In 2020, based on previous connections through the Museum’s exhibition, American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago, Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) contacted CHM’s Studs Terkel Center for Oral History regarding collaboration around its Jackson Oral History Project (JOHP). The oral history center jumped at this opportunity to continue its goal of supporting collaborative community based oral history projects using tools of oral history for goals of social justice.
Operation Breadbasket News, the official voice of the movement; in this publication, Breadbasket proclaimed, “We believe, since we are brothers and sisters, we have a responsibility to and for each other,” October 3, 1969. CHM, ICHi-183715
In 1965, Rev. Jesse Jackson launched Operation Breadbasket (which later became Operation PUSH), a movement to help formally organize Chicago ministers to promote more employment opportunities for local Black individuals. Jackson was a student at CTS during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and his time at CTS shaped his career. He and his wife Jacqueline both spoke of the value of a CTS education in their early formation.
Operation Breadbasket protest poster urging consumers to boycott Hawthorn-Mellody products, 1966. CHM ICHi-183509
Through a generous grant from the Donnelley Foundation, CTS recently completed collecting an oral history of Rev. Jackson’s civil rights work in Chicago as a way to preserve the stories of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago. Told by the people who lived and worked in the movement, these interviews are a window into a past that informs our present.
Interviewed by Rev. Brian E. Smith and Kim Schultz, the interview narrators include:
- Rev. David Wallace, former Chicago branch secretary for Operation Breadbasket
- Rev. Janette C. Wilson, advisor to Rev. Jesse Jackson and Director of PUSH Excel
- Rev. Martin Deppe, who worked with Operation Breadbasket
- Hermene Hartman, founder of N’DIGO Studio and publications
- Betty Massoni, wife of late Chicago activist Rev. Gary Massoni
- Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., Civil Rights activist and head of the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket
In February 2024, a public launch of the JOHP took place in CHM’s Robert R. McCormick Theater. The evening’s event included listening to oral history clips and a discussion panel with the project narrators led by Rev. Smith, which you can view here. “The Jackson Oral History Project has been an unprecedented opportunity to capture stories from key figures in the Chicago Civil Rights Movement,” said Rev. Smith. “The archive documents in vivid detail the birth of this movement, showing how CTS acted as an incubator for the movement’s early leaders, including Rev. Jackson himself.”
Faith and lay leaders holding signs that spell out “Selma Wall” march from the Brown Chapel AME Church to police barricades set up a block away, Selma, Alabama, March 1965. CHM, ICHi-075291; Declan Haun, photographer
In partnership with CHM, the institutions used these oral histories to create an online exhibition featuring the under-told story of these Civil Rights activists working in the Chicago Breadbasket Movement, documenting the birth of this movement in Chicago and highlighting the importance of CTS as an incubator in that movement.
The online exhibition can be viewed below or at CHM’s Google Arts & Culture site. This online experience brings together JOHP excerpts and quotations with documents and photographs from the Museum’s varied collections. The full audio interviews along with photographs of the narrators are hosted online through CTS and can be found here.
The two organizations continue this initiative through an upcoming trolley tour of South Side Chicago sites highlighted in the JOHP and important to the Chicago Civil Rights Movement.
