Remembering Jesse Jackson

Although Jesse Jackson is best known for his activism in the Jim Crow South and Chicago, he also left an indelible mark on New York City’s civil rights movement and political landscape. 

The records of Mayor David Dinkins’ Administration show Jackson’s notable influence on politics and his relationship with the mayor. Jackson was a close friend of Mayor Dinkins, and the two supported each other’s political campaigns. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition organization mobilized thousands of voters, helping Dinkins become New York City’s first Black mayor in 1990. In turn, Dinkins served as a co-chair of New Yorkers for Jesse Jackson during Jackson’s 1988 presidential run.

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Jesse Jackson and Mayor David Dinkins, 1990. Mayor David Dinkins Photograph Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Jesse Jackson appears alongside Mayor Dinkins in numerous photographs taken at mayoral events. These include Dinkins’ inauguration, the ceremony where the Mayor received the Brotherhood Award from One Hundred Black Men, and a reception held by the New York State Council of Black Elected Democrats. Mr. Jackson is referenced in conversations the Mayor had about issues affecting Black NYC residents, including housing initiatives, issues related to drug convictions and use, and the need for more economic relief in Black neighborhoods. 

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Mayor David Dinkins, Charlie Rangel (center), Jesse Jackson, 1991. Mayor David Dinkins Photograph Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Jesse Jackson’s relationship with Dinkins stood in stark contrast to his interactions with Dinkins’ predecessor, Mayor Ed Koch. Documents in the mayoral series indicate that Koch did not consider Jackson a viable presidential candidate. Koch endorsed Democrat Michael Dukakis and viewed some of Jackson’s remarks about Jews as inappropriate and polarizing. He also disapproved of Jackson’s association with Louis Farrakhan. In a letter from June 11, 1984, Koch wrote to his speechwriter Clark Whelton, “This is not a Jewish matter or whites against blacks but rather what is acceptable for someone who runs at the highest levels.” Despite their differences, Koch and Jackson met to discuss voter registration and strategies to increase turnout. Koch acknowledged Jackson’s considerable influence among Black voters and respect from other city officials. In fact, Jackson did have significant support in his campaign from many important people. On June 24, 1988, for example, Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm hosted a reception attended by Bill Cosby and Helen Abbott.

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Index, NYPD Intelligence Unit Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Records from the New York Police Department Intelligence Division also shed light on Jackson’s civil rights activism, including his work with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Poor People’s Campaign and his leadership as Director of Operation Breadbasket, an initiative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As head of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson successfully coordinated boycotts against companies like the A & P Supermarket chain and the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. The goal was to address economic disparities in Black communities by leveraging boycotts to secure better representation, employment, and fair business practices. Other records document Jackson’s founding of People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) in 1971, following his suspension from Operation Breadbasket. PUSH broadened Jackson’s mission to improve economic conditions for Black Americans nationwide.

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Memorandum, page 1, 1970. NYPD Intelligence Unit Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

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Memorandum, page 2, 1970. NYPD Intelligence Unit Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Correspondence, 1971. NYPD Intelligence Unit Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Clipping, 1971. NYPD Intelligence Unit Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Jackson’s leadership in the civil rights movement is most shockingly evident in a 1971 letter from the City of Chicago Police Department to Thomas Lyons, Director of the New York City Police Intelligence Division. The letter refers to an alleged plot to assassinate Jackson for potential economic advantages. Other correspondence also shows Jackson’s affiliation not only with political figures but also with other influential Black people. While opinions about Jackson vary, his activism, engagement with the New York City government, and presidential campaigns left a lasting impact on both the city and the nation.

Black History Highlights of Municipal Broadcasting’s First 25 Years - Part 1

For 73 years, WNYC was owned and operated by the City of New York. Detailing its African-American-focused programing over this period is no small task—indeed, it could easily serve as a master’s thesis in broadcast history. Within the limits of this essay, however, I have highlighted some of the most significant early moments and broadcasts that merit reflection during Black History Month. 

Reverend Dr. Henry Hugh Proctor. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

Among the earliest African American speakers on WNYC—if not the first—was the Reverend Dr. Henry Hugh Proctor, an early civil-rights leader who addressed listeners on the evening of October 11, 1924. He opened the broadcast with a prayer, followed by the Nazarene Chorus, based at his Brooklyn church, the Nazarene Congregational Church. Proctor is recognized as a key figure in the Social-Gospel movement, a significant precursor to the modern civil-rights movement. 

The municipal station was only eight months old in March 1925—and radio itself was still very much a toddler—when WNYC banned the use of racial epithets on the air. The action came at a moment of peak Ku Klux Klan membership nationwide and three years before NBC would launch the enormously popular, and racially charged, Amos ’n’ Andy. The ban followed a broadcast in which a city official told “a harmless watermelon story,” unaware that he had caused offense by using  a slur related to skin color.” Department of Plant and Structures Commissioner William Wirt Mills, whose agency oversaw the station, issued an apology and ordered corrective action in response to a complaint from The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper.

Excerpt from WNYC Engineering Log for October 11, 1924. WNYC Archive Collections.

The Baltimore Afro-American, March 7, 1925, pg.6. 

Seen in this light, it is notable that by 1946—likely earlier—the station’s operations manual extended its prohibition on racial and ethnic epithets to Jews, Irish Americans, and other maligned groups. The guide also instructed staff that “there is no need, for example, in crime news to refer repeatedly to a man's color unless there is a specific news reason, such as a police description of a missing person.” It further cautioned against repeating derogatory remarks about any individual, even when accurately attributed, unless the quotation itself had specific news value, such as forming the basis of a lawsuit. 

Black participation on WNYC and other broadcast outlets during the 1920s remained limited, largely confined to occasional gospel performances and dance band appearances. That changed in 1929, when both the New York Urban League and the NAACP secured regular weekly time slots—among the earliest sustained programming by and for African Americans in the nation. These broadcasts featured prominent voices including scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, writer and civil rights advocate James Weldon Johnson, and actress Rose McClendon. 

Between 1930 and 1933, the U.S. government sponsored trips to Europe for surviving mothers of deceased World War I soldiers and for widows who had not remarried, allowing them to visit the American cemeteries where their loved ones were buried. The program was initially praised in Black newspapers, which encouraged all eligible women to participate. That support shifted, however, when the War Department announced that the pilgrimages would be segregated. 

Mrs. Willie Rush, whose son died in France, spoke over WNYC on behalf of Gold Star mothers during a City Hall protest broadcast on July 11, 1930. An Atlanta native, she condemned the segregation of the Black and white delegations. She and other protesters were joined in the Aldermanic Chamber by Acting Mayor Joseph V. McKee and city officials. 

The NAACP attempted to persuade the federal government to integrate the excursions but was unsuccessful. The organization subsequently called for a boycott, prompting roughly two dozen mothers and widows to cancel their trips. Ultimately, however, 279 African-American women chose to make the journey. 

Planting ceremony of the Tree of Hope, Seventh Avenue and 131 Street, where out-of-work black entertainers traded gossip and tips on jobs, November 1934. Mayor LaGuardia collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

November 17, 1934 edition of Literary Digest courtesy of the Internet Archive.

An unusual event celebrating legend, myth, and collective hope brought WNYC microphones to Harlem on November 4, 1934. The occasion was the replanting and dedication of the community’s “Wishing Tree” at 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson presiding before public officials and a crowd of thousands. Also known as the “Tree of Hope,” the elm was believed to possess magical powers, according to reports in The Literary Digest.

Shortly thereafter, newly hired assistant program director Seymour Siegel moved quickly to bring government-subsidized musicians into the municipal studios through the Federal Music Project. Although the program remained segregated and Black musicians were paid less than their white counterparts, African-American performers were nonetheless employed under the WPA. The ensembles were broadcast nationally via 16-inch transcription discs mailed from Washington, D.C.—a pre-satellite distribution system. These groups included the Juanita Hall Choir, the Negro Melody Singers, the Negro Art Singers, the Los Angeles Colored Chorus, and the Los Angeles Negro Choir. 

The WNYC Archives compiled this mixtape of 26 performances selected from the Municipal Archives WNYC Collection of WPA music transcriptions. 

Singer and actress Juanita Hall, with back turned, conducting the Negro Melody Singers, circa late 1930s. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations / New York Public Library.

Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia’s second term in 1938 marked another turning point with the appointment of Morris Novik as station director and head of the Municipal Broadcasting System, a communications agency reporting directly to the Mayor rather than the Department of Plant and Structures. This reorganization ushered in a new era of inclusiveness at WNYC, beginning with an on-air discussion and debate over the federal Anti-Lynching Bill featuring NAACP executive secretary Walter White. The period also included a notable studio performance by actor Alvin Childress, who portrayed an enslaved person in a dramatic sketch titled Two Faces. 

Portrait of author Richard Wright (PM Photo/A. Lanset Collection).

In April of that year, author Richard Wright appeared on a Federal Writers’ Project roundtable broadcast and addressed the persistence of racial stereotyping and reflected on his work for The WPA Guide to New York City. “The most amazing thing about these stories, to my way of thinking, is that they were never done before… the average American's conception of Negro culture and life as it exists in New York is probably derived from not very accurate novels, or Hollywood representations of the urban Negro as either shabby and comical or exceedingly prosperous as the conductor of a popular swing orchestra.”

The following month, the National Urban League launched Negro News & Views, a new weekly program intended, in its words, “to awaken the general public to the realization of the importance of the Negro’s cultural contribution to American life.” Two weeks after the funeral of James Weldon Johnson in June, WNYC broadcast an on-air remembrance of the author of Lift Every Voice and Sing, often referred to as the Black national anthem. Listeners heard tributes from Mayor La Guardia and leaders of the NAACP, underscoring the station’s growing role as a civic platform for Black cultural and political life. 

In 1939, African-American actor Gordon Heath came to WNYC through the WPA’s National Youth Administration via its NYA Varieties radio program. He produced a biographical series titled Music and Youth, which he later recalled in his memoirs as a stream of “15-minute potted sketches from the lives of great musicians of the past.” One such vignette featured Beethoven in conversation with his landlord, declaring, “Ah, Herr Sturch—the wages of sin, they have not been paid.” 

Part Two of the blog will continue documenting WNYC’s role as a leading producer of programs focusing on Black civic and cultural leadership in the 1940s.

Rochdale Village Protests

In October, 2019, the New York City Municipal Archives finished digitizing a collection of over 1,400 surveillance films created by the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations.  Many featured political protests and demonstrations from 1960 to 1980. Prior to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, this surveillance program focused intensely on actions carried out by members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as they protested racial injustice and unequal treatment. One of the longest of these actions was the protest against the construction of the Rochdale Village housing cooperative.

At the time of its opening in late 1963, Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, Queens was the largest integrated housing cooperative in the country.  Located within a community that was almost entirely African American, it was part of a City-wide effort to racially integrate New York’s communities. And yet, during that summer, a nearly three-month long protest against Rochdale Village was conducted by NAACP, CORE and inter-faith groups. Although the building was promised to have both black and white tenants, an all-white construction union was hired to build it. During the summer of 1963, dozens of protesters interrupted the construction using a wide array of civil disobedience techniques.

Rochdale Village, 133rd Avenue East and New York Boulevard [Demonstration against racial discrimination in hiring practices], August 9, 1963

These techniques were sometimes as simple as sitting in the street to block traffic to the construction site. Others were more clever and subtle, with protesters walking so slowly while they picketed the entrance to the site that trucks could not leave or enter. Other times, seemingly unrelated people would fall from their bicycles while riding right in front of construction trucks. Protesters would then rush to the fallen person’s side to provide help, blocking traffic at the same time. While police officers would quickly arrest those who sat in the street or chained themselves to construction equipment, the more subtle techniques seemed to genuinely complicate or challenge the ability to arrest protesters.

Rochdale Village, 133rd Avenue East and New York Boulevard [Demonstration against racial discrimination in hiring practices], August 9, 1963

William H. Booth was one leader of the protests. The president of the New York State chapter of the NAACP at the time, Booth can be seen in several films going back and forth between fellow protesters and the police, sometimes frustrated, sometimes laughing, often coaching those who were being arrested. Eventually, Booth himself was arrested along with 23 others, the most arrests in a single day during the months-long demonstration. Although they were charged with disorderly conduct for trying to block construction trucks, the charges were later dropped. Booth would be appointed to Mayor John Lindsay’s Commission on Human Rights from 1966 to 1969, only three years after the Rochdale Village protest. After that, he served as a New York judge for 13 years on the Criminal and State Supreme Courts. Booth passed away in 2006 at the age of 84.

Rochdale Village, 133rd Avenue East and New York Boulevard [Demonstration against racial discrimination in hiring practices], August 8, 1963

Rochdale Village was completed in the fall of 1963, with 10% of its low and middle income housing units going to families of color. Over the next two decades, the share of apartments occupied by families of color would increase as white families left Rochdale Village and urban centers more generally for the suburbs. Rising crime, increased carrying charges (equivalent to rent) and troubled schools helped fuel the exodus. The housing cooperative fell into disrepair during the 80s and most of the 90s, but as the City revitalized by the end of the 20th century, so too did Rochdale Village. Today, it is fully-occupied and boasts of being one of the most affordable housing cooperatives in the City.

During the early 1960s, the NYPD filmed several other NAACP and CORE protests against the use of segregated construction labor for more housing cooperatives, hospitals and other buildings. In addition to protesting segregated labor, the NYPD also recorded NAACP and CORE rallies against segregated schooling, the prevalence of police brutality against communities of color, and the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1960s, the NYPD documentation of NAACP and CORE actions slowly diminished to be replaced by film of other organizations fighting for racial justice like the Black Panther Party. Films featuring demonstrations by the NAACP, CORE, the Black Panther Party and many others are now available  to browse on the New York City Municipal Archives online gallery: gallery