The dispute between mentor and sometime protege comes at an awkward time for Jackson. Ever since he disclosed last winter that Karin Stanford, the mother of his illegitimate child, had received a generous payoff when she left one of his several organizations, his finances have come under close scrutiny. Several newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Times, have reported that Jackson and his friends have reaped financial benefits from the threat of boycotts against major American corporations. “While Jackson says he is working to tear down the walls of ’economic apartheid’,” commented the conservative Weekly Standard, “his tactics bring to mind an old-style protection racket.”
Sitting in a small office behind the Harlem meeting room he calls the “House of Justice,” Sharpton last week added his own voice to the chorus of critics. Like Jackson, Sharpton runs an organization, the Madison Avenue Initiative, that wins contracts for minority-owned businesses through the threat of boycotts and lawsuits. But “we won’t take donations from companies we fight,” he says. While Sharpton denied “suggesting anything scandalous” about Jackson, he clearly wished to leave the impression that Jackson is more interested in serving himself and his friends, while he, Sharpton, remains the “outsider” closer to the people.
The Sharpton-Jackson spat revolves around a black entrepreneur named Le-Van Hawkins. In 1996, Hawkins made a deal to build more than 200 Burger Kings in inner-city neighborhoods around the country. In financial difficulty, Hawkins was later unable to pay back a $4 million loan from Burger King. When the fast-food chain tried to collect, Hawkins sued, claiming racial discrimination. A judge in Michigan threw out the lawsuit, but Sharpton came roaring in, threatening to stage sit-ins on Hawkins’s behalf. Last fall Burger King got help from a surprising source: Jackson himself wrote Sharpton, urging him to back off. Jackson explained that he had been working with Burger King for almost 20 years, and that black owners of their franchises would be harmed by Sharpton’s boycott. (During the same period, Burger King made donations totaling “less than $500,000” to Jackson’s empire, says a company spokeswoman.)
Sharpton was taken aback by Jackson’s intervention. At the time, he told a magazine reporter, “It is very difficult for me–trained by Jesse Jackson to confront the corporate world–to now go in those same corporate suites, and they use the guy that taught me as their protection.” (Jackson told NEWSWEEK he was invited into the talks by Hawkins and was not defending the corporation, but rather the black owners of the Burger King franchises.) Last December the dispute between Hawkins and Burger King was quietly settled with a $57 million payment to the black entrepreneur, a knowledgeable source says. Sharpton halted his protest.
Right after the settlement, a source close to Jackson claims, Sharpton called Burger King and solicited a donation. Sharpton denies he received any money from Burger King, and the company spokeswoman says there is no record of any payment to Sharpton or his organization. The exact truth is hard to come by: Jackson’s finances are a model of openness compared with those of Sharpton, who has testified that he pays his household expenses from “love offerings.” Sharpton acknowledges that Le-Van Hawkins is a longtime contributor to his causes, but neither he nor a lawyer for Hawkins would be more specific. Meanwhile, the Jackson-Sharpton feud simmers on. Last year the two civil-rights veterans boycotted each other’s birthday parties.
