Jesse Jackson, Tim Cook and the 'storming' of Apple HQ

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Philip Elmer-DeWitt

There is no photo on the Web of Jesse Jackson meeting with Tim Cook on Monday — or at least none that I could find.

Nor are there photos of the 100-plus demonstrators Jackson led in protest chants outside Cook’s office three days later — in the middle of a hurricane-force tempest that dumped half a foot of rain on Silicon Valley and knocked out power to more than 100,000 Bay Area computers.

(“Protestors storm Apple Campus” was the headline in theSan Jose Mercury News. Get it? Storm.)

The closest thing I could find was this undated photo of Jackson and Cook posing in New York City with a black-and-white print of a much younger Jackson with Martin Luther King, their mutual hero.

I’m pretty sure Monday’s meeting was not the shakedown described in Theodore Lee’s satirical Fly on the Wall, although that seems to be the prevailing theory in theAppleInsider comment stream.

I prefer to think of it as a pre-demonstration courtesy call — a polite meeting of two professionals with well-rehearsed set speeches.

• Cook on diversity. published last summer as A Message from Tim Cook.
• Jackson’s letter to Cook on improving working conditions for Silicon Valley service workers, published in November as a press release.)

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According to Jackson, every high-paying Apple job creates four low-paying service jobs.

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple  AAPL -0.29%  coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.