#128
#128
PREACHER SPOKE FOR MARGINALIZED GROUPS EVERYWHERE
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
W
hen you’re being persecuted or deprived of the universal rights, no one actually comes to help you – you have to make the move yourself and wish the best for your eventual outcome and hope you are received favourably by others on the other side.
Reverend Jesse Jackson was the exception, bringing the revolution to the people on an individual level and also as a community, but almost never letting you muddle through your problem on your own.
Reverend Jesse Jackson would walk up to you in a subway station inside the Chicago loop and tell you that you are important and that you are somebody, just by his presence, if he believed that such a personal outreach would help the situation.
This courage in conviction, which was perhaps lined with the audacity to think that he would matter to perfect strangers, enabled Jesse Jackson to travel to South Africa and petition for the freedom of Nelson Mandela.
Chicago needed Jesse Jackson as well. And so did Blacks all over America who lived in urban slums with no hope for advancement.
Jesse Jackson had nudged his way into inner circle of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr during that time of utmost urgency to reconcile the Black world with the White world in America and all the promises of freedom and equality that rang throughout the democratic world.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr pointed out the obvious disparity between Blacks and Whites by moving his family into a Chicago ghetto.
All the more remarkable was Jesse Jackson’s personal journey as a young Black moving out of a Black slum in South Carolina where he was raised in a single mother household. Jackson graduated from high school and then hit the barriers that had been purposely constructed in America.
Blacks had been cheated their freedom and equality by the Jim Crow Laws which institutionalized racial segregation after the American Civil War to limit the Emancipation Proclamation issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863.
The White population continued to begrudge Blacks basic human equality, despite the solemn sacrifices for national unity during the war and the freedom achieved from slavery.
Blacks tried all over America to find equality within the freedom restored to them, migrating from the southern plantations to the northern factories, many arriving in Chicago, since Washington and New York were a long way away yet
One hundred years later, Black Americans were getting the shaft, and Reverend Jesse Jackson didn’t mind telling Washington DC and the rest of the world that singular truth.
This rare combination of audacity, courage and intellect unleashed the voices from the Black ghettos that spoke of the hard to believe real life stories of the daily struggle to survive in the communities America had built for Blacks.
Jackson had met King during the protests that followed Bloody Sunday, when the White dragoons wearing gas masks beat up civil rights activists walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.
The protests went on for days, perhaps to defy the police brutality, ultimately creating the correct time and space for Jackson to meet King.
I ONLY HEARD HIS WORDS
The work of the civil rights movement had barely begun the day Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at the Loraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The Nobel Peace Prize winner may have seen the worst times of Black America, but there was still so much to do.
Jesse Jackson had been walking with Martin Luther King Jr. in protest in support of the working class who still could not pay their household bills and provide for their families. The wage economy was hardly better in effect on dignity than the slave economy.
In the first instant, Jesse Jackson had sufficient audacity to just be there in that moment with Dr King, and then also tremendous courage to move forward and continue on the dream of the civil rights movement.
In having been there and deciding to push forward despite the tremendous loss, Jesse Jackson unified the Black America of the Civil Rights Movement with many more modern iterations moving forward.
The task had to be completed. Blacks didn’t just need to be able to ride the bus or freely walk the bridge, but Blacks also had to get out of the ghettos that white America had engineered.
Jackson’s continued presence reminded everyone around the world that there were two truths in America: that truth in which the White people lived, and another truth in which the Black people lived.
The concept was a basic one but one that the preacher from Chicago was not going to let go of – and took the message to other places around the world not previously contemplated.
Jackson connected in spirit non-voting Blacks in White rule South Africa with voting Blacks in White rule America – simply by going there and showing concern.
And when the time was right, Jesse Jackson drew in White Americans and White people around the world to work together for economic justice with Blacks and groups continually marginalized by government.
What caught my attention at an early age, was not that Reverend Jesse Jackson was preaching to me through television sound bites, which he wasn’t, nor that he fought injustice, which he had been, but that Jesse Jackson fought against just about every injustice that had become apparent enough for him to become concerned.
The image of defiance was so pervasive that before entering the debate about this thing or that thing, you tended to want to wait to first hear what Jesse Jackson’s opinion was about a given injustice.
To hear an issue explained in that way that he did, made the injustice seem so obvious and undeniable, and the entire situation clearly intolerable.
Jesse Jackson was persuasive without telling me through the media that he was from Chicago or that he was Black or that he was a Black preacher from Chicago who walked with Martin Luther King Jr still to this day.
I only heard his words and felt how those words put together like that resonated with me.