For me, it's someone I've honored, respected, and followed. Growing up here in East Oakland, Chavez's organizing motivated many of us to not only speak out on behalf of our communities but to do the work...advocating for the humanity of not just farmworkers but those of us in the neighborhood.
This is hardly the first season in which the wealthy have made themselves more and more powerful in collusion with the powerful, making themselves more and more wealthy all at the expense of political equality and economic opportunity. Today we use words like unprecedented, but the truth is our times are more precedent than we would care to admit.
He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were White or Black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these—those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected—demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time sold us out as a people.
I foresee tomorrow will represent everything that Rev. Jackson stood for. It will include dignitaries and icons, as well as many from where the true power lies, with the people in the streets.
