Reverend Jackson birthed it, President Obama raised it, they both nurtured it – and now the Obama Center and Rainbow PUSH are keeping it alive on Chicago’s South Side.
Rainbow PUSH has been part of our lives so long it’s easy to forget it was once Operation Breadbasket – then People United to Save Humanity, then People United to Serve Humanity. The name evolved, but the mission didn’t. It was never just about Reverend Jackson. It was about all of us. We were the rainbow. As he liked to say, “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.”
Before Barack Obama became the first Black President of the United States – before he even became a senator– he authored a book called “The Audacity of Hope.” That was the same Hope Reverend Jackson had preached every Saturday at Rainbow PUSH headquarters. Obama inspired a whole nation with that one ever-powerful word. It meant everything to a community that could still see Jim Crow in the rearview mirror and felt the clouds of racism obscure the road ahead. We can’t foresee the future. But we can hope.
What we can do is keep hope alive.
Hope is the theme at the Obama Presidential Center and beautiful green campus, which includes a Chicago Public Library and a sports complex. Other cities made a bid for it, and Chicago’s South Side responded: Bring It On Home! Standing tall, very tall on 62 nd and Stony Island, the obelisk shoots up, seemingly proclaiming, “We go high.” At night, it’s a vision, so we encourage you to take a south side drive, if only to experience the wonder, even if the demand for tickets puts you in the middle of winter for a visit, and you must visit.
President Obama wasn’t born here, and perhaps his political ambitions took root earlier – maybe as a student and editor of the Harvard Law Review. But Chicago was the match that lit the fire. It was here that he became a community organizer, then a state senator, and it was from Chicago that his Hope for change carried him to Washington as a United States Senator – and then to the presidency.
It was Reverend Jesse L. Jackson who provided the Hope that inspired a young man– raised in Hawaii, the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother, to believe he could become President.
Jackson had garnered seven million votes in a primary at a time when even seven hundred seemed out of reach. He used the legal system to reform delegate rules, making it easier for a Black candidate to run for President in the future. And so, when the time came, armed with confidence, hope, and more qualifications than any other candidate, that young man became our nation’s first Black President.
Now, a monument to that Hope across from Hyde Park Career Academy – a school no Black student would have dared enroll in before 1950. Today, its all-Black student population looks forward to the benefits of being the high school fortunate enough to sit directly across from the Obama Presidential Center.
The Obama Presidential Center radiates Hope from the first floor to the eighth. You feel it the moment you walk through the doors. You see it throughout the museum, which traces President Obama’s journey to the presidency against a backdrop of a civil rights movement that lived, breathed, and echoed Hope.
Also keeping Hope alive on Chicago’s South Side is a renewed Rainbow PUSH. Though it has been with us for decades, it is entering a new era. Reverend Jackson’s youngest son, Yusef Jackson, has been leading the organization’s Saturday Morning Forums for the past few years, and following his father’s death, he was unanimously chosen to lead as CEO of the Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition –charting new paths, building new solutions, finding new ways to keep Hope alive.
Yusef Jackson recently returned from the Vatican as part of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s contingent that met with Pope Leo.
Hope lives in Chicago, and thanks to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Obama Presidential Center Chicagoans and visitors have a southside place to be, a place to discover, a place to play, a place to be newly inspired every Saturday morning with the Rainbow PUSH message; a place to remind yourself that you are somebody – a place to visit throughout the week (Tuesdays are free for Chicago residents) and really get to know a beloved President – and whether that place is on 62nd and Stony Island or 50th and Drexel – you know it’s a place where Hope always resides and where Hope springs eternal.
