Local grassroots organizer Carl Pinkston credits the late Rev. Jesse Jackson’s unique blend of strategic genius and ability to instill hope with shaping his own five decades of activism.

As a teen attending Sacramento High School in the late 1960s, Pinkston considered himself a “Black militant,” drawn to the radical tradition of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, whose activism felt more relevant than mainstream civil rights movements.

“Many of the Panther folks from Sacramento did a lot of organizing around Sac High and City College. We would sneak off from campus to go over to City College and go to the Black Student Union meetings and check them out,” he recalls.

“I was reading a lot, and trying to understand certain things, trying to get a sense of stuff.”

During his “learning period,” Pinkston discovered “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” 

“I wanted to learn everything about Malcolm X,” says Pinkson, now 72. “I wanted to be Malcolm X. I wanted to do something and see that transformation.”

Today, Pinkston actively fights for social justice as a leader with the Sacramento Area Black Caucus, the Black Parallel School Board and the Sacramento Poor People’s Campaign, focusing his expertise on tenants rights, better treatment for students of color and dignity for the unhoused.

He was inspired by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who stoked his fire for change. “We felt we were going to have a revolution,” Pinkston says. “They were all in their 20s. It was like I could relate to that.”

The more he read, he gained a new understanding and respect for leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jackson, and their “more radical sides,” which often were downplayed.

The pivotal shift came in the early 1970s while Pinkston worked for the Department of Water Resources. Frustrated by data showing Black communities at the bottom of employment and housing, he was challenged to read Karl Marx’s “German Ideology.” Pinkston initially was dismissive of Marx’s writings until coming to a part that said, “Philosophers have interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” That, he says, “set me off to do organizing.”

He began studying the organizing styles of figures like Dr. King and Ella Baker.

“What I learned from Ella Baker was it ain’t about you,” Pinkston says. “It’s about oppressed people and that your job is to help oppressed people become leaders and you don’t necessarily have leaders that people will follow, but the masses themselves will actually be involved in doing the work.”

Pinkston also sought out the wisdom of his grandmother, Mamie Hicks, a local church founder who had witnessed a lynching in the Jim Crow South. Her answer to why she kept fighting — that her generation poured their resources into the next so they could “take it to the next level” — humbled Pinkston and taught him to listen to his elders and learn from them.

Major ‘PUSH’

Rev. Jackson became known for the phrase “keep hope alive.” It was more than a campaign slogan, Pinkston says.

“In the worst of times when everything is a total disaster, people dying, they could speak to you with the greatest of hope,” Pinkston says of Rev. Jackson and Dr. King.

“They were surrounded by the Klan, they were surrounded by oppression But they were able to just close all that out for a moment and be like, ‘I’m going to show you this new vision, this new world.’”

That vision came with a price, including arrests, injuries to boycotting students and the assassinations of leaders like Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. Even after Rev. Jackson’s death Feb. 17 at 84, some on social media attempted character assassination, repeating old allegations that he had a hand in Dr. King’s murder for his own political gain.

“I remember when I told my mom, ‘Hey, I’m going to be a revolutionary.’ She said, ‘Well, I don’t want you to be no revolutionary because being a revolutionary is going to get you killed,’” Pinkston says.

Pinkston had the chance to work directly with Rev. Jackson in 1997, following the passage of California’s anti-affirmative action bill, Proposition 209, in 1996.

As Sacramento joined efforts to reverse the harmful legislation, activists like actor Danny Glover and Dolores Huerta lent their power to the movement. Pinkston felt Rev. Jackson was needed more than ever.

“Prop. 209 passed in November and people were simply saying, ‘Oh, we lost again.’ The defeatism and the nihilism started setting in.”

A friend with a San Francisco-based social justice group mentioned Pinkston when Rev. Jackson reached out to him. Pinkston asked Rev. Jackson to come to Sacramento for a march aimed at rebuilding hope and focusing the community’s energy. The ensuing experience was a masterclass in organizing.

Jackson didn’t just make a symbolic appearance, Pinkston recalls. The renowned leader and his staff met with him and other local organizers, including members of the Sacramento Civil Rights Network, to strategize on every detail: the best route for the march, security considerations, the imagery and messaging, and, critically, the follow-up plan for what work would continue after he left. Pinkston valued Jackson’s high visibility, which was essential to attracting media attention and conveying the message to a wider community in the pre-social media era.

Pinkston reaches back to those days working with the civil rights leader for one of his current roles, training the next generation of activists with the organization Central Valley Movement Building.

Young people are engaged, Pinkston says. Like civil rights movements of the past, young people have recently let their presence, and platforms, be known in protesting the police-involved deaths of unarmed Black men and women and speaking out against ICE raids on immigrant families as they did in January, participating in a coordinated, national school walk-out.

“There are a few that want to learn,” the local elder activist says. “If I can get a few I can train, I can get them to talk to the other young people. When I look at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there were only like 12 people. … I don’t need many. I don’t need masses of organizers. I need those good organizers to engage masses of people.”

Like his long ago conversions with his family elder, young people often ask Pinkston how he keeps hope alive.

His answer: “Every morning, I get up and I take a cup of hope and I go to work. You cannot bring hope into existence if you don’t do the work.”

Change doesn’t happen overnight. “It took years,” he says of Rev. Jackson’s vision. “And it will take years to do this work. If you can’t do this work for long, break it up in small chunks and do it. Do what you can on many different levels. You don’t always have to be out in the street movement. You can do what you can, wherever you can. You can become an artist, a singer.”

He was impacted by boxing great Muhammad Ali’s 1967 refusal to be drafted to the Vietnam War. “That was powerful,” Pinkston says. “It wasn’t all demonstrating but, man, that reverberated with young Black men throughout the nation. They could relate. Even though some ended up being drafted and going overseas, some became part of the Black Panther Party and other organizations as well.”

Pinkston was saddened by Rev. Jackson’s passing, but says the real loss would be not honoring his legacy.

“We won’t have [his] wisdom and thoughts going forward, but what he has done, what he said, I want it repeated, talked about, articulated and practiced for years to come,” Pinkston says. “If we don’t do that, then I’m not going to any celebratory Jesse Jackson stuff. That’s not how you celebrate Jesse Jackson. You celebrate him by doing the work.”

A request to have Rev. Jackson’s body lie in honor inside the U.S. Capitol rotunda was denied. Instead, his body was present for celebrations of his life and legacy across several locations, including his Rainbow PUSH Coalition headquarters in Chicago, his native South Carolina and in Washington. A public service is scheduled March 6 at Chicago’s House of Hope, with private homegoing services set for the following day at Rainbow PUSH, which will be livestreamed.

As the nation prepares to lay Rev. Jackson to rest, California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom on March 4 ordered flags at the State Capitol and all state buildings to be flown at half-staff in his the civil rights icon’s honor.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The OBSERVER published a special tribute to Rev. Jesse Jackson in our Feb. 20 issue. To purchase a copy and preserve Black history, call 916-452-4781.