Mike Burr: Jackson was a man of faith who believed faith demanded action
About the writer: Mike Burr is a retired American Baptist pastor who lives in McMinnville with his wife, Barbara. Active members and contributors at First Baptist, they have three children and four grandchildren. Before his retirement, he served churches in the Seattle area, Northern Idaho and Western Colorado.
I was saddened to learn of the death of Jesse Jackson at the age of 84.
I met Jesse 55 years ago. I was sent to Chicago by the Northern California Council of Churches to attend a training presented by the Urban Institute.
I had been working as an intern with an Oakland, California, group consisting of representatives of the Congress of Racial Equality, American Indian Movement, Black Panthers, La Rasa and others, who were working on minority recruitment in the Oakland Police Department. As a white boy from Washington state, I obviously needed some help!
In Chicago, I met Jackson at an Operation Push meeting, where he was working on housing and justice issues on Chicago’s south side. Chicago was still reeling from the impacts of the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy at the time.
In some ways, south Chicago was like a prison camp with the Chicago police as the guards. Jesse was a dynamic minister and speaker and was organizing Chicago neighborhoods and housing developments to demand better city services — things like garbage service, street lighting, water and sewer services, housing code enforcement and such. One piece of the meeting, which was devoted half to worshipping and half to community strategizing, was to highlight the plight of the Black community in the city Cairo, almost 400 miles to the south.
I shook hands with Jesse only once and spoke only a couple of sentences to him, but it was enough to be recruited to participate in a march taking place in Cairo after my training was finished. Cairo was at the southern tip of Illinois, and during slavery, it was notorious for capturing enslaved people fleeing north and sending them back south.
The Black community of Cairo was boycotting Cairo businesses because of continued discrimination and abuse. In response, the Ku Klux Klan had been terrorizing black churches and organizations, as well as threatening boycott leaders.
Cairo was run by the KKK. and historically the KKK kept its thumbs on the Black community through violence and murder. The local police department seemed to be the center of the KKK activity.
When it became too much, the community reached out to Jesse for help. Jackson responded by organizing a march that would include faith, political and entertainment leaders from around the country.
Jesse organized school buses for us to travel from Chicago to Cairo, and it was a long, uncomfortable ride. About eighty miles from Cairo, the state police stopped our buses and, after a long wait, impounded them and forced us out to the side of the road.
The “School Bus” sign was supposed to be covered over on the buses, and part of one “S” was showing. That was used to justify the action.
Jackson immediately took to the phone and organized a huge Cairo community carpool. Community members arrived and took us the rest of the way into Cairo.
The actual march was led by Jackson and ministers from around the country, as well as celebrities like Mahalia Jackson. In all, probably four or five thousand people had been recruited to put the spotlight on the situation in Cairo.
As we marched, we walked past a local housing development riddled with bullet holes from KKK attacks.
A Black Baptist Church was also covered with bullet holes, and not one window had been left intact. The church bus didn’t appear to have a square foot without a bullet hole in it, either.
As we marched, the police created sandbag emplacements around the station, each prominently featuring manned machine guns. They also deployed an armored car.
Jesse led the march between police brandishing rifles from their cars on one side of the street and Black Panthers brandishing shotguns from cars on the other side. The Panthers came on their own, not by invitation.
I didn’t have much interaction with Jesse Jackson, but this experience created and organized by him was pivotal in my development as a pastor and a person.
Jesse was a dynamic personality, a powerful speaker and a man of faith who believed faith demanded action. He used those powers to speak truth to power on behalf of the poor and downtrodden.
Jesse Jackson was a dynamic force of nature focused on creating justice. Our country could use more like him.
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