“There is nothing on earth that God does not do,” the Reverend James Meeks told the thousands of people at Salem Baptist Church’s House of Hope on the last Sunday in October, a week and a half before election day. “But God has to have some people to do it through.”
Many politicians and public officials are put off by Meeks’s willingness to use his church as a power base, his vehemence in opposing abortion and gay rights, his reliance on political theater, his fickleness when it comes to alliances. Last summer Sean Harden, executive assistant to Mayor Daley, responded to the demonstrations Meeks had led to protest what he called “apartheid” in the public schools by saying, “We all want to see improvement in the schools. You can do it in an antagonistic way, or you can do it with an olive branch–then people understand you’re doing it because of the issue, and not as an opportunist for your own self-gratification.”
It was there that he got into his first public power struggle. After working for five years with one-year contracts, he asked for a longer-term arrangement. The elders refused, the dispute escalated, and they locked him out of the church. When no one was watching the door one Sunday morning, he walked in and interrupted the service, announcing that he was leaving to start a new church and inviting everyone to join. Around 200 people did.
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According to the Sun-Times, in 1995 Meeks crashed a Christmas party at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s house, where he spent a few hours debating religion and politics. Then he slid a memo with a few more thoughts under Jackson’s door the next morning. Jackson invited him to get involved in what was by then known as Rainbow-PUSH. People who know both men well say that while Meeks clearly wanted to attach himself to one of his longtime heroes, Jackson wanted the connection at least as much. He hoped Meeks and his congregation would pump new energy into Rainbow-PUSH, which was dominated by its older, civil rights-era members. Meeks soon became the organization’s state director and later its vice president.
Salem drew even more worshippers, including Ricky LeFlore, a west-sider who started attending Salem in 1997 with his wife and daughter. “Even though it was not what I was looking for, it was what I needed,” he says. “We went out one night, up Michigan Avenue, just talking to people, talking to what you’d call ladies of the evening. When pastor has a vision, we get behind him, and we make it happen.”
Beale, a 31-year-old computer analyst, had helped organize the Roseland campaign. In 1999 he told Meeks he was interested in running for Ninth Ward alderman. Meeks put him in touch with Delmarie Cobb and recruited Jackson and other church members to help. Cobb says the campaign wasn’t exactly a well-oiled machine–inexperienced volunteers made mistakes such as improperly filling out some of Beale’s ballot petitions. “Anthony almost did not make it on the ballot,” she says.
In 2000 David Miller, a south-suburban dentist, asked Jesse Jackson Jr. for advice about running for state representative in the 29th District. Jackson suggested he seek Meeks’s help. “Jesse said he was a good guy,” says Miller. “I decided to run and had a plan, and Meeks got involved.”
