•January 23, 2019•

By Maudlyne Ihejirika
Chicago Sun-Times

“He would have been 90 this year,” says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
Jackson was reflecting on this year’s holiday honoring his mentor and friend.
Jan. 15 was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, celebrated nationally on Jan. 21.
As the years go by, there are fewer of those who marched with him to share their memories. But Jackson, one of his closest aides, can still recount milestone moments from King’s Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965-66 like it was yesterday.
“Our offices used to be at 366 E. 47th St., in what’s now Bronzeville, and we used to meet every Saturday morning at Chicago Theological Seminary,” says Jackson, 77, who first met the man of peace at an airport in 1964, when King was en route to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize.
Jackson then marched with King in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.
He soon joined the team of the charismatic civil rights leader and was assigned to run Operation Breadbasket, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s anti-poverty effort.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.