Nation: Black Pocketbook Power

Black Power sentiment is fed, among other things, by the urban Negro’s pent-up resentment of the white businessmen who make their living from the slum’s daily needs. These white-run enterprises, blacks complain, not only batten on the ghetto’s misery by overcharging for shoddy goods but also siphon off their profits from Negro neighborhoods and seldom employ black workers.

But black animosity can breed an antidote to its own racial poison. In Chicago, where the white community dismissed Martin Luther King’s 1966 civil rights crusade with a hatful of vapid promises, black pocketbook power has become an effective, constructive force. In less than two years, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, 26, a burly, apothegmatizing King lieutenant who praises the Lord and believes in the might of economics, has wrested work from ghetto businessmen for 3,000 of his flock and boosted South Side Negroes’ annual income by $22 million.

Hearing Footsteps. Running his Operation Breadbasket from a dingy cubicle on the second floor of King’s dilapidated South Side headquarters, Jackson fixed his strategy in April 1966 in his first campaign against a dairy with 104 outlets in Negro neighborhoods. Jackson’s request to examine the company’s employment rolls was refused. Next Sunday, pastors from 100 Negro pulpits urged a boycott of the dairy’s products; by Thursday, the company had capitulated, offering ghetto dwellers 44 new or upgraded jobs—20% of its total employment.

A 54-store grocery chain even proved tougher. Platoons of housewife picketers mobilized by Jesse Jackson’s cadre of clergy marched for ten days until the chain hired 183 Negroes in jobs ranging from department managers to delivery boys; today it employs 309 Negroes. After testing Operation Breadbasket’s strength, A. & P. stores in Chicago found 970 jobs for Jackson, and Jewel Tea has hired 662 Negroes. Dozens of other white employers did not wait for a boycott. “You can’t calculate the number of jobs made available because they hear those footsteps coming,” says Jackson.

Boost for Mumbo. Operation Breadbasket grew from successful Negro boycotts in Philadelphia in the early 1960s and spread to Atlanta, where King’s men have claimed 5,000 new jobs for Negroes in the past six years. Currently, Jackson has plans to deploy his pickets in several Southern cities. “Our tactics,” he insists, “are not ones of terror. Our biggest concern is to develop a relationship so that the company has a respect for the consumer and the consumer will have respect for the company. As buying power among Negroes increases, they will be able to spend more money. So it benefits both sides.”

Next, Operation Breadbasket turned to promote sales of goods produced by Negro enterprises, threatening boycotts to force stores to stock such products as Mumbo barbecue sauce and Diamond Sparkle wax. “Mumbo grew 600% in only four months,” exults Jackson, who is now negotiating with Chicago stores to market the produce of an Alabama farm cooperative run by dispossessed Negro sharecroppers.

Casting around for opportunities to promote Negro-owned businesses, Jackson and his aides have organized service companies and matched them with customers. Trash from 40 A. & P. stores is now collected by a Jackson-organized sanitation firm (“What’s more grass-rootsy than garbage?”), and the chain has also taken on Negro janitors and exterminators. “Up until then,” Jackson snorts, “we didn’t even control our own rats and roaches.” Five new South Side groceries are being built by two Negro contracting firms, each of which already grosses more than $1,000,000 yearly.

Jackson is convinced that a new political order will eventually emerge on the South Side as Negro economic power and pride increase. “Politicians,” he remarks, “are devoted to their oats even more than to their votes.” And to make doubly sure, Operation Breadbasket pressure has persuaded ghetto firms to ease the slum’s perennial capital shortage by opening accounts in two Negro banks, thus boosting deposits from $5,000,000 to $22 million. “Where big money stays,” the pastor preaches, “big decisions are made.”