Jesse Jackson: Big picture overshadowed in Gates case

By Globe Staff

The Rev. Jesse Jackson weighed in on the Henry Louis Gates controversy during a meeting with the Globe's editorial board, inveighing against the "seriousness and cost of institutional, structural racial profiling.''

The White House meeting between Gates, Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley, and President Obama may have quelled the conflict over Gates's arrest last month, Jackson said Friday. But in the frenzied media coverage, the bigger picture tended to get lost.

"If Rosa Parks and the bus driver had the meeting, and he apologized for having her arrested and she accepted his apology and they met with the president, it wouldn't have addressed denial of access to public accommodations for the masses," Jackson told Globe reporters and editors.