For Jesse Jackson, economic justice and civil rights were intertwined

For the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, social justice was also entwined with economic justice and labor organizing, including organizing boycotts, pushing for job opportunities and supporting unions to pressure businesses.

“Like the entire generation that led the Civil Rights Movement, Rev. Jackson rightly understood that economic exploitation through capitalism was one of the main drivers of racial inequality,” Alvin Tillery Jr., political science professor at Northwestern University, said in an email.

Jackson’s “life and work serves as a reminder that issues of racial justice are intertwined with both economics and civil rights. From the beginning of his life as an activist, Jackson saw politics, economics and civil rights not as a siloed spheres, but rather as interdependent,” Chris Cooper, political science professor at Western Carolina University in North Carolina, said in an email.

Last February, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the nonprofit Jackson founded, joined a nationwide boycott of corporate giants such Amazon and Target for rolling back diversity initiatives after President Donald Trump took office.

Similar efforts date back decades. In 1962, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., launched Operation Breadbasket in Atlanta. The campaign sought to create economic opportunities by pressuring companies to hire Black workers, according to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. In 1966, King appointed Jackson as the first director of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago.

Under Jackson, then a Chicago Theological Seminary student, Operation Breadbasket pressured five dairy businesses for more opportunities for Black workers. Three companies negotiated to add jobs for Black workers immediately and two complied after boycotts, according to the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

“Jackson often used boycotts and other economic threats and actions to influence civil rights. He understood that political change often depended on economic actions,” Cooper said.

Chicago's Operation Breadbasket went on to focus on Pepsi and Coca-Cola bottlers and then supermarket chains. It won 2,000 new jobs for Black workers worth $15 million a year in new income.

“What was different about Rev. Jackson was that he used his Operation PUSH and Rainbow PUSH Coalition to scale up this fight on a national level for the first time,” Tillery said. “In short, he took the fight directly to the Fortune 500 companies and to Wall Street through public pressure campaigns and boycotts.”

Melody Spann-Cooper, CEO of Midway Broadcasting Corp. in Chicago, recalled Jackson was at the first boycott she attended when she was a child.

“There was a grocery store called A&P here in Chicago, and it was serving rancid meat in a lot of the stores in the Black communities and Rev. Jackson shut them down,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Jackson founded Operation PUSH in 1971 in Chicago to improve the economic conditions of Black communities across the U.S., according to its website. In the 1970s, it expanded into social and political development using direct action campaigns, a weekly radio broadcast and awards that honored Black people in the U.S. and abroad.

Through Operation PUSH, Jackson also sought to protect Black homeowners, workers and businesses. In 1996, it merged with his National Rainbow Coalition to become the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

Jackson’s efforts to influence business were transformative, Tillery said. “He negotiated diversity agreements, procurement commitments, executive hiring benchmarks.”

Tillery added, “The reason every Fortune 500 company today had some form of supplier diversity program before the Trump administration began to attack them is not accidental. That norm was forged in the 1970s and 1980s through sustained pressure campaigns led by Rev. Jackson.”

In 1996, Jackson and the Citizenship Education Fund founded the Wall Street Project to diversify the financial services industry. The initiative is “one of the most underappreciated parts of his legacy,” Tillery said.

“When Jackson began pressuring investment banks and asset managers to diversify underwriting and capital allocation, many elites were stunned. Civil rights activism had entered high finance,” he said.

Jackson took his mission of economic and social justice around the world. In 1979, he traveled to South Africa to investigate the firing of 700 Black workers from a Ford Motor Co. plant and helped lead the international movement to end apartheid, according to the United Auto Workers.

He stood with the AFL-CIO at mobilizations and worker rallies, from coalfields to campaigns for janitors, the union said in a statement Tuesday. In 2002, Jackson joined the AFL-CIO and local unions in organizing laid-off Enron workers to secure fair severance pay.

Jackson “brought communities together with a simple, powerful truth: Economic justice and civil rights are inseparable,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond said in a statement.

Jackson was also a longtime champion for health care, said 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the country’s largest health care union. In the 1980s, he marched with 1199SEIU picket lines to win organizing rights for tens of thousands of home care workers.

He pressed for universal health care through his presidential campaigns and the Rainbow PUSH coalition. He also helped secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, according to 1199SEIU.

He joined former UAW President Bob King in 2010 on a multicity tour calling for jobs, justice and peace.

“He stood with workers in the streets from Detroit to cities nationwide, demanding industrial policies that create jobs, enforce workers’ and civil rights and put people before profit,” the UAW said in a statement.

Jackson “understood the bond between civil and workplace rights,” the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said this week. He stood with Teamsters during contentious contract campaigns, including the 1997 UPS national strike and with United Airlines mechanics in 2016. Jackson also rallied in 2023 with UAW Local 551 in Chicago and hundreds of autoworkers during their “Stand Up Strike” that targeted big carmakers.

“His leadership and solidarity in that moment reflected a lifetime of commitment to the cause of the working class, and the cause of humanity,” the UAW said in a statement.

Contributing: Nicole Jeanine Johnson/WBEZ