Operation Breadbasket

Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) attracted criticism from other civil rights groups, notably the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for its fleeting commitment to the communities where it staged nonviolent direct action campaigns. Critics charged that SCLC engineered short-lived confrontations, proclaimed victory on the basis of flimsy concessions from the “white power structure,” and then departed, leaving behind exhausted and vulnerable black communities. Conscious of this shortcoming and aware that the big-city milieu demanded a different strategy, when the SCLC went to Chicago in 1966 the organization was determined to exhibit staying power. To that end, it established Operation Breadbasket, a “don't-buy-where-you-can't-work” program intended to give SCLC a long-term organizational presence in the Windy City. Spearheaded by local ministers under the leadership of Jesse Jackson, a young SCLC staff member, Breadbasket endeavored to secure jobs for blacks in companies that had few black employees and to ensure that those companies did not exclude blacks from high-level positions. Using threatened and actual consumer boycotts, “between 1966 and 1971 Breadbasket filled at least 2,250 positions, in all classifications from unskilled to management, shattering the job ceiling” (p. 193

Black Power · Civil rights · Criticism · Direct action · Martin luther king · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Victory · White (mutation · Work (physics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · Engineering · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

• Searching for Black Santa

  Open Access•E James West•Comparative American Studies An…•2023

  Add to list