“Bloody Shirt” Jackson
From a “Frontline” documentary:
MARSHALL FRADY: Jackson had been standing 10 feet below King, in the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel, when the shot was fired. After the initial confusion, Jackson had made his way up to the second floor balcony where King lay dying.
ANDREW YOUNG: After they removed his body, Ralph Abernathy got a jar and started scraping up the blood and said_ you know, and crying, it was Martin’s precious blood. “This blood was shed for us.” It was_ you know, it was weird, but people freaked out and did strange things. Jesse put his hands in the blood and wiped it on the front of his shirt, see, and it was_ it was_ I mean, what do you do in a moment like that?
[…]
DON ROSE, Former Advisor, SCLC: They [the press] were falling all over themselves to get Jesse, and particularly as the word got out later that morning that Jesse had returned to Chicago and was wearing clothes stained with Dr. King’s blood and was appearing before the city council and so forth.
MARSHALL FRADY: Don Rose accompanied Jackson to the tapings, the two men riding from studio to studio in the back seat of a car.
DON ROSE: He was thinking very clearly, thinking ahead, thinking of, frankly, his own career, the future of the movement and his role within it. And we were both reinforcing each other with the view that Jesse was a very logical successor to Dr. King.
JESSE JACKSON: [April 12, 1968] When I see you here, so much alive, asking what to do, where to turn_ I am available now. I am more convinced than ever that every time that there is a crucifixion in right and righteousness, that inevitably and universally there is a resurrection.
MARSHALL FRADY: King aides, long resentful of Jackson, saw his behavior as brazen opportunism. They were already angry that he had spoken to the press in the hours after the assassination and furious that he had so dramatically inflated his own part in the story of King’s final moments.