readily. Like it or not--and there are plenty who don’t--Jackson is that rare individual who can traverse the immensely complicated racial and religious terrain of this crazy quilt of a city “keeping hope alive.”

He has been there. Perhaps more than any American, Jackson took up the cry from a fallen Martin Luther King Jr. that the country could not survive without solving the problems of urban racism and poverty. Over the past decade, when few cared to listen, Jackson made the journey from the Bronx through Chicago or Atlanta and on to Watts--preaching his anti-drug, pro-education message combined with a singularly successful effort to get young people of every color to register and vote. He is particularly proud that once again, this time in South Los Angeles, he carried his message of power through the ballot box. “I said, ‘Would you have liked to be in the jury on the Rodney King case? Well, you can’t be on a jury if you’re not registered.’ ”

It ought not be necessary to add that in two national Democratic primaries the overwhelming majority of blacks--and a good number of others--said clearly that, on such matters, he speaks for a large, if underrepresented, constituency.

After seeing Jackson on a corner off Crenshaw a couple of weeks ago, talking to some tough-looking young people that the larger society had sought to discard, one wonders why the media finds it so difficult to accept that this man has a role to play. Jackson is, after all, a reverend who believes in getting the word out. He has been dealing with the task of securing jobs and education for inner-city youth at least since 1971, when he founded Operation PUSH. No one has been more prescient in warning of the tinderbox of ghetto America. And like it or not, people who do not listen to anyone else listen to Jackson. So listen.

Question: Where do we go from here? How do you bring the Koreans and blacks and everybody else together?

Answer: Our first step, when we sit down, should be to think about it differently. So many people are trying to play Watts Part II and are missing very different urban dynamics. For example, South Central L.A. is now 55% black, 45% Hispanic. Of those arrested, 51% were Hispanics, 37% black, 12% white. That shows a very different profile than Watts . . . .

Q: So it’s more complex. Where does that lead us?

A: In terms of remedy, it is time now for blacks and Jews and Hispanics and Asians to get into the real significance of multicultural education. You can’t have people living that close together who have no operative appreciation of each other. . . . Multicultural education ceases to be a debatable theory. It becomes a necessity for surviving in the multicultural arrangement. We have to have an appreciation of how we each got here--the suffering of Jewish displaced persons and Japanese in American concentration camps. We have to stop viewing others as parasites. The fact is--all of us are hosts, and none of us are parasites.

Q: What about the current planning to bring L.A. back from the abyss?

A: What we now see is a reaction rather than a response. A reaction is, “We got to do something real, real fast.” Now some things we must do real, real fast. But a response is more measured. That is, a plan with some time schedules. And the premise must be driven not by fear, but with a cause that’s morally right, and necessary, and cost-effective. The problem 35 years ago has now become a condition. A condition is different than a problem because it’s a more advanced stage. It means it takes more time, more understanding, more money, and more mercy because you’ve allowed the sore to become gangrene.

Q: There are all sorts of proposals to cure the sore . What’s wrong with them?

A: The planning is always top down. Coming up with Ueberroth--nice guy. Come up with Webster--nice guy. We have not seen a black, male or female, or an Hispanic, male or female, put in a prominent position yet. Even now, they ain’t got the point. I mean, they’re still bringing in more white males, more Santa Clauses, to dole out. That does not address bridge-building. . . .

Q: Aside from the choice of personnel, what about the vision?

A: It has to be much bolder and recognize the analogy between the needs of urban America and what was done to get Europe and Japan back on their feet after World War II. It means the same kind of funding and training now being proposed for the former Soviet republics. It means that folks who live there will have priority on loans, debt forgiveness, jobs and training. It means that the new enterprise zone exists for the benefit of those who live there, not for somebody else’s benefit. This is not to create an incentive for America’s wealthiest top 1%. You need to create an incentive for those locked out in the first place. . . . We obviously need a long-term urban plan. It is in our national interest to do so.

Q: Do you think you can get around this tremendous hostility in some parts of the black communities toward Koreans?

A: Well, I think walls of hostility can come down if leadership develops an understanding and builds a constant level. We don’t have the luxury not to build bridges because the absence of bridges are gulfs, and gulfs become traps . . . . Q: What do you make of Jack Kemp’s approach to rebuilding the ghetto?

A: What they are about is new rhetoric without touching the old reality. There was an urban crisis of abandonment before the Rodney King incident. It is like spontaneous combustion, where you discard material for a long period of time and then some spark ignites it. You have a generation of discarded people and the Rodney King situation set it ablaze. And essentially what Kemp and Bush want to do is change the furniture around when the foundation is in trouble.

Q: But you must concede that there is some truth to their claim that the Great Society programs failed to solve problems.

A: No, I don’t concede that. The Great Society programs lifted a whole lot of people out of poverty: prenatal care and Head Start and day care worked. The joint venture with the churches worked, the programs to help seniors worked. It was lifting people out of poverty. The War on Poverty did not fail, it got diverted--it collapsed because resources were shifted to the war in Vietnam. You must remember the context: We had just had the end of apartheid, we had just gotten the right to vote, people were living in poverty.

Q: It clearly did not solve the problems of Watts and South Central Los Angeles.

A: It was stopped before it could. When you are putting water on a fire, you don’t stop while the fire is still raging. What was missing was the economic self-determination dimension. It never went as far as a Marshall Plan for Europe and similar efforts for Japan. We had our priorities clear there. The Marshall Plan said here is a body of people who need help now--here is a formula for their development. . . . We knew it required time and there was a long-term plan to accomplish it.

Why, there are $1 trillion in public pension funds. Why can’t we borrow from that to build affordable housing? . . . And use the trained people who live in the area to build the housing.

Q: C’mon--where is the support going to come for such programs? You have had a conservative tide with the Republicans and even the likely Democratic candidate is more conservative on these issues.

A: Change never comes about because of the vision of people in power in government. The vision for change has to come from outside the process. The vision for ending segregation and extending the right to vote didn’t come from there. Lyndon Johnson told Martin Luther King it wouldn’t happen . . . and King went out and organized it. . . .

Somewhere between Selma and Montgomery, when the people moved, we saw Lyndon Johnson saying one night, to our surprise and to our delight, “We shall overcome.” That means the vision for the voting rights did not come from the White House. It was the people in motion. Last week, the people in motion were in L.A. and now people are discussing things like urban policy for the first time in a decade.

Q: How do you transform that into political muscle?

A: That’s why I keep putting my focus on voter registration. Bring in new voters. There’s also a message gap. We need to inspire new voters. Not with these little plans that are proposed for tinkering on the edges--little gift certificates like the flat tax or round tax. No, the nation needs perestroika-- a substantial restructuring of our economy and its priorities. Riots in L.A., flooding because of infrastructure collapse in Chicago, 10 million unemployed, enormous debts rack up because of savings and loan and other looters. You need . . . a commitment to new plants, new ways of doing education and creating jobs. This is the time for big dreams and big things--we are at a critical moment.

Q: Sounds good, but most people do not share that optimism . We have indeed become cynical about the prospects for change and rebuilding.

A: Cynicism is a luxury and is some thing that people who have real needs can’t afford. I can’t afford to be cynical because it is hope that keeps the people alive. When your job is gone, and your electricity is turned off, and your loved ones are injured or dead, and your job is gone, and you are down to your irreducible essence, only hope stands between you and collapse. It can’t collapse. That’s why we have to keep hope alive. It’s so fundamental to the human spirit. The very least that leaders can do, when they can’t supply the material goods yet, is to sustain imagination and hope.

Q: One of the ironies in the current situation is that the hope comes only in the aftermath of the riots. Despite the terrible cost , the fact is that without the riot, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

A: You are right about that. Man, what a terrible price to pay. How much wax is there in the President’s ear, and how thick the blinders, if it takes 60 deaths and 2,000 injuries and enormous losses in business to get the attention of an indifferent President and a stagnant Congress for a minute? But what a price for a wake-up call.

Q: Do you think that wake-up call is going to work, or, six months from now, will it be back to business-as-usual?

A: I hope that we could see the window of opportunity L.A. presents us. If not, L.A. could be the salad, not the entree to this explosion. This could be the opening of the rebellion to the indifference and all this neglect. I mean, we cannot assume that the calling out the Guards and Marines in every city addresses the problems. . . . You have all those guns and drugs and crushed dreams.

Q: And other provocations?

A: Well, yes. Look at Daryl Gates personally arresting those kids and then he came back and had a press conference. It’s being provocative as opposed to being mature. That’s very immature, but it looks like a jaded mind.

Q: So, it is really all about the loss of the very jobs that attracted blacks and others north from the South .

A: There is a big problem of those jobs not existing now. When you lose those jobs in the defense industry, you need a national plan to retrain. The Japanese have got a $3-trillion plan to rebuild their roads, bridges, sewers. Putting their people back to work. And we’ve got a 10-year, $3-trillion plan to defend them while they do it. . . .

Rebuild the infrastructure. I was in Chicago, and they got some contractor to do a major part of a road reconstruction. And there were blacks, whites, Hispanic, men and women out there working 24 hours a day. It was a big boost to everybody. They were buying stuff and paying taxes. That way you work your way out of a recession as opposed to welfaring your way into despair.