During 2015, the Rev. Jesse Jackson did a candid interview with International Business Times in which he revealed he felt President Barack Obama had failed Black America. Obama was near the end of his second term in office, and according to Jackson, not much had changed to improve the condition of Black Americans. The veteran civil rights activist criticized the president and addressed the issue of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, which was launched in 2013.
Here are three things to know about why Jackson, the longtime president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said Obama had failed Black America.
President Barack Obama didn’t leverage the full force of federal agencies to target systemic inequities that continue to keep Black people behind whites in employment, opportunity and wealth, Jackson said.
Obama “has the view that racial injustice is something that requires a vote (in Congress),” Jackson said. “Blacks are without a targeted plan. Without one, we’ll never have an even playing field.”
Although Black unemployment dipped below 10 percent for the first time in seven years during the second quarter of 2015, it was still disproportionately higher than that of whites. The national unemployment rate was 5.3 percent, while the rate for African Americans was 9.5 percent. Among whites, the unemployment rate of 4.6 percent.
Here’s how Obama explained the disproportionately high Black unemployment rate in a May 2015 talk at the historically black St. Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina.
“In the African American community, a big reason (for high unemployment) is that you’ve got young people with criminal records who are finding themselves unemployable,” Obama said. “Now, that’s not just bad for that individual, that’s bad for their children, that’s bad for the community.”
Still, Jackson felt the Obama could have done more, even though he faced an unfair amount of opposition, much of it racially motivated, from conservatives in the federal government, Jackson said. But that should not have prevented Obama from directing his Cabinet to do more without Congress’ help, Jackson added.
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In October 2015, Obama spoke in Chicago at the National Police Chiefs Conference and lent his support to the police. He said law enforcement too often gets scapegoated for increasing crime rates. He promised to continue to support them with federal resources including funds to provide police departments with equipment such as bulletproof vests.
Jackson had a problem with that.
“It’s time not for a national police summit in places like Baltimore, but for an urban reconstruction summit, where all the agencies are used in that reconstruction,” Jackson said. “There is an opportunity to pull together government agencies — (housing, education, transportation departments) — and make something work.”