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I respectfully disagree. I have direct personal knowledge of how he operated back in the “good old days,” and it was no more noble then than it is now. The only difference was then we didn’t have the internet and it was easier to keep up a false façade.

If you’re interested, here’s what happened. My dad was an educator in Chicago’s public schools for about forty years, spanning from the ‘40’s to the ‘80’s. He had started a program at his inner city high school where there were two tracks for Latin class, one for the students who worked hard and had exceptional ability, and a lower tier for everyone else. The plan was working. Good kids from poor, dysfunctional families were making it out of the hood. So many so he had some Chicago medical school officials telling him he was the primary source of their successful minority applicants.

Then Jesse Jackson and Mayor Daley the elder got involved. It seems the parents of the lower tier students got wind of the success of the upper tier kids, and they were outraged that their children were not also hitting the big time. It had to be, they thought, my dad was racist, because he wasn’t giving all of them an equal shot at success.

So they shut the program down, and the steady stream of success stories stopped. They took away my dad’s principalship and shipped him to the downtown office to write budget reports for the remainder of his career. He was miserable, and was getting ulcers. But he was old school. This was his new way to support his family and he was going to stick with it, unfair as it was.

As for Mr. Jackson’s nobler days? He sat down with my dad, at the time he was losing his principalship, probably some time in the late sixties early seventies, and told him to his face the reason he was losing his job as principal of that school was because he was white. Just that direct. Jackson has always been that person, and it matters not to me one whit that he may have been better at managing his public image back in the good old days.

Another thought while I’m at it. My dad got to experience the dysfunction and the racism of the hood in person, for decades. He told me of a conversation he had with a woman that encapsulated racial hatred like I’ve never heard it before or since. She told him that just as blacks were slaves of whites for 400 years (her words), so whites would be slaves of blacks for the next 400 years.

This is the vile, bitter root of race hatred that Jackson/Sharpton/Holder/Obama know is there to be tapped. And they cannot permit it to heal. Once it heals, once you have real integration and blending of the lives of black and white into a healthy middle class, with functional family life, more concerned with prosperity and personal happiness than settling old scores, the game is over. The hate merchants would lose their market and have to go out and get a real job. So they do not permit it to heal.

My dad also predicted a race war. He believed it was inevitable, given the relentless stoking of the lust for revenge, and it was a source of great sadness to him. I am hopeful he was wrong.