Jason Riley

And that is what I think is one of the reasons his legacy is so complicated.

Yes, absolutely.

And you're right, it starts right there with the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, where Ralph Abernathy, another lieutenant and really mentor of Martin Luther King, disputed Jesse Jackson's account of what happened on that day.

So it does go back a long ways.

He was someone who was known as a self-aggrandizer, a big self-promoter.

And you mentioned Al Sharpton and some others there.

That's another part of his legacy.

I say that Jesse Jackson was one of the leading figures in what became a racial grievance industry in this country.

Sharpton also epitomized this.

They made a lot of money

blaming all black problems on white people, on white racism, and really doing things that help themselves personally rather than blacks broadly, as King had.

I mean, it's easy to tell you what Martin Luther King's legacy is.

I mean, it's the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It's the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But what is Sharpton's legacy?

What is Jesse Jackson's legacy?

That's much, much more difficult.

The other thing that Jackson epitomized is really all that went wrong with the civil rights leadership starting in the 1960s.

King and his generation was all about colorblindness.

It was about equal opportunity.