Steve Malzberg
Monday, Jan. 20, 2003

Martin Luther King's actual birthday is Jan. 15. Last week I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Phil Donahue show on MSNBC. Earlier that day, President Bush had announced that the administration would file a brief supporting the plaintiffs in their case against the University of Michigan Law School. That case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court and could go a long way toward ending racial preferences in school admissions.

The guest on the show with me that evening was the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Jackson had been called upon to replace the Rev. Al Sharpton, who had earlier canceled. The topics of discussion were affirmative action and the possibility that the youngest of the D.C.-area snipers, John Lee Malvo, could face the death penalty. It also happened to be Jan. 15, Dr. King's birthday.

First some background. For many years I have been of the opinion that if Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would be outraged by the way his legitimate struggle for true equality between the races has been hijacked by our modern-day so-called "civil rights leaders."

Dr. King was a man of peace, a man of principles and a man with a dream. That dream was for all of us – black, white, brown, yellow and green – to be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the two men who the media have accepted as Dr. King's successors, Jackson and Sharpton, believe quite the opposite.

First, over the years, both Jackson and Sharpton have made divisive remarks about Jews. Sharpton has also made similarly offensive statements about a white store owner in Harlem. He called the man a "white interloper."

Later the man's store was burned to the ground by some nut. (There has never been any legal connection made between Sharpton's words and protests outside the store, and the man who set the fire, killing several innocent people.)

He's also been involved in several incidents that many consider to be extremely racially charged, such as the Tawana Brawley incident, for which he still refuses to apologize. (His most recent refusal came two Sundays ago on "Meet the Press.")

There he was, the spokesman for a black teenage girl who claimed that she had been raped by several white men, including police officers, and then covered with excrement and stuffed into a plastic bag.

A grand jury later found that the whole thing was a hoax. Sharpton, during his "Meet the Press" appearance, claimed that the case was about civil rights.

Try very hard to imagine Dr. King ever doing any of the above. No matter how hard I try, I just can't bring such a great man down to the level of Jackson and Sharpton. Now back to the "Donahue" show with Jesse Jackson.

The first thing that Jackson attempted to do was tie President Bush's decision in the court case to the fact that he announced it on Dr. King's birthday. That is of course just silly, and I would have thought that Jackson knew how silly it was. But as I found out as the show progressed, he may not be all that well informed.

Bush waited until one day before the deadline for filing a brief in the case to make his decision. The timing shows just how much trouble the administration was having in deciding which way to go in the wake of the Trent Lott affair. Thankfully, they did the right thing. But Jackson used the timing to suggest that Bush was somehow spitting in the face of Dr. King.

Jackson also went on to defend the need for racial preferences in school admissions and in most walks of life. He threw in references to slavery from time to time, and talked about how successful blacks in this country have had the advantage of affirmative action.

The way I heard that was to imply that without racial preferences, blacks couldn't make it the way whites can. I don't think Dr. King would have ever accepted that bit of nonsense.

And when it came to respecting the law, the court system in this country and the facts of a particular story, Jesse Jackson once again proved that he is no Martin Luther King.

We were discussing the death penalty and John Lee Malvo. Jackson talked about a double standard with the way the death penalty is used. He started talking about the four New York City police officers who shot and killed an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo. The cops thought he had reached for a gun and pulled it out of his pocket after they had instructed him to keep his hands up.

There were several other mitigating circumstances that led a jury to a not-guilty verdict on the charge of murder. But that didn't stop the reverend from calling the officers "executioners."

He also got his facts wrong when he referred to a case involving a Central Park jogger and the five young men convicted of raping her several years ago in New York City. Recently, a sixth man has come forward to say that he and he alone raped the woman.

As a result, in a move that has outraged many, a judge has thrown out the convictions of the five, even though they confessed at the time. Jackson, when speaking of the five, claimed that they had been "rounded up and faced death."

The problem with that statement is that, as I mentioned, the five had confessed. More importantly, though, none of the five were ever charged with murder and they did not face the death penalty. Oh well, he was close!

Here again I ask, can you picture Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ever making that kind of mistake or calling cops who have been acquitted murderers on national TV? Let's go back a couple of years to when a group of students had rioted at a sporting event at their high school. The students were suspended by school officials, who claimed zero tolerance for such actions as the reason for the suspensions.

Jesse Jackson went to the school to protest the suspensions, calling the school's zero tolerance policy one of the most important civil rights issues facing our nation today.

He was kidding, right? Oh, if only he had been kidding.

And if only Dr. King had been allowed to continue, I'm certain that we would be much further along on the issue of race than we are today. But so long as our "civil rights leaders " are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Dr. King's dream has turned into a nightmare.

Steve Malzberg's WABC Radio shows can be heard live on the Internet at www.wabcradio.com: Monday-Friday, 6-8 p.m. Eastern time, with Richard Bey on "The Buzz" and Sunday mornings from 9-11 a.m.

Editor's note:
"Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson"