I never met Rev. Jesse Jackson, but I was privileged to hear him speak several times at Rainbow Push headquarters over the past 4 decades. When I first moved to Chicago as pastor of Kimball Avenue Church, I was concerned primarily with my congregation and my local Northside neighborhood. Yet, he was always in the background, and. I was always aware of his impact on Chicago, the nation and the world–an impact that cannot be fully measured.. The death of this civil rights giant this week marks the end of an era, but his legacy will gone on…at least I hope it will.
One of his most enduring legacies is the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. The moniker, “Rainbow Coalition,” was first coined by Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Chapter Black Panther Party, who built an alliance between the Black Panthers, the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican organization) and the Young Patriots (a southern white organization) in 1968 and 1969. The three groups agreed to work together and support one another in the fight for justice, police accountability, community investment, jobs, better education and an end to racism, poverty and gentrification. Later, other groups advocating for social justice joined the coalition. They provided programs such as breakfasts for children, health clinics, daycare centers, and clothing give-aways in their various communities. Following the assassination of Hampton by Chicago police with the aid of the FBI on December 4, 1969, the coalition began to splinter and dissolved by 1971.
The idea of solidarity across lines of race, ethnicity and class, however, lived on. Rev, Jackson, in particular, organized his own National Rainbow Coalition in 1984 when he campaigned for the presidency. Sara Tenenbaum and Marissa Perlman of CBS News Chicago, described Jackson’s Coalition as an organization that demanded new “social programs, affirmative action hiring practices and voting rights protections for groups that Jackson saw being left out of President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies.” Just like Fred Hampton, Jackson sought to unite people across the divisions of race, ethnicity and class to fight for economic justice. Forty plus years later, Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition still exists, advocating for civil rights and economic justice in Chicago and major cities throughout the U.S.
New “rainbow coalitions”, inspired by Fred Hampton and Jesse Jackson, continue to spring up in spaces like Rev. William Barber II’s Poor People’s Campaign and Rev. Liz Theoharis’s Kairos Center network. These networks and others like them continue to fight for equal rights, social justice, voter protection and economic parity throughout the country.
The times we live in, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; where the SAVE Act threatens voting rights; where communities of color are terrorized and families are torn apart by ICE; rainbow coalitions are more important than ever.
Rev. Jesse Jackson has died, but all of us–of every skin tone–cannot let his vision of social justice and civil rights die with him. Keep hope alive!
Tongue on Fire 