CHICAGO (WLS) — Rainbow PUSH is synonymous with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who died Tuesday at 84. And its mission has not changed, even with the reverend’s health struggles. ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch Workers put purple bunting up over the front of the entrance to Rainbow PUSH headquarters Tuesday afternoon. They are mourning the loss of a civil rights icon: a man who fought to bring equality to a generation of people. “God put him here to speak truth to power, to challenge economic injustice where he found it,” Rainbow PUSH Senior Advisor Rev. Dr. Janette Wilson said. Jackson launched Operation Breadbasket in 1966 at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church on the South Side. It was a northern initiative of the Southern Christian Leadership Convention, led by Dr. Martin Luther King. “Dr. King asked Reverend Jackson to set up Breadbasket in Chicago as an economic arm of SCLC. He said that Chicago was one of those cities where Blacks, at that time Negroes, did not have their fair share. And one of the things Breadbasket did was we had consumer clubs, and we fought to get Black products on the shelves,” said Betty Magnus, with Rainbow PUSH. Musette Henley volunteered at Operation Breadbasket. “We used to come together on Saturdays and learn things,” Henley said. About a year after Dr. King’s death, Jackson established Operation PUSH, People United to Save Humanity. That later merged to become the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. It was a worldwide organization as Jackson was an international leader. But he was also a Chicagoan. Michael Bracey was a neighbor. “As a beacon of light for the African American community, one for all people, period,” Bracey said. Henley was born in 1951, the same year as Jackson. “It’s like my heart is broken, like a part of my family,” Henley said.
https://abc7chicago.com/post/what-is-rainbow-push-coalition-how-reverend-jesse-jacksons-civil-rights-organization-came/18613795/
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