I would visit the Saturday morning forums at Operation PUSH as often as I could and eventually found myself working as communications director there and quickly realized Rev. Jackson, and Operation PUSH, was about “shaping the narrative” in the Black American liberation struggle.
As I write this summary, I realize that my graduate school media processes and effects studies at the University of Minnesota was in some ways an off shoot of the PUSH propensity to critique the framing of the American and global narrative.
I gave Rev. Jackson my prediction that Jesse Jackson Jr. would win his first congressional election campaign, back in the mid-1990s, which now that I reflect, was with some very top-flight opponents. We stood there in a well-known preacher’s church, in Minneapolis, as they were conducting a fundraiser for Rev. Jackson. I marveled at how far I had come from the 19-year-old, fresh out of Mississippi, teen to the mature man I had become, chatting with one of my icons. One thing Rev. Jackson said to religious believers, back in those days was, “If you really believe…” about one’s professed faith — “you’ll get the job done.”
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