When Pastor John Borders was serving as the chaplain of the Suffolk County Jail in the late 1980s, he invited the Rev. Jesse Jackson to speak to his congregation of prisoners.
Around that time, in a conversation Borders said he’ll “never forget,” Jackson admonished the young pastor for not doing enough to prioritize social justice in his ministry.
“You and the other clergy need to work harder at bringing together the elected officials and the clergy in Boston to solidify the social justice agenda,” he recalled Jackson telling him.
Borders, who now leads Morning Star Baptist Church in Mattapan, said those words continue to inform his ministry – pressing him, he said, to use the pulpit as a vehicle to bring about social and political change for Boston’s Black population.
“We must not only walk in that path [of spiritual piety], but we must develop a praxis,” Borders said. “And that was a social justice praxis. He helped me with that.”
Jackson, who died Feb. 17 at age 84, led a life that was hardly limited to a church’s pulpit. In 1965, while a student at the Chicago Theological Seminary, he led 20 students and a third of the seminary’s faculty to Selma, Alabama, where peaceful protesters had been brutally beaten by state troopers.
Two years later, prior to finishing his theological studies, Jackson left school to focus entirely on furthering the Civil Rights Movement under Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
For the remainder of his life, through two presidential campaigns and thousands of speaking appearances, Jackson used his status as a religious leader (he was ordained by the minister of a Chicago church after he went to work for King) to advocate for greater economic and educational opportunities for Black people.
“His life really taught me … that the pulpit was not a place to retreat from politics, but it was actually a platform for us to bring more clarity to our community, to our cities, to our country, and to the world,” said Rev. Willie Bodrick, the senior pastor of Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury (shown above).
In 2017, Jackson spoke to the congregation at Grace Church of All Nations in Dorchester. Karen Foxworth, the wife of A. Livingston Foxworth, the senior pastor of Grace Church of All Nations, was present for the speech.
She said his being there was “historical. Everybody was just really hinged to the word, because of his history and his knowledge and his fight and his experience. We really got a lot out of it.”
Borders, who described himself as one of Jackson’s “young protegees” in Boston, said his emphasis on social justice inspired him to co-create an initiative that would later become the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a project that successfully and drastically reduced youth violence in the city.
“The gangs had come into Morning Star Baptist Church and tried to kill a man,” Borders said, referring to an attack in 1992 in which a group of young men stabbed a 21-year-old man eight times during a memorial service at the church. “That led to clergy meeting at Morning Star for over six months from every faith and every religion in America.”
That initiative, together with Operation Ceasefire, helped bring down Boston’s youth homicide rate by two thirds by 1997, according to data from the Bridgespan Group.
“Reverend Jackson’s life continues to reinforce the opportunity for us to see truth to power,” Bodrick said. “Also to advocate, and to ensure that our advocacy becomes action that supports the most vulnerable.”
This story is the product of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.