Jackson Jr. recognized the full scope and character of his father's mission as the country preacher who brought "a consistent prophetic voice" to struggles for economic and social and racial justice, and peace, over the course of more than six decades in the public eye.
Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow-red, yellow, brown, black and white-and we're all precious in God's sight. America is not like a blanket-one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture. The same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.
In any liberal morality play, Democrats always get to be the shivering, oppressed black people, while Republicans have to play the part of Bull Connor, Birmingham, AL's racist commissioner of public safety. Except the facts are exactly the opposite. I'm sure you're bored of hearing this, but Connor was a Democrat, as were all the politicians promising "massive resistance" to racial integration. Republicans were the ones forcing Democrats to abide by federal law, along with a few John Fetterman- style Democrats.
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. took a chance on me as a 19-year-old college student. At that age, as an intern in 2009, I should've been pouring coffee, maybe making copies. Instead, he put me to work on college affordability policy, youth violence prevention, and immigration reform at his Rainbow PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) Coalition on the South Side of Chicago.
King's intuition was that white people with lower incomes would support this type of policy because they could also benefit from it. In 1967, King argued, "It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income . . . which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro's economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation."
