Years ago, he said he would never come back. Not to the area where his family had their mailbox blown up and where they had received racially-motivated threats in the 1980s.
But 1986 Columbus North High School graduate Rodger B. Jackson changed his mind and served as the straightforward keynote speaker of the 30th Annual Columbus/Bartholomew County Area NAACP Branch Freedom Fund Banquet at The Commons on Thursday.
If nothing else, he said at the outset that he was heartened to look out at a crowd of about 130 people and see black, white, Asian, Latino and Indian people at the event.
“You have no idea how refreshing that is to see,” he said.
The 50-year-old Jackson, a producer and the managing partner of the Chicago-based Independent Network Television, mentioned that the racial/ethnic mix is especially important to one living in Chicago, which he recalled “the most segregated city you will ever walk through in your life.” He said that even some of the city’s white neighborhoods are subdivided into splintered and very separate groups.
He spoke for 35 minutes on the theme “When We Fight, We Win.” But even Jackson himself acknowledged he had no NAACP rah-rah speech to offer. Instead, he asked audience members to define who the “we” represents in any struggle — and to clearly delineate what a group might be fighting for.
For more on this story, see Saturday’s Republic.
