JCUA Director of Antiracism and Equity Jackie Baldwin delivered the follow remarks at the Fierce Urgency of Now rally on August 1st commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Chicago Freedom Movement marches into Marquette Park to demand housing desegregation.

Shalom and As-salamu alaykum.

My name is Jackie Baldwin. I lead the antiracism and equity work at the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs — JCUA — and I am a founding member of our Kol Or Jews of Color Caucus.

I’m also a member of Beth Shalom B’Nai Zaken EHC, here in Chicago Lawn, where Rabbi Capers Funnye is the senior rabbi. Our synagogue is proud to be a place of refuge, just as it was when Dr. King led his march into Marquette Park sixty years ago.

60 years ago, JCUA’s founder, Rabbi Robert Marx, was asked to come to Gage Park as an independent observer. To watch Dr. King’s march, and report back. So he sat down on the curb, with his young son beside him. And what he watched was a mob with rocks, bottles, and slurs hurled at people whose only demand was to live where they wanted to live.

He would write later that what he saw seared his soul, that he finally understood how ordinary people could be brought to kill. And he named his own failure. He had watched from the wrong side of the street.

Then he made a promise: “This time I will be on the right side of the street.”

That Friday, Rabbi Marx walked into Marquette Park behind Dr. King — into the rocks and the bottles that struck Dr. King in the head and left dozens injured.

Rabbi Marx was on the right side of the street that day. He understood that allyship meant taking the same risk and being willing to give up rights he had, so that those denied rights could demand the rights they deserve.

Today is a reminder that we must not allow the threats we face now to deny our children the future they deserve. Today is a call to stand steadfast and resolute, to demand that the victories won sixty years ago will not be forfeited to authoritarian rule.

People are frustrated. And I have heard many say that marching is a waste of time. I wholeheartedly disagree.

We know marching alone is not the solution. But marching matters because our collective steps make the ground shake. Our steps create a vibration that rumbles across streets, across neighborhoods, across cities.

I march because I recall the words of Coretta Scott King: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won; you earn it and win it in every generation.”

I march because I hear the words of Angela Davis reminding me that “Freedom is a constant struggle.”

I march because Kwame Ture taught us that we must “mobilize to organize.”

I march because I am tired of anti-Blackness, and all of the racism and bigotry that stems from that evil ideology.

I march because I refuse to let history be rewritten with lies and fabrications.

I march because I know that we are all created in the image of the Creator.

I march because I know freedom and safety for the Jewish community means freedom and safety for all.

I march because every day is a moment to move us toward liberation.

Rabbi Marx wrote one more thing in that letter, sixty years ago. He wrote that Passover is not three thousand years old — that it is today, and that we are part of it.