Seeking Votes and Clout

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26-year-old activist appeared on the news shows the following morning in a sweatshirt he said had been smeared with the blood of the martyr. He was the last person King talked to, he said, and he had cradled the dying leader in his arms. Others who were there dispute the story. Jackson, never overburdened with humility, now takes a biblical view of the bickering, invoking his own "Peter principle." Says he: "Peter was with Jesus physically, but Paul interpreted Jesus better than Peter did. Peter and them got jealous of Paul and tried to ax him out based on longevity." Those with a more earthly view of their mission feel the incident is representative of Jackson's tendency to usurp the limelight in his bid to follow King as America's pre-eminent black leader.

King's successor as head of the S.C.L.C., Ralph Abernathy, gave the ambitious young man a gritty assignment that, says Jackson, no one else wanted: mayor of Resurrection City, the tent encampment established on the Washington Mall during the 1968 Poor People's Campaign.

One bleak, rainy day, a litany inviting antiphony sprang to Jackson's lips that be came his slogan and made him a celebrity. He preached to the suffering campers "Say I am somebody." I am somebody. "I may be poor but I am somebody." I am somebody! "I may be hungry but I am somebody." l am somebody!

Two years later Jackson, who had been given charge of S.C.L.C.'s Operation Breadbasket program in Chicago, be came embroiled in an internal dispute over the organization's accounting practices. Jackson quit to form his own group.

That was Operation PUSH, which exhibits all the strengths and weaknesses of its founder. Its programs can be showy, bold and imaginative. But often its follow-up is slack, its results ambiguous. One initiative has been to negotiate "trade covenants" with major corporations designed to secure jobs for blacks and business for black enterprises. Another, known as PUSH-EXCEL, is a school-motivation program based on Jackson's self-help philosophy for blacks. Should Jackson run for President, the purported accomplishments of these programs are likely to come under closer public scrutiny (see box).

The idea of promoting a black presidential candidacy was first given serious consideration by a loosely knit group of about 50 black mayors, Congressmen, civil rights leaders and other officials from around the country.

The group is formally known as the Coalition for 1984 Election Strategy and informally know as the "black leadership family." They met in Washington early this year and later at the Atlanta airport in a marathon session that lasted from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. The group began by deciding to concentrate on registering voters, drafting a "people's platform," and developing the option of running a black candidate or a set of black "favorite sons" in the Democratic primaries.*

At its most recent meeting in Chicago last June, a pro-Jackson faction of the leadership family pushed through a resolution endorsing a black candidacy. Jackson was not specified by name, but it was clear that he was the candidate the leaders had in mind. It was by no means a unanimous decision. Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow Coretta, Congressional Delegate Walter Fauntroy of the District of Columbia,