Chicago Freedom Movement

Fulfilling the Dream

The Reverend J. H. Jackson

“This campaign of non-violence helped to create tensions and, after these tensions, came violence. One newspaper said that the civil rights leaders who had come to Chicago for the summer campaign’s had come to bring revolution. As we look back over the months, we have discovered that no revolution has come to Chicago—increased bitterness, but not a revolution. There has been some divisions, some peoples have lost confidence in some leaders in Chicago, and the campaign of the summer of 1966 has not strengthened confidence on the part of local leaders in one another. “

J.H. Jackson, Unholy Shadows and Freedom’s Holy Light (Nashville: Townsend Press, 1967), p. 161.

(Biographical note: The Reverend J.H. Jackson was the president of the National Baptist Convention, the most powerful association of black Baptists in the country, in the 1960s. He did not support nonviolent direct action. He did not support the Chicago Freedom Movement. He was the pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side.)

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