The bad seed

Hate killer’s grandpa fought for civil rights

TWO GENERATIONS before James Jackson went hunting for black men to kill in Manhattan, his grandfather crusaded for the rights of African-Americans in Louisiana, the Daily News has learned.

Ernest Merklein Jr., Jackson’s grandfather, was a member of the Caddo Parish school board in Shreveport, La., in the late 1960s and helped the district through integration.

Jackson, 28, a bloodthirsty racist, was charged Monday with murder as a terrorist act after cops say he used a 26-inch sword to fatally stab 66-year-old Timothy Caughman. The blade went through the victim’s chest and exited through his back during a March 20 attack at W. 36th St. and Ninth Ave. that Jackson told police was meant to be a practice run.

Jackson, a white Army vet once deployed in Afghanistan, boarded a Bolt Bus in Baltimore and rode to the world’s media capital for maximum exposure. He told The News in an exclusive jailhouse interview on Sunday that he wanted to stop white women from getting romantically involved with black men.

Nearly 50 years ago, Merklein, who died in North Carolina in 2010 at 81, had a polar opposite view of the world, friends told The News.

Shreveport lawyer Art Carmody, 89, who graduated from Fordham University, said Merklein believed that everyone should be treated the same.

“He was very pro-integration,” Carmody said. “He was very problack people.”

Jackson, in the interview with The News, referred derisively to his family’s liberal heritage. He said his grandfather had crosses burned on his lawn in Louisiana.

Carmody said he heard that a cross was burned at some point on Merklein’s lawn, but another friend, Delton Harrison, 87, specifically recalled it.

“He tore it down,” Harrison said. “He never really talked about how he felt about that, though.”

Neither Carmody, Harrison nor a third friend, oilman Denman Long, 93, recalled the details.

“He had been active and believed in doing the right thing and so he probably had people who didn’t like that,” Long said.

Carmody said Merklein ran for the school board post because he felt that new blood was needed on the board.

“He thought he could improve the existing composition of the boards and he did,” he said. “He was unpopular in a lot of circles because of his liberalism and Catholicism.”

Merklein graduated from the New Mexico Military Institute and Louisiana State University.

As a pilot, he was badly burned in a plane crash in 1947 near Shreveport after he turned the controls over to a student pilot, according to a 1979 profile in the Shreveport Times. He was burned over 40% of his body, but overcame his injuries to serve in the Army during the Korean War.

Merklein later went into the insurance business, working for Alexander and Alexander, now known as Aon. He rose to be vice president of the company.