It’s easy to feel disheartened in these staunch economic times, but consider a chair with a dozen layers of paint. It’s full potential is only evident once that paint is stripped away, allowing pure possibility.
That said, one of my favorite television shows right now is nextTV, a local program produced by the Chicago Urban League (and hosted by Chicago Urban League CEO Cheryle Jackson. According to their website:
“nextTV is a fast-paced lifestyle program focusing on the urban community. [They] take a closer look at people changing their lives through entrepreneurship, their careers and day to day living.”
What I love is that it lifts the gilded curtain to show the meat and bones of a number of businesses (and career paths) in our community that don’t get a lot of exposure (especially to younger people).
Two examples include profiles of Quentin Love (a young man who owns the Quench Restaurants peppered across the South and West Sides) and a chemist by the name of Linda McGill Boasmond, who is President and General Manager of Cedar Concepts Corporation. We follow their struggles to grow and flourish with the help of the Urban League’s nextONE business acceleration program. It may sound like a bad time to do such a thing, but a business is everything you put into it. It’s successes and failures rely on a few. Why not make that person you? Besides, there are a number of incentives (many spurred by the Stimulus Package) to get us growing in more entreprenural directions.
Economic Enpowerment is a theme I’ve mentioned a few times here at Darkjive. I believe it’s a sure route to social change. And the paint has been stripped. What else is there to wait for?
It feels to me that now is the moment to move. To dream. Big.
nextTV airs 8:00am and 12:30pm, Sundays on My50 WPWR-TV
(above photo by Mario Sorrenti)Vodpod videos no longer available.
Black bongo player performs at the International Amphitheater in Chicago as part of the annual PUSH [People United to Save Humanity] ‘Black Expo’ in the fall of 1973. October 1973
darkjive.com 
Operation Breadbasket, the seed of PUSH
I have dedicated a number of posts here at Darkjive to the PUSH Expo, a 1970s exercise in Black Economic Empowerment (or Black Power as it was then known). The PUSH Expo phenomenon was borne from the seed of Operation Breadbasket (a department of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference), but the roots took twisted turns.
The term “Civil Rights Movement” often brings to mind images of the deep south, but Chicago was a key battleground in those days. Not just because of the influx of new Black citizens that the Great Migration delivered, but because of the ongoing struggles for housing equality and empowerment exacerbated by said influx.
Jesse Jackson, whose ties to Dr. King traced back to the Campaign at Selma in 1965, was selected by King to head Operation Breadbasket’s Chicago Branch. True to its name, the organization distributed nourishment to the communtity, but it also played a more proactive role to fighting for social justice.
Tactics such as boycotts were implemented, but according to Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), a seamier aspect including cronyism and strong-arming businesses to donate money to Operation Breadbasket were folded into the tactics, as well.
Eventually, leadership rifts came to a head, and in December 1971, Jackson fell out with Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as head of the national SCLC. Jackson and his allies broke off and formed Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity).
Various sources tell me that this was a pivotal moment in Chicago History because a giant, organized black party (the largest in Chicago at the time) broke off into factions and never regained the traction it had built before that point. Then crack hit the community like the atomic bomb (and the fallout is still being felt). I argue that the hindsighted strength of the PUSH Expo-era was built on momentum created in the years that had preceded it, in conjunction with the genius of marketing with a major motion picture (!) and tons of press. Documentation equals existence itself, and media has the power to romanticize just about anything.
In the end, please leave me the romance. Let me believe that we were SO close to breaking free. It gives me a fairy tale to build tomorrow upon.
8 Comments | tags: Chicago History, Civil Rights, community building, economic empowerment, food justice, Great Migration, inner city, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, operation breadbasket, PUSH Expo, Race, Ralph Abernathy, SCLC, urbanism | posted in Chicago Cultural History, Commentary, Jive Culture