Ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. on Sunday urged Oklahomans to turn their attention back to the problems of poverty, joblessness and inequality.
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The pain of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building still burns deeply, the civil rights leader said in a fiery sermon at St. John Missionary Baptist Church, 5700 N Kelley Ave., which lost four members that day.
"We are groping in the darkness in so many ways," the two-time Democratic presidential candidate told a standing-room-only audience.
"There's conflict in our society today and the bombing in Oklahoma City was just one manifestation of it."
In Oklahoma, 82,000 people are unemployed, 180,000 children live in poverty and 40 percent of state prison inmates are black although blacks comprise only 7 percent of the population, he said.
"There is a growing tendency of locking up our youth rather than lifting them up," Jackson said from a pulpit decorated by a huge spray of yellow and white gladiolas.
Jackson also chastised Oklahoma colleges and universities for failing to educate many of their black athletes. Noting low student-athlete graduation rates at Oral Roberts University, Oklahoma State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa, Jackson said: "To use these athletes for four years to fill up the stadium and make millions and have no plan for them to graduate, that's violence, too."
In a sermon that was equal parts politics and religion, Jackson criticized President Bush for launching the Iraq war without sufficient evidence of an Al-Qaida connection or weapons of mass destruction, and for allowing a ban on assault weapons to expire.
"We are the most blessed society, yet the most violent," Jackson said.
"We've lost 1,500 in Iraq in two years, but 50,000 on our own streets. Where is the war zone?"
After the service, Jackson said he accepted the invitation to preach at St. John in part because he is working with the Rev. M.L. Jemison, the church's pastor, to organize an Oklahoma chapter of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, a multi-racial, multi-issue organization devoted to progressive causes.
"We're building affiliates around the nation. We're going to build a strong Rainbow/PUSH in Oklahoma," Jackson said.
During the service, ushers circulated a Rainbow/PUSH petition urging President Bush and Congress to reauthorize the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Some provisions of the act are set to expire in August 2007.
"We want our right to vote extended and protected now. We've earned it. We deserve it. It's our right," Jackson said.
Voting rights is not a racial issue, Jackson said, noting that poll taxes also kept poor whites from casting ballots. Multiracial cooperation continues to be needed on a range of causes, he said.
"Most poor people are not black. Most of the poor in Oklahoma are not black. They're white, female and young," Jackson said. "That's why we must have a vision bigger than our race.
"What made Jesus different and Moses different and Dr. (Martin Luther) King different and Pope John Paul II different, they were minorities with majority visions," Jackson said.
