Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Releases details of April 4 March
against 'Racial Profiling'
Two-mile route leads from Gladstone School to Cook County Jail
Chicago - On Saturday, March 22, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr. released details of a planned April 4th Illinois-based
march against racial profiling to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Calling the event, "Dignity Day," the civil rights icon urged people across the nation to take off a day from work,
participate in nonviolent demonstration and to donate a day's pay to the civil rights organization of one's choice to
express moral outrage at current trends.
Illinois demonstrators will illustrate the disparities between school funding and prison funding which leads to increased
prison populations and the rudiments of racial profiling "from the womb to the tomb," Jackson explained. His
organization joins other organizations across the nation planning marches in other cities for similar reasons.
"The same forces that lost the battle to divide the nation by law, are now trying to divide the nation by profiling, race-baiting, police misconduct and political panic," said the president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. "Life expectancy
is short, there is less access to capital, there is a digital divide, a resource divide and a race divide. It's time to join us
in a day of dignity and say enough is enough."
King, 39, was killed in 1968 while preparing to join striking sanitation workers on the picket line in Memphis, TN.
March organizers say the demonstration is not limited to people throughout Illinois, saying they expect demonstrators
from Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.
According to march planner, Rev. James T. Meeks, vice president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, at noon people
will gather at Gladstone Elementary School, 1231 S. Damen and proceed at 1:00 p.m. to the Cook County Juvenile
Center where the two-mile walk will conclude at the Cook County Jail's new maximum security facility on 26th Street
and California.
"Profiling begins long before we learn how to drive," said Meeks. "It is time for us to become like Joshua and the
Children of Israel and put on our marching shoes. We need to shift our priorities and our resources, and end racial
profiling, prison profiling and poverty profiling."
Meeks said between Gladstone, one of Chicago's oldest schools built in 1864, and Cook County Jail - there is no
economic development stimulus. "There's not one business, not one trade school, not one job training program," he said.
"In a school with 600 students there's only one bathroom. These kids look out the window at where they hope to
graduate to. (He said of the prison that is less then two blocks from the school). Someone has to get mad about that."
The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition said it designed the march to highlight the inequities in school funding and spending
on the building of jails and prisons. With more than two million people in prison, 500,000 more than in China, the civil
rights organization believes that is something woefully wrong with the present rate of adult and juvenile incarceration,
Jackson, for example, led a vigorous campaign to defeat the Proposition 21 legislation in California, which would lower
the age of youth who can be tried as adults for major criminal offenses.
"They once picked cotton, now they pick children," Jackson said of the expansive, lucrative prison industry. "As crime
goes down because unemployment has gone down, prisons are going up but are being left without customers. Therefore,
lawmakers advocate write draconian laws-Proposition 21, three-strikes, zero tolerance, mandatory minimums, anti-loitering-that will put more juveniles into the criminal justice system then keep them in the educational system."
About 150,000 people are in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 are in local jails. Prisons hold
inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. While most jails
and prisons are indeed filled with people who are indeed guilty of offenses, increasingly the lucrative practice of
warehousing non-violent, first-time offenders, the mentally ill, poor teenagers and the homeless raises obvious concerns.
Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate, followed by Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and South Carolina.
Jackson said that while many people will be lamenting the death of King, he and others will be continuing with his
legacy by marching for the dispossessed and those living in the margins.
"People always ask me what King would be doing if he were here," Jackson said. "I ask them simply "what was he
doing when he died."
For more information on the Save the Dream: Stop the Profiling March for Justice, contact Rev. James Meeks
at 773-373-3366 or Rev. Marshall Hatch, Illinois Coordinator, at 773-287-5051.