Pride and Prejudice

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"Let's talk black talk," Jackson said to two black reporters on Jan. 25 as he waited for a flight at Washington's National Airport. It was in the course of that conversation that Jackson dropped his "Hymie" bombshell. One of the reporters, Milton Coleman of the Washington Post, passed on the remark to a white colleague, Rick Atkinson, who used it in the 37th paragraph of a story about Jackson's foreign policy. Jackson at first insisted that he had no recollection of making the remark, then apologized in a synagogue two days before the New Hampshire primary.

The controversy had almost subsided when Farrakhan, the Muslim leader who has been making appearances with Jackson and furnishing him with bodyguards, declared on a radio sermon, "We're going to make an example of Milton Coleman! What do [we] intend to do? At this point no physical harm . . . One day soon we will punish you with death!" As a gratuitous aside, Farrakhan allowed that Hitler was "a very great man" albeit a "wicked" one.

Until his incendiary words burst into national headlines, Farrakhan, 50, was—to whites, at least—the obscure leader of a fringe movement. A onetime nightclub singer known as the Charmer, Farrakhan in 1955 joined the puritanical (no smoking or drinking) Nation of Islam, a black separatist group founded by Elijah Muhammad in the 1930s. Once 250,000-members strong, the Nation of Islam split apart upon Muhammad's death in 1975. His son Imam W. Deen Muhammad renamed the group the American Muslim Mission, rejected many of his father's teachings and began admitting whites. Farrakhan formed his own faction, keeping the Nation of Islam name and prophesying that one day white "devils" would be incinerated by holy fire, leaving Black Muslims to rule the earth. Farrakhan can claim only between 5,000 and 10,000 followers, but his influence is spread by a weekly radio show. Says he: "I never dreamed that my words, spoken not on his platform but on my own, on my own radio show, paid for with our own money, would be taken and used by the media to bring me to public attention."

Farrakhan, in the tradition of Elijah Muhammad, speaks in an apocalyptic tongue that many whites find frightening but that many blacks do not take seriously. "I don't represent violence," Farrakhan insisted to TIME. "Not at all, and I'm not antiwhite, I'm against that which whites have done to blacks . .. we're anti-oppression, antityranny, anti-exploitation." By any standard, however, his remarks were outrageous in a presidential campaign, and they demanded a quick denunciation from Jackson. None was forthcoming. Instead, Jackson commented that Coleman and Farrakhan were "two very able professionals caught in a cycle that could be damaging to their careers." He later stated that Farrakhan's apparent death threat was "counterproductive" and "wrong," but he complained that the pressures to disavow Farrakhan were a "form of harassment" by the white media. Why not badger President Reagan to reject his endorsement by the Ku Klux Klan? Jackson asked reporters. The furthest Jackson would go was to demote Farrakhan from "surrogate" to "supporter."