As memorial services continue this week in honor of the late civil rights icon and unwavering human rights activist Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., who died last month at age 84, I want to highlight a powerful part of his legacy that is often overlooked: his fight for food justice,  which began in the grocery aisles of Chicago. 

“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” his family wrote in the statement reporting his death. “His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.” 

A protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson devoted his entire life to the pursuit of liberation for all people, especially Black people. Born and raised in Greenville, S.C., Jackson understood racism first-hand. He began his civil rights career as an undergraduate student at North Carolina A&T State University, joining the Greensboro chapter of the Council on Racial Equality (CORE). As field director of CORE’s operations in the southeast, Jackson organized sit-ins and public demonstrations for desegregation and served as a delegate at the Young Democrats National Convention.  

Upon graduating from North Carolina A&T with a degree in sociology in 1964, Jackson was awarded a Rockefeller grant and relocated to Chicago to begin his postgraduate studies in theology at the Chicago Theological Seminary. 

But the spirit of the civil rights movement would not let Jackson go. He deferred his seminary studies to devote his time to the movement under the leadership of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1966, King tapped him to lead the northern expansion of Operation Breadbasket, the SCLC’s ambitious economic justice arm, in Chicago. He would later become the National Director of Breadbasket.  

“Breadbasket became the vehicle for demanding fair trade, demanding economic trade, demanding opportunity, and winning, we could win,” Jackson stated in an interview. “It raised our economic consciousness.”

To build Breadbasket, Jackson enlisted the help of Rev. Calvin Morris and, at King’s request, founding member Rev. Willie T. Barrow, developing a team and playbook for the next chapter of the civil rights movement. 

As head coach, Jackson appointed Morris as Associate Director of Breadbasket and Barrow as director of the Women of Operation Breadbasket. This team carefully converted public protest into a standardized, repeatable method of supermarket civil rights through two interconnected plays: Black women’s leadership and coalition building.  

As a professor of African American Studies and scholar of food justice, I find this to be a compelling, yet overlooked part of Jackson’s thinking, building on other food struggles in the movement. 

Supermarket civil rights turned grocery stores in Black neighborhoods into battlegrounds for food security and economic mobility. Jackson believed that Black communities had to control the local economy, demanding that grocers provide adequate produce and meat, supply jobs for Black people, and carry Black products. If a store could not comply, Breadbasket would organize customers to boycott and withdraw support. 

As Morris said, we may shop here, but “we are not going to participate in our own oppression… and we will withdraw our support for you.”

On the frontlines of grocery store battles were Black women, including Jackson’s wife, Jacqueline Jackson, who worked to ensure that Black products lined the aisles. The women also waged a war against the sale of bad, tainted meat in their neighborhood grocery stores.  

What made Jackson’s activism different from other civil rights organizations of the time was that he believed women belonged at the forefront of movement work — bearing witness to sociologist Charles Payne’s famous observation about the movement: “men led, but women organized.” 

Beyond the picket lines, Black women ran the day-to-day logistics and operations of Breadbasket. Black media pioneer Hermene Hartman, for example, worked as a dispatcher for Breadbasket during the legendary “Don’t Buy at A&P” campaign, taking calls from protesters and prominent figures, linking the Chicago movement to the national struggle. 

But the key driver of Jackson’s leadership’s success was his ability to build coalitions across racial lines, religious backgrounds, and socioeconomic status in pursuit of Black freedom — and he never abandoned that principle. 

In 1971, Jackson converted Breadbasket into Operation People United to Save Humanity — later changed from “Save” to “Serve” (PUSH)—now known as the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, merging his civil rights work with human rights advocacy. Jackson would go on to engineer two presidential campaigns that broke new ground in U.S. politics in 1984 and 1988. He remained committed to social justice to his death. 

In many respects, Jesse’s playbook of food justice in the civil rights movement set the tone for his tremendous career and “pivotal role in virtually every movement for empowerment, peace, civil rights, gender equality and economic and social justice,” as his biography on the Rainbow PUSH website states. 

Indeed, the death of Rev. Jesse L. Jackson marks the end of an era, especially during the 100th anniversary of Black History Month. 

The question remains: how will we remember Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr.? We often commemorate the civil rights movement as an inspiration for the next generation. Jackson and his playbook also call us to study his food justice work more closely and apply what we learn to this moment, as an estimated 48 million Americans continue to experience food insecurity each year. 

One place to start is to engage with the Jackson Oral History Project at Chicago Theological Seminary. Another is never to underestimate the power of demanding change, as Rev. Jackson and Breadbasket always did — in the neighborhood, starting at the local grocery store.