"Operation Breadbasket is a narrative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Operation Breadbasket, 1966-1971, an economic empowerment project that Martin Luther King Jr brought to Chicago as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Rev. Martin L. Deppe was a founding and active member of Breadbasket's steering committee throughout the life of this program. Using the power of the pulpit to galvanize consumer support including occasional economic withdrawal ("Don't Buy") efforts, the participating ministers, the ...
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"Operation Breadbasket is a narrative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Operation Breadbasket, 1966-1971, an economic empowerment project that Martin Luther King Jr brought to Chicago as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Rev. Martin L. Deppe was a founding and active member of Breadbasket's steering committee throughout the life of this program. Using the power of the pulpit to galvanize consumer support including occasional economic withdrawal ("Don't Buy") efforts, the participating ministers, the project negotiated for a fair share of jobs in the African American community of Chicago, and in time added products and services originating from that community. By the end of six years, Breadbasket's fifteen "covenants" with milk, soft drink, chain store and other consumer-oriented industries, brought approximately $57 million dollars of new income into the black community annually. The program ended when the project's national director, Rev. Jesse Jackson, resigned in December 1971, and essentially took the program out of SCLC into his own Operation PUSH, later Rainbow PUSH. This book is both a history of Operation Breadbasket, and a memoir of life in it as written by one of Breadbasket's most active participants. Deppe uses his extensive files--steering committee minutes, memoranda, brochures, letters, sermonic material, Chicago Defender archives, colleagues' files--along with extensive new research, including interviews with several surviving participants."--Provided by publisher.
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Here is a book veterans of the civil rights movement in the 1960's will want to read and one that current activists should read. Operation Breadbasket - Untold Story, tells the story of the unheralded leaders of the SCLC program based in Chicago that broke a market stranglehold by white businesses in Black communities and empowered Black businesses in their own neighborhoods and beyond. It brought clergy leaders from local Southside churches to work together in a disciplined fashion to analyze product distribution, sales patterns and employment practices of large food and beverage chains doing business in Black shopping centers. When the economic data obtained from the companies disclosed bottom line profits flowing out of consumers purses into vendors pockets without re-investment in new job opportunities for residents, negotiations began. Corporate officers were slow to recognize clergy as a equals at the bargaining table until the preachers went back to their pulpits and mobilized their congregations around effective product boycotts. When pickets showed up and sales numbers began declining in neighborhood stores, management "got religion" and began serious negotiations resulting in significant increases in new jobs, job training and promotions for Black residents soon followed by new contracts for Black owned and operated vendors. Author Reverend Martin Deppe chronicles these achievements with documentation of actual hiring numbers and earning / contract dollar impact from his extensive files as a participant on the clergy Steering (negotiating) Committee. He also sheds light on internal organizational dynamics of the SCLC movement activities during the Chicago campaign that brought Dr. Martin Luther King to the city. In many respects, the disappointment with the outcome of that more publicized effort that focused primarily on open housing was ameliorated by the successes of Operation Breadbasket. And Breadbasket also launched the high profile career of Reverend Jesse Jackson who came to Chicago as a seminary student and wound up the national director. Deppe sensitively addresses issues of Jackson's leadership style that both succeeded in the expansion of Breadbasket into a mass movement utilizing professional entertainment qualities as well as accelerated his own political ambitions within the city and beyond. The take away for today's movement is how significant outcomes in the struggle for justice can be achieved by leaders committed to solidarity and engaged in strategic planning and disciplined actions.
