Friends and family say Chicago embraced and nurtured civil rights icon Jesse Jackson from the start

In 1964, Jesse and Jacqueline Jackson drove into Chicago from North Carolina, where they had met, married and had their first child.

In the car, with 1-year-old Santita in tow, a pregnant Jacqueline looked around at the tall buildings downtown and asked her husband a question.

“Jesse, do you think anyone will get to know us here?”

The newly minted North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College grad was optimistic and reassuring. He turned to his college sweetheart and said: “Baby, I think we’re going to be OK. What we’re going to do is get to work, and we’re going to be just fine.”

In the decades that followed, the Rev. Jesse Jackson left a profound mark on the city where he organized and founded what would become the influential civil rights organization Rainbow PUSH Coalition. But in interviews with WBEZ, his friends and family also paint a portrait of how the generous and loyal community he found in Chicago sustained the civil rights icon throughout his life.

Singer and political commentator Santita Jackson talked not about the political power her father amassed in Chicago, but about the warm welcome and mutual aid he and his family received — particularly in those early years — from a veritable who’s-who of storied Black Chicagoans.

“We were never alone, never alone, and that’s the great thing about this city,” the 63-year-old said. “It is a city that will embrace you.”

Santita and her family found themselves in need of that tight hug on Tuesday morning, just hours after their father passed.

Spencer Leak, Jr., a close friend of the family, said when he got the call about the reverend’s passing, he hopped in his car at 1:42 a.m. and went to be with the Jacksons. He said Jacqueline Jackson, now 81, held him and said, “Boy, you better squeeze me tight because if it wasn’t for your grandfather, we don’t know where we would be.”

It was Leak’s grandfather, A.R. Leak, an established businessman and owner of what is now Leak & Sons Funeral Homes, who provided an apartment for the young Jacksons to live in as they got their footing in their new town.

“[The Leaks] said, ‘We've got a nice building, and we live in it,’ ” Santita Jackson said. “They helped [my parents] to establish a line of credit so they could buy furniture, and they carpeted the apartment so the children could roll around and play all we wanted.”

The families would stay close friends and neighbors in South Shore for years to come, with their children becoming like brothers and sisters.

Spencer Leak Jr., now 56, recalled playing basketball with the Jackson boys in the driveway and having dinner with the family.

“No politics [were] brought up; it was just all laughing and joking like a family,” Leak said. “The public knows Reverend Jackson as this civil rights leader. I know him as a father [figure] and a brother to my dad.”

Leak also recalled slapping “Run Jesse Run” stickers on cars during the reverend’s historic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.

Spiritual mentorship

But long before Jesse Jackson ascended to the national stage, he struggled to provide for his growing family in his early Chicago days.

Santita Jackson recalled the time in the mid-1960s when her dad, by then a father of three who had run out of scholarship money from the Chicago Theological Seminary, was waiting in line at a food pantry at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, where he was serving as a youth minister.

Santita Jackson said the legendary civil rights leader Rev. Clay Evans, founder of Fellowship church, pulled her father over and said “I’m not gonna let you stand in this line.” After that day, Evans and the church made sure the family had groceries each week, and that the young parents had the best babysitters the congregation could offer.

Another pastor, Rev. James Bevel, vouched for Jesse Jackson to lead Martin Luther King Jr.’s Operation Breadbasket — which would quickly elevate Jackson in the civil rights movement and lay the foundation for what later became Rainbow PUSH.

Rev. Martin Deppe, a United Methodist Church pastor who worked on Operation Breadbasket, would also remain a close friend of Jackson’s. He recounted to WBEZ about the first time he saw the captivating leader.

“He came in, and like wildfire, within two or three weeks, he was running the meeting,” Deppe said. “His charisma [and] strengths were so, so evident that the leading Black pastors yielded the gavel to him.”

Deppe said Chicago’s pastors embraced the magnetic Jackson, mentoring him and connecting him to other powerful businessmen and city leaders — especially as Operation Breadbasket began attracting thousands of members.

“[Jackson] didn’t start out in politics, he started out in the church,” said Deppe, author of “Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966-1971.”

As Jackson’s star rose in the 1970s and 80s, Chicago’s pastoral community provided spiritual guidance. Evans, who had pulled Jackson out of the bread line decades earlier, would remain a mentor and close confidante, according to Rev. James Meeks.

“Reverend Clay Evans was the pastor of this family until his death” in 2019, Meeks said.

Finding community in South Shore

In addition to the spiritual and material support Jackson received, his children, too, would flourish and find their own way in the City of Big Shoulders.

Yusef Jackson, the reverend’s youngest son who is now chief operating officer at Rainbow PUSH, said the South Shore neighborhood played a crucial role in his family’s life.

“What made the South Shore community so special was they allowed us to be normal children in public school, playing in the park,” he told WBEZ. “Each Jackson lives in South Shore [today]. That’s how important the community is to us.”

Santita Jackson said she “couldn’t ask for more” from her hometown. “It sent two of my brothers [Jesse Jr. and Jonathan] to Congress, it’s given me a wonderful career in radio,” she said.

When asked whether her father ever considered moving to another city, she scoffed, adding that Chicago was the only place her father could do the work he did.

“It is a town that is full of strivers, of people who really came here to grow: Blacks who had been chased out of the South, refugees and immigrants looking for opportunities,” she continued, remembering the young couple that drove through downtown Chicago on that day in 1964.

She added: “Go elsewhere for what? There is no place like Chicago, and it is our home.”

Contributing: Somer Van Benton