Rev. Jesse Jackson: Civil Rights Activist and Politician

13:34Graham Bensinger:Dr. King and Dr. King and I was sitting there and he came in for a while. Chance Escher, Dr. King's lawyer, was Ali's lawyer. And so we met in that setting and we just kept on meeting and working together. When he was in exile, we spent a lot of time together. And I fought hard with Dr. Leroy Johnson to get him back in the ring. So we did a lot of stuff together.

14:00Jesse Jackson:Your favorite memory with Ali would be what?

14:06Graham Bensinger:At my home, at my grandmother's table, eating crackling cornbread. Which is, for those who don't know, crackling cornbread is nothing but pork. It was so good, he ate a pan of it. In the second, he said, what is this stuff? And I said, it's pork. Oh, I can eat pork. Mr. Muhammad knew I was eating this. He didn't stop eating it, though. You know, but his sense of, I mean, the guy was, he lost three years of his, the heart of his career. Someone like Michael Jordan did, really. He came back to be the world champion. So he became a, he went because of his style and his flair, his boxing ability and his dancing in the ring, his talk, his principal position, he gave up money, but not an idol approach, he gave up, he was literally broke.

15:10Graham Bensinger:I think Joe Frazier loaned him some money to get him back into the ring and offer him a fight so they both think he could make some money. So Ali really did not do a short circuit to glory beyond the ring.

15:22Jesse Jackson:You mentioned style. You were quite the athlete yourself in high school and college. You made the varsity team in football your freshman year of high school. You were also quite the baseball player as well. How good of a pitcher were you?

15:37Graham Bensinger:Well, the older I get, the better I was. At least you had made it. There you go. Yeah, well, I could play it. My father, Charles Jackson, was a great baseball player. And these days, he would have made the pros, the majors. He was a triple-A baseball player. And when people like Jackie Robinson or Don Newcomer, Junior Gilliam would come south, he would be a part of the all-star team to travel. So I got a chance to see him and some of the best guys play. And as I grew, I could throw it with accuracy. But I had a sense that I enjoyed baseball the most. that I could play four years of football and finish college.

16:22I don't want to risk going into a minor league situation

16:28Graham Bensinger:where you may or may not make it.

16:30Jesse Jackson:But you could have if you wanted. You were that good.

16:32Graham Bensinger:I could have, but it was too great a risk. I thought the gamble should be reduced and the option of playing football in college fascinated me the most.

16:46Jesse Jackson:How talented a quarterback were you?

16:50Graham Bensinger:Best I'd ever seen. Well, I was well coached, you know, and we had good teams. I enjoyed sports. It was not bad. I could not have gone to college. No? My parents couldn't afford to send me to college. I never remember them being out of debt. And so football gave me a chance to go to school, and I'm ever grateful. Athletics, I'm also concerned about how today athletes have been exploited in such a different kind of way. You can go from picking cotton balls to picking footballs. Picking cotton wasn't so bad. If you could own the cotton sack and the cotton patch, and you could weigh your cotton and build it and sell it and turn it into textiles vertically.

17:37Graham Bensinger:If you could only stay at the bottom, picking cotton is a bad deal. be it athletics, if we can only play football, basketball, baseball, fill up the stadium. Many schools have 25 to 30 athletic programs, tennis and badminton and track and all. Sports that do not generate capital, great sports, but the football team and basketball team generates money for the whole athletic department. And often those sports are heavily played by African Americans. and I get the financial consideration that they deserve.

18:11Jesse Jackson:I wanted to actually take you back to when you were growing up. So your grandma, she had your mom when she was 13. How old was your mom when she had you, and why did that upset your grandma so bad?

18:27Graham Bensinger:Well, 17, because she had the aspirations for her mother to go to college. The mother was quite a singer and had scholarships for music to go to school and got pregnant. chose to have a baby that upset her dreams but they were forever close and didn't break the bond it just interrupted the rhythm of their projected dreams and parents often you don't have to have a degree to aspire that your children have a degree. Grandma worked for the Waldrips and they would throw away the various magazines, science fiction and magazines, National Geographic. Grandma couldn't read them, but she knew that if their children read them, I should read them.

19:23Graham Bensinger:She'd take them and bring them home. I was reading National Geographic when I was 10 years old. Of course, my grandmother had a sense, a feel for education. When her first child was born, she had a 25 cents a week metropolitan insurance policy for the college. I later found out what the policy was. 25 cents a week. A small amount of money, but a huge treasure of thought.

19:50Jesse Jackson:I think your mom, when she was 16 years old, before she had you, she actually had five college music scholarship offers. She was a soloist at church. Why was it, though, after she had you, she was almost exiled from the church? Well, because of the moral standards of our church community.

20:14Graham Bensinger:They frowned upon babies, maybe one of the wedlock. and when mother became pregnant was so prominent and so well known it became an issue so finally she had she had to leave the choir bring me down front to all apologize for my birth she was accepted and received again and back at a special place in church for which she never left That was the moral standards of that day. A lot of times girls would get pregnant and they would go north to have the baby up north, away from home so as not to embarrass the family. That didn't just happen in black-white relations, that happened in black-black relations too.

21:02Jesse Jackson:Money was tight. How true is it that you'd have to wait for your grandma to come home before you could have Thanksgiving dinner?

21:12Graham Bensinger:Well, what it was is that for most of us in our neighborhood, our parents were maids and cooks and tended to babies of the white folks on the other side of town. And on Thanksgiving Day, we would, down at the bottom of the hill, we would play football, usually without a football. Sometimes we won't overracket football. And around 4 o 'clock, our parents would get off the Alta Vista bus coming up the hill. They would get overcooked food, more food cooked than would be used. They would bring it home. We'd meet them at the bottom and hear them bring it up to the house. Also, we couldn't buy a turkey.

21:52Graham Bensinger:Didn't have the money. Our stove was too small to cook a turkey in in the first place. We ate turkey. It was the overflow of White Folk's Kitchen.

22:04Jesse Jackson:I think you guys had a$9 budget when you would go to the grocery store to buy groceries. What would happen sometimes when you'd get to the front register?

22:14Graham Bensinger:Oh, my father, every week he'd come home, we would go to buy groceries. Maybe his limit would be$9,$8.50 or something. And I could count better than he could count, and I was in fifth grade. And I would be trying, if I miscalculated, we were like 960 rather than 880. Even though we shopped at the grocery store all the time, it was not like bring the money back or get it next week. We had to run that line and take the product out and put it back on the shelf. It was humiliating and never wanted to be in that position.

22:48Jesse Jackson:I understand the first house you lived in with your mom and grandma. you guys had wallpaper up more to protect from the wind coming into the house.

22:59Graham Bensinger:They had to put a ceiling they call it around the doors to cut the wind. And wallpaper not so much for decoration but to break the wind. We didn't develop a complex about it Graham because we were conditioned in that way. But something within me said we could change our condition. Really? And that we shouldn't live this way. So you were conscious of it at the time that that wasn't the standard you wanted? We would go to the white people's house and look at what they had. We just didn't have it.

23:41Jesse Jackson:Why the majority of your time growing up did you live mainly with your grandma as opposed to your mom or dad?

23:49Graham Bensinger:It really wasn't that far apart. That's exaggerated sometimes because mom and grandma always stayed either in the same house or next door to each other. But of course, I had the grandma affection. Grandma spoiled me. Did you? Oh, yeah. What did she do? Wouldn't let my mother spank me. People even talked to me loudly. Oh, what a wonderful woman. What a cook. And she was the neighborhood's grandmother. She was such a special person. God.

24:17Jesse Jackson:I read this story somewhere and your biological dad got a new house and you would on occasion like enviously stand outside on the street and look in. He moved to very nice, he was very

24:36Graham Bensinger:entrepreneurial, very industrious, a very nice house on the other side of town. White House, big picture window and central air and heating. A stream ran into his yard with God and the flowers and stuff like that. I would just go and look. I was hesitant to approach him. My step-mom was there. I'd internalize anxiety about that.

25:05Jesse Jackson:Why wouldn't you approach?

25:06Graham Bensinger:The children are sensitive to being affirmed or rejected, not getting in trouble. It's a very complicated situation. He loved me. He protected me. My step-mama grew up to love me. It didn't start out that way. I remember when she was dying, and I had done, I had preached, eulogized my father when he died and she was asking me to euthanize her and she said you know you're you're our oldest son take care of your brothers which was my father and her three other boys so in the end it worked out very well i was i learned to love them and to be accepted by them your half brother

25:57Jesse Jackson:Noah had said at times though you felt rejected how so?

26:04Graham Bensinger:Your blood cries out to you but it did not have deep indentations because I was so loved by my mother and my stepfather. My stepfather adopted me legally when I was 12. I was Jesse Burns, my grandmother's name. I became Jesse Jackson. That's my third name. I'm adopted. I never was fatherless. I never was homeless to that extent. Many of the children had worse conditions, frankly, and they were less loved.

26:31Jesse Jackson:What about taunts you got from fellow students? You know, I think one story read, they would say, make fun of you for not having a daddy. Well, children play rough.

26:45Graham Bensinger:Being a child is a contact sport.

26:47Jesse Jackson:So you were a student at the Chicago Theological Seminary School. And what I thought was kind of funny about this is obviously you've had this wildly successful career. But in college, you actually were struggling in seminary school. How true is that?

27:09Graham Bensinger:I was struggling because my attention span was challenged by the movement. I left Greensboro. I had been jailed twice. I had been marching, and I was into social activism. I was inclined to go to law school, law seminary, and Dr. Sam Proctor convinced me to go to seminary to try it for a year. And I was torn because I'm in Chicago in seminary, and my boys are downtown marching in Selma, Alabama. Matter of fact, the Sunday that the march took place in Selma, I was in school. I just came to the library and I looked on television and saw the beating. I couldn't take it anymore. And I said to my classmates, if Jesus is real, we've got to go to Alabama.

27:56The cross is not just something to wear, something to bear.

28:01Graham Bensinger:And I challenged that sense of theological commitment. And three cars of us drove from Chicago to Selma, Alabama. That's what I really meant, Dr. King, for the first time, in an engaging sense. I was hired shortly thereafter. I worked with him from 65 to 68.

28:18Jesse Jackson:I want to back up momentarily, if I could, to two other key moments that predated that, that I think helped in shaping your view on things, one of which was you're six years old and going to a local store and see Jack. Take the story from there.

28:40Graham Bensinger:Oh, kind of like urban ghettos where the Stornos, all the ethnic groups, were occupied. And at that time, the social standards were such that they had freedoms we didn't have though we lived there. And we thought he would laugh and play with us. A white guy playing with us was a big deal. He would smack the little girls in the butt and they'd giggle at him, kind of silly in retrospect. I called him by first name. So one day I ran in the store and there were seven and eight adults, still a little bigger than where we are now. And I ran against a Mary Jane candidate. I said, Jack, he stopped. I'm pissed off the criminal judge, don't you ever pissed off me again.

29:32Jesse Jackson:two things hit me so quickly one was that and he had a pistol yes yes he did it does and the store who saw it didn't see it they refused to see it what do you mean I mean they saw it and since they were saying I should have known better someone like Emmett Till it's cool quote first of the

29:53Graham Bensinger:white lady they said should have known better with you know the lady lady said he didn't do it but should have known better. So their dismissal of it was that. There was no protest, no demonstration, no burning the store down. The other part of it was that I knew if I told my father to just come back from Germany, he was very upset because that generation fought for rights in Europe. They didn't have it home. And they came back home, didn't have the right to vote. and he wasn't even going to the war because his brother was there but he refused to he was shining shoes at a certain store and when he stopped the barbershop the barber had him sent to the army every white man was it was a in some sense a deputy sheriff so he had a certain anger I don't know if I told him he was gonna come down he was gonna either shoot or get shot so something Someone said me in that flash moment, don't tell your daddy.

30:59Graham Bensinger:And I took it and went to the truck a long time forever. I just internalized it. That can happen. Those decisions can happen in such a flash.

31:10Jesse Jackson:Greenville Public Library, you go there to try and get a book that you need for a college term paper.

31:18Graham Bensinger:Well, 25 books. I was home from the University of Illinois for Christmas. There was a speech with 25 voluntary bibliographers, and they had to read the books in some measure and write the speech and memorize and give it to a speech contest upon returning to school. So I came out excited to do my work. I ran to the colored library. I don't have the number of books, but my friend at the Central Library does.

31:49Graham Bensinger:So I'll give her a call. I read a note. I ran maybe two miles. I got to the library. I was puffing in. I sent with two policemen as if they just happened to stop by. I missed the point at first. And I said, she said, I knew you were coming. I have for you in seven days. I said, seven days? This is my first Christmas vacation. I really need the books now, she said. I said, may I go down in the stacks? She said, you remember? She said, I got the message. I went up back and I cried. I came back that summer. seven classmates of mine, Reverend James Hall, Springfield Baptist Church. We went to the library and we were arrested.

32:30Graham Bensinger:I can't take as much credit as I wanted to take because he had trained us. If they talk back to you, if they talk to you loud, don't say it, they curse you, they push you, don't push back. Nonviolent discipline training. Put cigarettes on your neck, take it, don't fight back. We were prepared. We had been through all the processes. So we went to the library and got in the library and our lawyers were there. The police met us and said, we only don't leave this place by the count of three, you're going to jail. We looked at each other, you're going to jail? One, two, we turned and went back. I said, why are you guys back to church so quick?

33:11Graham Bensinger:They did a good luck. He said, I sent you to go to jail. So we went back and we were arrested. But it was a challenge for us to break that zone of fear. I went to jail the first time. I lost my fear of jails and death. How did it feel when you did it? It felt great. There was a certain dignity and a sense of fight back. You fought somebody your size. The other side was my father, who had really taught me with his own sense of personal politics how not to be violated. He was home Saturday afternoon watching television with his feet in the wash tub with the Epson sauce. And I went to the fridge where I was getting some ice cream out.

33:56Graham Bensinger:I heard his feet. I could tell that walk. How you doing, son? I said, all right, Dad. I said, you ever missed a meal at home? I said, no, Dad. Yeah, on television, you and them children, you down town hungry or something. It was not about hungry. It was not about the sit-in at the library, at the restaurant. It was about the library. If you were going to do that, you had to leave here and go back up. Yeah, I don't know what to do, that kind of stuff, back up to school. I learned my sense. I'll fight back from him, but he was afraid for me. My politics came out one Sunday afternoon after church, he had a job, a bank, a lawyer's office, and a judge's chambers, and teach my brother how to enter the cans and how to buff and mop and all that stuff.

34:52Graham Bensinger:And that Sunday afternoon, his boss came by, hey, Charlie, come here with two of his big friends. And then I kept buffing. He said in a very unkind way, come here. Dad kept buffing. Come here, Charlie. Dad kept buffing. You know, come on, come on, kick you. Dad stopped the buffing machine. I heard all of that. Took his belt up and all those keys on the belt. Walked up there and said, Mr. Templeton, you, two of your big friends, I cannot stop you from kicking me. You can't take the leg back with what you do to kick it either. I'd rather get in trouble. We were leaving. My brother and I, we grabbed Dad's and we left, went home.

35:39Graham Bensinger:Later on, that same man, who was a fairly decent guy on a sober day, recommended my father to adopt a post office as a custodian. But he was one of his habits. Well, that sense of standing up, he knew my mother was sick and didn't have a job that Christmas. He knew Dad, it was his only job. So he had no job. And yet he's still a little principal. That's inspired me every time I think about it. And it led to my most happy Christmas. We were supposed to go to the church to exchange gifts and fruits.

36:19Graham Bensinger:And Dad said to Mama, we're not going because we don't have anything to share. Mama said, we're going. you just don't want to go to church. We're going, if we just go there and sing, Reverend Sample will appreciate our, and appreciate our presence. And since I have given out of thee, that type thing, that type spirit. We were there and Reverend Sample gave us some fruit and some necktie, bow tie or something. And we were happy. Give us something. And we came back home walking. We got to our house up the eleven steps.

37:00Graham Bensinger:Six bags of groceries in front of our door. We thought somebody made a mistake because we had not ordered any, couldn't afford any, and we asked Mr. Scott next door, did you order these groceries? He said, no, somebody left them for you. No, they couldn't have because we didn't order them, we didn't have any money. And so Dad said, put them in the house, and we'll keep the meat in the fridge there until someone calls for them and the fruit and cookies say, don't you or your brother touch them. We didn't. We were afraid to. Mr. Dave Roberts, a man that my mother had worked with to get his veteran papers signed and his money to come in.

37:42Graham Bensinger:And her dad was sick and dad had no job, mom was sick. Helen, you got these boys, they want to help you put groceries up. She said, it's not their fault. I told them don't touch it. He said, why don't they help you? She said, whoever left a note didn't leave me the writing. He said, but you know I couldn't write. You did the writing for me. and he'd come back with the food as a way of saying thank you. God at the beginning of my life, and that kind of reinforced my sense of religion and the goodness of God.

38:20Jesse Jackson:It means a lot to you, that story, even to this day. Even today. So fast forward to your in-college seminary school, March 7, 1965. 65, you know, you see what's going on, Bloody Sunday, March through Selma, you're driving down the next day, and despite eventually missing your second child's birth, you get your first real meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. What's discussed, and why are you pitching him on bringing the movement to Chicago?

39:02Graham Bensinger:He came to Chicago, not in my insistence. It was a big debate. Should you bring the movement north? Should you stay south? And they finally decided to come to Chicago. We began to organize ministers. And in organizing those ministers, we gave him a base when he got here, a base for fair housing marches. He came here fighting for public education, came here fighting against the red infirm houses on the west side, in the marching for open housing. He was searching for a way to arouse the consciousness of people. And the open housing marches became the final act of his life, really, which really was the war in Vietnam.

39:44It was the definitive movement, the Fair Housing Act,

39:48Graham Bensinger:came out of those demonstrations.

39:50Jesse Jackson:I think it was five days before his assassination. You end up getting into a heated argument of sorts and fellow activist Andy Young says, you still remember that, that the last substantive conversation the two of you had was some sort of argument.

40:07Graham Bensinger:It was not the last substantive conversation. We were often, he encouraged vigorous debate and staff meetings. We were not docile, just waiting to go. He said, we're going to Washington. We said, well, what's the, if they reject us, what would be the, what's the breaking point? We knew in Birmingham, if they ignored us, the more we filled up jail, the more we marched, that was the hook. If you go to Washington, Johnson does not like us, does not like you.

40:39Jesse Jackson:What is the hook? Johnson being the president? LBJ, huh?

40:45Graham Bensinger:There's no hook. Well, what do we do? It was along those lines. And the context of it was, he had said in the meeting open, I have had a migraine headache for three days. And I don't know if I can go any further. I'm being turned on. He was being attacked by a leader. He was maybe 62 percent in the black and 62 percent in the negative among blacks when he was killed. 52 percent by black and 72 percent by whites in the negative. Blacks were attacking him, taking attention away from civil rights before the war. His point was money for healing and harm is going to killing abroad. You can't separate.

41:24Graham Bensinger:It's the same budget, war or peace. And he said, maybe I should just quit, give up, stop. And he said, Dr. King, don't talk that way. It was such a solemn thing. And then be quiet. Don't say stop. Peace, peace, whenever there's no peace. I can see he read that in Jeremiah. He then said, maybe if I would fast to the point of death. My friends, Rob Stokely, Floyd McKissick, Jim Farmer, we disagree on some tactical, but we're friends. Come to my bedside. We follow him. They say, well, maybe we can turn the minus and two plus and go on to Memphis and on to Washington to have sit-ins to end the war in Vietnam.

42:12Graham Bensinger:He left, went back home. We went to several places and we were together in Memphis that Tuesday.

42:19Jesse Jackson:When Dr. King was assassinated, what do you remember seeing and what do you remember happening? I remember the day before how excited we were about the prospects of leaving that going on to Washington.

42:38Graham Bensinger:I brought a band down from Chicago. He had heard them play Chicago two weeks before and Ben Brashplate Precious Lord at the seminary where we were having our Saturday morning meetings. And we were going to Reverend Bill Kyle's home for dinner. We came across the courtyard about 6 o 'clock. We should have left at 5. He said, Jesse, you're always late. I said, Dr. King, you're late. You know you're an hour late. You're habitually late. No. And we were going to Reverend Kyle's home. You don't even have on a shirt and tie," said Dr. King. Prerequisite for eating his appetite, not a shirt, not a tie.

43:14Graham Bensinger:He laughed. He said, Ben said, be sure to play my favorite song, the person's Lord tonight. Ben said, I will. Pow! I would have hit him and severed his tie. That's all I saw was blood just everywhere. Knocked him against the back of the hotel door. I remember somebody saying, get low, get low, because whoever it was, if they had sprayed bullets, they could have hit three or four of us in the courtyard. There's a picture of Andy Young and somebody. That picture is saying the police are coming to drone guns. The guns, the shot came from that way. Go the way the shot came from. That's what that picture was all about.

44:00Graham Bensinger:I hate to replay that moment. He died so young, so innocent, such moral authority. It hurts to think about it, talk about it.

44:13Jesse Jackson:What do you remember thinking at the time as all of this is going on?

44:21Graham Bensinger:One thing about I remember Dr. Abner after saying, back up, that's my friend, my friend. He realized he'd been shot. I backed away and went and called Mrs. King. I had the phone by his bedside. I called Ms. King. She indicated in her book the first call she got was from me because I never called her. I called home to my own wife and children at the same time. I remember really saying that we cannot let one bullet kill a movement. We're going on to Washington, and we did. Most of us are not spending time in Memphis at the trial. We spend time in Washington fighting in the war and fighting for poverty to be ended.

44:59Jesse Jackson:What did you say on the phone to Mrs. King?

45:03Graham Bensinger:Mrs. King, how did you say, how things go on? I said, well, Mrs. King, it was hard to get it out. Martha King has been shot, I think, in the shoulder. I couldn't see it in the neck. I mean, I was not the coroner. I said, I think you should try to get it over as quickly as you can, though. She said, I'll come. She was in bed reading. and I'm sure within eight or ten minutes she got a call from one of the white service and he had been killed and that drama took us in many ways to where we are today.

45:37Jesse Jackson:Why was it important to you in the days that followed that or the next day to where the blood-stained sweater?

45:45Graham Bensinger:My anger.

45:47Jesse Jackson:Anger?

45:48Graham Bensinger:Anger. I was upset. that was, I mean, we're not, blood's not gonna stop us. We're gonna fight back. It was a badge of honor.

45:58Jesse Jackson:James Earl Ray, who was convicted of killing Dr. King, why have you said before you believe he didn't act alone?

46:06Graham Bensinger:He didn't have the money, the motive of the organization's skills to do it. A lone killer getting out of town at six o 'clock, getting into Mississippi and all that, ended up in London. He couldn't have done that by himself. When he was killed, the FBI's in Atlanta office, they jumped up on the table and reported they exclaimed joy. That was the environment that we focused on at that time. A group of two or three of us went to C. James Rory one time in Brushy Creek, Mountain Creek, or something like that. and I was convinced he pulled the trigger. He didn't have the capacity to pull this off by himself.

46:54Jesse Jackson:You realized that after you visited with him?

46:57Graham Bensinger:Before, Reverend Lawson visited him and Marty King III visited him on different occasions. From the exact from him, something different than Raoul, some story he had made up, I guess he made up.

47:15Jesse Jackson:What do you think happened?

47:19Graham Bensinger:The government was very involved. You think so? Who would say that if there was a national emergency and you had to lock up 100 people, that came to be one of them? The argument was that the communists, the threat to the country. It was not the truth, the Christian minister.

47:40Graham Bensinger:and the FBI tapped his phones. RFK allowed who would tap his house phone, car phone, and tap phones in the hotels we stayed in. So all of us were tapped out by the FBI. That's the role they played. and part of it was because when Swenna couldn't train the two Jews and black had been killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Dr. King said they were not trying as hard as they could to find the killers. Hoover called them a damn liar. Dr. King didn't call them a damn liar back. He just knew that the FBI was not doing its best and the FBI were creatures of the culture.

48:26Jesse Jackson:To what extent do you think J. Edgar Hoover played a role in... I have no idea.

48:31Graham Bensinger:That gets in too much detail, except I know this guy couldn't do it by himself. There was a very public hatred for Dr. King expressed by the FBI and the government. What do you think of Hoover? Well, he had the concentrated power of the intimidated officials. I mean, every senator in Washington was afraid of him. Every president. He had this concentrated power. He was a different kind of animal.

48:57Jesse Jackson:What did you know about just you yourself being under surveillance at the time?

49:04Graham Bensinger:Dr. King told us there's no defense against ambush and sabotage. So don't fret over what they may do. Do what you want to do. In some sense it was a badge of honor. We had nothing to hide really. We said we're going to have a meeting tomorrow night at 7 o 'clock at the church and we're going to demonstrate. All they heard was, well, we were going to say that church anyhow. It didn't matter that much to us. I think also it was a kind of badge of honor. I remember one time there was a group in Chicago called the Red Squad. They were surveilling us, surveying, and they were telephones and all that.

49:49Graham Bensinger:And finally a suit was filed and then the lawsuit came out. made public and there are some names on it. Some of the local resident militants name were not on the list. They were upset, they felt violated because they didn't make the list threatening anybody. So we just had to live with threats.

50:15Jesse Jackson:And I know you've received your fair share of death threats over the years. How concerned have you been at various points for your own life?

50:25Graham Bensinger:Not so much, but for my family.

50:28Jesse Jackson:How so?

50:29Graham Bensinger:I wanted my children, knowing that all the king's children had to come up with fathers to have some values, some properties that would take them beyond what may happen to me or their mother. My wife was quite an activist herself. She went to Cuba for her. She went to the Middle East for her. So she's an activist. I want you to have good minds. Strong minds break strong chains. I want you to have a sense of trustworthiness, a sense of character, a sense of work ethic, a sense of scientific object, a sense of scientific ability to be, and a sense of religion, a sense of caring for people beyond yourself.

51:16Graham Bensinger:I want to take these values with you the rest of your life and try to nurture those, our children, all those basic values.

51:25Jesse Jackson:I wanted to ask you about your PUSH organization. Started off as PUSH, now the Rainbow PUSH starts in 1971. I think Christmas morning you started it. Your wife once said those early days the house was almost like a commune. Describe the scene.

51:44Graham Bensinger:Well, we all stayed with each other. We were close that way. Kind of dumb with our style, you know. We met on Christmas Day. Jim Brown was there and Bill Russell and others came from around the country to support efforts to continue using economic boycotts as a lever to get blacks on board and C-suites and professional services and the like. We're still doing today really on Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We began that 50 years ago.

52:11Jesse Jackson:The next iteration of your organization, long after you one day pass, where would you like to see Rainbow Push?

52:22Graham Bensinger:Position to defend, protect, and gain civil rights locally and globally. Whether there's a crisis in Africa or Central America or Europe, where there's a chance of war and there should be peace, we should be committed to that always. Voter registration and participation in the political process, but put a renewed focus on the private sector. I mean, politics is where the money is, private sector is where the wealth is. We vote reluctantly every two, four, six years. We vote with a dollar every day. We use that leverage to get companies to open up opportunities. The strange thing is that when the doors open, it helps the company.

53:08Graham Bensinger:Companies miss out. What do the black community represent? Market, money, talent, location, and growth. Market, money, talent, location, and growth. So if you have a kind of insular environment where you can't see the market, 100 largest citizens, majority are black and brown. I mean, LA to Memphis to New York to Miami, it's too much market and money to miss. but many whites have a stigmatism. They can't see well. They see the world through a keel, not through a door. They can't see the bigger picture. So in some ways we'd be shaking them loose to open doors.

53:46Jesse Jackson:What do you have to do to best position your organization to have success after you?

53:54Graham Bensinger:Well, by having staffs capable of doing work, we have a senior vice president, we have ministers around the nation who invest in this struggle. There's no doubt in my mind they can carry it on. After all, this is God's work. This is not just my assignment. This is God's work. God will take care of his own.

54:17Jesse Jackson:The organization over the years has received a fair share of criticism. How about the piece of criticism that's bothered you the most?

54:29Graham Bensinger:People want us to do more than we can do. A lot of the criticism just comes with the territory.

54:37Jesse Jackson:Like what?

54:38Graham Bensinger:Well, we were engaged in a battle involving a state's attorney in Chicago. This is a more late case. And the state's attorney recused to accept for his number two guy, dismissed him because they do that on nonviolent charges to keep him overcrowding the jails on nonviolent offenses. no one was shot. And so, but the picture being painted that Jesse was so guilty everyone would not touch it. I said, it's not right to castigate her about it. I said, besides, the male running back north of New York, he and the police chief discrediting her in the case of Laquan McDonald where he was, they held the tape back 400 days, spanning an election.

55:40Graham Bensinger:He was shot 16 times. Tricks in the back, six while on the ground. Paid out$5 million in hush money. The police didn't get upset about that. Paid out millions in hush money. I can't pay people to pay their salaries. What about that? And the cop finally was convicted, first cop convicted in 50 years. 50 years. He got 81 months for killing this boy and shooting him in the back 16 times. When the penitent of this daughter of ours was killed after having left the White House and the parade, high profile killing. It got 84 years, 81 months, 84 years. And the mayor was involved in holding back the table paying off her money.

56:33Graham Bensinger:So we had to fight that fight. That's what we do. But if you can't fight all those fights, there's so much going on. There's that fight and there's Medicaid, full protection, corporate justice. There's a lot to do all the time. So you have to pick your fights. Today of course, with the election here, we decided that it was going to get bitter toward the end. And I had both those candidates stood right here, speaking to people on Saturday morning. and some designer pledge that they would meet today, the 3rd of April, have a joint press conference, which they did today. And the idea was, no just choose sides, choose reconciliation, that's what we did.

57:20Jesse Jackson:Chicago Sun-Times columnists once said, a group of people surrounding Mr. Jackson have profited from his civil justice involvement, and I think that's disturbing. your thoughts on criticism like that? That's a compliment. How so?

57:37Graham Bensinger:If it's not proper, then we're not done at work. If we're trying to get black products on shelves and get money in black banks and black insurance companies, if we're trying to get access to garbage, blacks can pick up the garbage at stores to make money, of course they make money. and they support the organization once they make the money. Of course, this is no, so it's kind of silly criticism. Of course, people that we support support us. That's how we stay in business.

58:08Jesse Jackson:To what extent is it a challenge at times to, you know, you run a nonprofit, funding is really important, yet I'd imagine there are times that you kind of question the motives of companies that are giving you money because you would have previously been critical of them?

58:33Graham Bensinger:The corporations in America, they have philanthropy. There's several things that they have. They need to have board slots and E-suites and jobs. And so getting the corporate contributions to sustain our movement, which they really owe the community, There's no other side of us challenging them to do the right thing. It never occurred to me if anything went with that.

59:00Jesse Jackson:Have you ever considered not taking money from companies you're critical of?

59:05Graham Bensinger:Yeah, if we're in the middle of a struggle, if we're in the middle of a boycott, you wouldn't do it at that time. That would be bad strategy and bad taste.

59:16Jesse Jackson:At what point does it become okay?

59:21Graham Bensinger:It's a judgment call.

59:24Jesse Jackson:Have there been instances where that's been an internal debate for you?

59:29Graham Bensinger:I understand what the lines are.

59:32Jesse Jackson:Yeah. Presidency. You've run twice for it. Why did you decide to run?

59:43Graham Bensinger:I got pushed into it. We were fighting to get hair washed and elected. Thought we could win. And Ted Kennedy and Mondale decided they were going to come here and campaigned for Daley and Jane Byron. We said, please don't come. This is a Democrat primary. We support you guys all the time. They said, we have to come. Daley and Byron are our friends. We said, we must be chopped liver. So I tried to get Maynard Jackson to run. He wouldn't do it. Trey and the young to run. He wouldn't do it. I arranged somebody that should run, at least in the primaries. and at some point they begin to say run, just run.

1:00:22Graham Bensinger:And so as I should, I was seriously not just playing. I began to run and learn how to run. And A4 was a really learning curve. I learned rules that would change by A8. I learned how to relate to people more effectively. To be in the Mississippi Delta one day and be up in cold New Hampshire next day is learning what America is. I mean, I love what it looks like, and that's what it did.

1:00:52Jesse Jackson:I believe it was the 88 election. You win 16 of 21 primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday. Then you win Michigan. How much of a chance at that point do you think you have to actually get elected?

1:01:08Graham Bensinger:A great chance we didn't have the money. You know, we've got 1 ,200 delegates with$19 million. dollars. Most cost efficient campaign ever.

1:01:17Jesse Jackson:Why do you think you didn't have the money?

1:01:19Graham Bensinger:People didn't believe how possible this is now then. Which is what? I remember when I was talking with President Barack Obama downtown one day, he said he was a student watching the debate at Columbia, which we did fairly well in. He said, Reverend And I looked at the debate and I said, this can happen. The whole idea was to stir up imagination, it can happen. And once he did it and won twice, now you see a whole lot of people who think they have reasonable talents can run because they run another path where the grass has been removed out the way.

1:01:59Jesse Jackson:What do you remember from the first time meeting President Obama?

1:02:03Graham Bensinger:His wife and my daughter Santita was classmates. and he and my son Jesse, our mates, and tell me how smart he was. His dad, this guy's going someplace. So we sat around the house talking talk.

1:02:22Jesse Jackson:I believe he sought your blessing before standing for election for the Illinois Senate in 1996. Tell about that, like what that entailed.

1:02:34Graham Bensinger:It was not a difficult decision to make because he had the right skill set and the right friendship and relationship with my family so it was not a difficult decision to make.

1:02:45Jesse Jackson:And one of, correct me if I'm wrong, but one of your daughters was the maid of honor in Barack and Michelle's wedding. How did that come about? My daughter Santita, Michelle were classmates with Whitney Young.

1:03:00Graham Bensinger:So they were close that way.

1:03:03Jesse Jackson:You said his election to the presidency was the last lap of a 60-year race. Describe what you mean by that. 54, Jim Crow becomes illegal.

1:03:17Graham Bensinger:55, the Montgomery Busport card. 64, the public accommodation bill. 65, the right to vote. 68, Dr. King kill. and really from 68 to 08, it was a 40-year run through the wilderness. So to go from slave ship to the White House, to go from the balcony in Memphis, the balcony to the White House was quite a journey. And so getting to the big house with the keys is the last step of that journey. There are fights beyond that that we now see because people can, you don't have the keys forever. and life is dynamic, not static. So it was, again, from being denied the right to vote, to have an African-American president was a long and meaningful journey.

1:04:08Jesse Jackson:What was the emotion of that night for you when he was elected?

1:04:13Graham Bensinger:You know, it was, I wept because it was the moment and it was the memories. I looked up on the screen where we had been in 68 during the upheaval in Chicago Democratic Convention right in front of Everton magazine. He had won the big one. He had won the big one, you know. The poor people who made it happen were not there. They couldn't afford to come to Chicago. People who paid the price with their blood and who for many years didn't have the right to vote, they couldn't afford to be there. And I long for their presence. I wish Dr. King, Maggie Evans, could have been there just like for 15 seconds, just have seen the glory of their work.

1:05:06Graham Bensinger:It was quite an emotional moment.

1:05:08Jesse Jackson:Why do you think you had a less strong relationship with the Obama administration than than perhaps it could have been?

1:05:17Graham Bensinger:Oh, that was his choice to make, you know. I respect him so much. I worked for him vigorously around the world. There was always some weight, some people trying to trying to create chaos for us, but his work was so splendid. He came into office, we lost 800 ,000 jobs in one a month. and they gained jobs every month for eight years. 26 million people getting health insurance for the first time. Climate change, building up the oil industry. His family had dignity, no corruption, no scandal. So I was just, I remained enamored over what he did.

1:06:05Jesse Jackson:What do you think, looking back, could have made the relationship between the two of you during the time of his presidency stronger?

1:06:12Graham Bensinger:I don't know, really. Because to me, he was strong. Always supported him. And I still support him very much. I think he's a very wise man. And he should have a long time to give a lot of service.

1:06:26Jesse Jackson:You did spend more time in other administrations before his. Were you surprised that there wasn't more engagement?

1:06:39Graham Bensinger:You know, it never worried me. I had enough access, people in his administration. I gloried in the judges he appointed. I spent a lot of time in Africa and Europe and in America organizing, reduced the cost of education, Gola registration, Gola fortification, and unnecessary wars against Syria and against Libya. So I remain very involved and I have the highest regard for Barack and Michelle. I think they meant a lot to our nation.

1:07:18Jesse Jackson:How about the most satisfying moment from your career?

1:07:24Graham Bensinger:Well it was walking with and beside Dr. King. That was a very gratifying experience. Bringing Americans home from foreign jails, bringing Goodman home from Cuba, I mean from Syria. Americans home from Cuba and Americans home from Iraq and Yugoslavia. Those were very gratifying moments. And when I got back with Goodman, Reagan said don't go, don't know what you're doing. If you do go bring him back, forget him, bring him back. Okay. Got it.

1:08:02Jesse Jackson:Thank you very much. All right, buddy. Thanks for listening to my interview with Reverend Jesse Jackson. To see more of our time together, go to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger.