Jesse Jackson: One Leader Among Many

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considered law, then settled on the ministry, even though "I didn't dig that stereotype—donning black suits and hats, no bosoms and all that." He accepted a foundation-financed scholarship to Chicago Theological Seminary. There he proved a quick and perceptive student. "He is the only person I know," claims the seminary's Dean of Students Robert S. Moore, "who can talk Tillich to sixth-graders and make them understand." But Jackson was more interested in talking Black Power to black ministers, whom he began organizing while still a student. He became convinced that the Bible was "nothing but a succession of civil rights struggles by the Jewish people against their oppressors." If the Jews could do it, why not the blacks? He rushed off to Selma, Ala., in 1965 and met Martin Luther King for the first time. "King was like a giant—this articulate black cat down in Alabama, which we thought was hell; but he was not afraid of violence and bullets and bombs." Jackson was the last man King spoke to before he was shot in Memphis. Jesse ran to the balcony, held King's head, but it was too late.

Jackson lives with his wife Jacqueline, 26, and three children (Santita, 8; Jesse Jr., 5; and Jonathan Luther, 4) in a six-room apartment in the predominantly black Jackson Park area on Chicago's South Side. His wife, whom he met at North Carolina A. & T., has worked with him on civil .rights activities, including Breadbasket.

One of the common strengths of many of today's black activists is their unselfish application of considerable intelligence to an unchallengeable moral cause, creating an aura of confidence that they ultimately will prevail. Such a man is the Rev. Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia, whose organization called Opportunities Industrialization Center has opened 90 branches across the nation. Its office in Brooklyn, for example, uses an abandoned jail as a classroom for training unskilled blacks for jobs with established firms. Its on-the-job training programs have been even more effective.

In St. Louis, Percy Green, a radical leader who clothes himself in U.S. Army fatigues and sports a cap with five stars on it, nevertheless fights within the system. He heads up ACTION, which provided key testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that convinced the Defense Department that McDonnell Douglas Corp. would have to hire more blacks if it wanted to retain its contract to produce F-15 fighter aircraft.

One of the most unusual self-help groups is called Thugs United, based in New Orleans. Organized by leaders of tough black gangs, it claims a membership of some 6,000 ghetto blacks, including pimps, prostitutes and drug pushers. Far from a reformist outfit, it tries to get such anti-social types to put some of their illicit income back into the community to help train ex-convicts to hold straight jobs, promote voter registration, teach remedial reading. It also pressured most hard-drug pushers to lay off such sales to high school youths. When one pusher was caught soliciting near a school, someone broke both of his arms.

Mainly under labor union sponsorship, an action committee in the Watts section of Los Angeles owns and operates its own automobile service stations, where it trains black mechanics. It also controls four Shop-Rite Markets, which do $9,000,000 in business