took place in the home of Jackson’ s mother. Seated around a kitchen table piled high with fried chicken, collard greens, yams, cornbread, and potato salad, the men talked about what it would take to strike a deal.
( Later, both Gibson and Jackson would give me lengthy, recorded interviews, in which they differed on the substance of this meeting.)“ I don’ t want to engage in any kind of struggle with you,” Jackson recalls telling Gibson as the conversation turned from his mother’ s cooking to the business at hand. If he was going to allow his name to be placed into nomination, Jackson said, he wanted to know that he had the backing of a majority of the board.
Having gone through two presidential campaigns and won millions of votes, Jackson didn’ t want his standing as the nation’ s most popular black leader to be hostage to the whim of the NAACP’ s 64-member board. He would only allow his name to be advanced as a candidate if he had the chairman’ s backing, Jackson told Gibson.
Jackson said Gibson assured him he had his support, but said he needed time to bring others in his ruling clique around to his position. Gibson remembered being supportive, but noncommittal.
To help this process along, Jackson agreed to go through the motions of making a presentation to the search committee when it met in Indianapolis, along with three other finalists— Jewell Jackson McCabe, Shinholster, and Chavis.
But Jackson had little patience for that process. He hoped that by
DeWayne Wickham and Jesse Jackson in Washington, D. C., at Barack Obama’ s second inauguration, January 21, 2013
making a strong showing there, he would force the board to cut short the search and offer him the job that he said Gibson assured him would ultimately be his.
Shortly before he was to make his presentation, Jackson ran into Jerry Maulden in a hallway outside the meeting room. A respected board member, Maulden, the NAACP treasurer, hadn’ t committed to a candidate. Jackson thought that if he could get the Arkansas businessman to come out for him, the other fence sitters would follow his lead.
“ Jerry, I need your vote,” Jackson said as he greeted Maulden with a hug.“ I need your vote, but I need your leadership. If you’ ll stand up and make a speech for me in there, they’ ll follow, and we’ ll get this thing done.”
“ Reverend, listen, I love you like a brother,” Maulden said as he returned Jackson’ s embrace.“ I’ m going to pray in here real hard as to what I ought to do.”
“ Pray,” Jackson snapped, planting his hands in Maulden’ s chest and pushing him away.“ I don’ t need your prayer. I need your vote.”
Jackson had good reason to be impatient with the selection process. He was by far the best known and most accomplished of the four finalists for the job. The others-- all people with impressive credentials-- did not match up well with him. That they made it to the final four seemed to result more from a concession to organizational politics than any serious judgment about their ability to successfully compete with Jackson for the position.
But in the days before the April 9, 1993, special board meeting, Jackson’ s position started to weaken.
Rupert Richardson, a board member from Louisiana, heard rumors of a deal having been struck between Gibson and Jackson. She was also getting reports out of New York that Dukes and Gibson-- who had been blood enemies-- were now spending a lot of time talking to each other on the telephone.
As a member of Gibson’ s inner circle, Richardson worried that she was getting all of this secondhand. She confronted Gibson shortly
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