Rev. Jesse Jackson, Operation PUSH, and the Road I Didn’t Take

It can be hard to know whether you made the right decision until many years after the decision is made.

This week I have found myself thinking non-stop about Rev. Jesse Jackson.

In a recent interview reflecting on his passing, I said something that remains true: going to work with him two years after he founded Operation PUSH in 1973 was the most impactful experience of my life.

I was 23 years old. He was 33.

I worked with him for three years, and without fear of contradiction, those three years shaped the rest of my adult life.

In 1976, the year after my 47 year old father died, I made the decision to leave Rev. Jackson and Operation PUSH to help my mother raise my 8-year-old sister. My departure was not dramatic. It was not hostile. It was simply a decision about direction, calling, and the kind of work I felt led to do. But even peaceful decisions can leave quiet questions that follow you for decades.

What made my time there even more profound is something I came to understand more clearly with age. I was 24 when Rev. Jackson appointed me national coordinator of Operation PUSH. Years later, I realized the deeper significance of that trust: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had appointed Jesse Jackson national director of Operation Breadbasket when he was 24 years old.

I did not fully grasp it at the time, but I was standing inside a chain of responsibility - one young man being trusted by another who had once been trusted the same way.

When Rev. Jackson ran for president in 1984, I sometimes wondered what might have happened had I remained with the civil rights organization. I might have been in position to continue building PUSH while he carried the national political campaign. I might have participated more directly in that historic moment.

Those thoughts have visited me many times over the years.

But another truth lives beside them.

Had I remained with PUSH, I would not have pastored First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens for 31 years. I would not have built local solutions to problems affecting families in my own community. I would not have had the opportunity to apply, week after week and year after year, the very lessons I learned under his leadership.

Most decisions are made without the benefit of perspective. We decide with limited information and imperfect clarity. Only years later does life reveal what that decision actually produced.

For a long time, I evaluated my departure by asking, “What did I give up?”

Age has taught me to ask a better question: “What was made possible?”

I left a national movement, but I gained a local ministry. I stepped away from day to day proximity to a global leader, but I gained the opportunity to help shape families and lives across three decades.

And yet, I would be less than honest if I said I never wondered whether I made the right decision.

Reflecting this week, I returned to what I said publicly: I learned more in three years working with Rev. Jackson than I learned in ten years of higher education. His discipline, his courage, his passion for economic, social, and political justice - those qualities marked me. I can point to specific things I do today that are directly attributable to his training and mentorship.

He was tireless. He was passionate. He was old school in the best sense of the word - putting the movement ahead of himself. Before there was the Rainbow Coalition, there was Operation PUSH. Before the presidential campaigns, there was the work of sustaining a focus on justice and calling America to live up to its founding principles.

In the 1970’s he could stand in downtown Philadelphia in the middle of the week and draw 10,000 people to hear him speak. His influence was national and global. Travel across the African continent and his name is known.

But for those of us who worked with him, his impact was also personal.

Dr. Soaries and Santita Jackson, Rev. Jesse Jackson’s oldest daughter.

I was with him in December in Chicago. I told him how much I appreciated what he had done for me - 53 years earlier. Half a century later, I was still living off lessons he taught in my twenties.

It can be hard to know whether you made the right decision until many years after the decision is made. Sometimes certainty never fully arrives. Perhaps all we can honestly say is this: we did our best with the information and faith we had at the time, and then we committed ourselves to honoring the road we chose.

I did not continue that journey with him.

I walked another one.

But I did not walk it alone. His imprint was on me. His expectations shaped me. His trust strengthened me.

Rev. Jesse Jackson invested in a 23-year-old young man and entrusted him with national responsibility at 24. That trust still echoes in my life today.

For that, I remain grateful.

And like his family, I will miss him.