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Rev. Jesse Jackson: The Campaign That Taught a Generation to Dream —
From Chicago to Southeast Queens and
the World
From Chicago to Southeast Queens and
the World
✊🏾 By Kamau Austin and the Southeast Queens Scoop Resource Team
The world lost a freedom fighter today, but in truth, Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson never belonged to one place. He moved through history like a drumbeat — from the cotton fields of South Carolina to the streets of Chicago, from the voting lines of the American South to the townships of Africa, from the global stage to the storefront churches and block associations of Southeast Queens.
Rev. Jesse Jackson has died at the age of 84, closing a chapter in the modern Civil Rights Movement that stretched from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final days to the rise of a Black presidency.
But for those of us who came of political age in 1984 — this is not just an obituary.
This is a memory.
This is a movement.
This is personal.
The Man Who Carried King’s Mantle Into the Economic Battlefield
Jackson was not only a marcher. He was an architect of economic justice as civil rights.
Through Operation Breadbasket and later PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition, he forced corporations to hire Black workers, invest in Black communities, and open boardroom doors that had been sealed since slavery.
He understood something that Southeast Queens has always known:
Political power without economic power is a promise without a budget.
Long before “supplier diversity” became a corporate buzzword…
long before “DEI” became a national debate…
Jackson was negotiating billions in jobs, contracts, and investment for Black America.
He globalized the struggle — negotiating the release of prisoners in the Middle East and the Balkans, standing for democracy in Africa, and turning the Black freedom movement into an international human-rights language.
1984: When Hope Walked the Streets of Southeast Queens
For many of us in Southeast Queens, Jesse Jackson was not a distant figure on television.
He was the campaign.
In 1984, in what was then the 65% Black 6th Congressional District — represented by a white congressman and structurally disconnected from its demographic reality — Jackson’s presidential run did something the traditional political establishment could not:
It unified the un-unifiable.
- The Nation of Islam.
- The Five Percenters.
- The National Black United Front.
- Rev. Herbert Daughtry’s African People’s Christian Organization.
- Allen AME in South Jamaica.
Street organizations. Church people. Nationalists. Integrationists. Young militants. First-time voters.
All moving in the same direction.
Not because they agreed on everything —
but because Jesse Jackson made them believe they were part of the same future.
