Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Minutes after his sermon in a sanctuary filled to capacity, the basement of Macedonia Baptist Church overflowed with those who simply wanted to breathe the same air as the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Dressed in a dark three-piece suit in defiance of the stifling heat, Jackson discreetly dabbed rivulets of sweat with a handkerchief palmed in enormous hands.

It would never occur to someone used to preaching to standing-room-only audiences to loosen his tie, no matter the humidity index, especially if the anointed one is considered a prophet in some quarters.

Dozens of chairs in the center of the basement were set aside for the news media, but fewer than a dozen local reporters attended the hastily scheduled news conference. Congregants circled the perimeter, fanning themselves and snapping pictures of Jackson for posterity.

At the podium, Jackson measured his audience and whispered instructions to a burly man who was either an usher or a member of his security detail. He stood close by surveying the crowd with stoicism bordering on suspicion.

In his preamble, Jackson rehashed issues that have always worked for him: inequity in American drug-sentencing laws, the disproportionate number of blacks in prison, President Bush's mismanagement of the economy and the war on terrorism.

The hushed voice Jackson used to recite the litany of domestic woes inadvertently revealed its routine place in his speeches, especially the rhyming couplets and analogies he's road tested at thousands of churches and political rallies.

Only when he began calling for immediate American intervention in the Liberian civil war did his voice fill with the prophetic indignation that comes across so well.

In recent weeks, the horror perpetrated on the civilian population in Monrovia by child soldiers fighting against Liberia's dictator Charles Taylor has registered in the American heartland. Jackson wants to fan these sparks of sympathy into open flames of support for an American peacekeeping presence that would, in all likelihood, kill lots of Liberians just to bring about a semblance of order.

This is the sort of tragic irony that proponents of far-flung military interventions based on humanitarian ideals rarely talk about. Jackson spoke eloquently, if not persuasively, about the history we share with a country founded by former slaves and the American Colonization Society in 1816.

He insisted that Americans acknowledge a "moral and legal obligation" to Liberia that transcends the usual prism of race used to determine when military sacrifices are acceptable.

"This is a policy skewed by looking at Africa through a keyhole and not a door," Jackson said in a series of catchphrases.

But Jackson's coup de grace was an idiosyncratic appeal to a "friendship treaty" signed by Abraham Lincoln and the rulers of Liberia in 1863. According to Jackson, this treaty forms the basis of a mutual defense pact between Liberia and the United States that the African nation has honored through two world wars.

When I asked Jackson how a treaty signed by a 19th-century American president and tribal rulers in Liberia could be anything but a colonial power muscling a vassal state, he swatted the question away, insisting that it continues to be a centuries-binding covenant between equals.

It's a surreal contention given the ephemeral nature of treaties signed by his predecessors and successors. It's also ahistorical when you factor in Lincoln's desire to deport as many blacks as possible to Liberia.

The so-called friendship treaty amounted to a one-way ticket back to Africa. Frederick Douglass denounced the Great Emancipator's schemes for colonizing Liberia with free blacks as a racist fantasy.

Over the next century, Liberia became a country that discriminated between Africans descended from American slaves and other Africans. Despite its democratic promise, it developed a caste system that put the colonists on top, eventually leading to decades of Liberian civil war.

If Jackson wants to argue for sending American troops to Liberia, he'll have to do more than appeal to the moral authority of a treaty that was more about racial coercion than about justice.