Essay 1386

From The Chicago Tribune…

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ACTION JACKSON

Boycotts through time

By Patrick T. Reardon

If history repeats itself, Rev. Jesse Jackson has again turned to one of his most used forms of activism: the boycott. Earlier this week, he called for consumers to leave on store shelves the DVD boxed set of the seventh season of “Seinfeld” because of Michael “Kramer” Richards’ racial rant at a West Hollywood nightclub.

Here are other boycotts he has called for over the years:

August 1982. A boycott of ChicagoFest, a predecessor of Taste of Chicago, carried out in anger over Mayor Jane Byrne’s replacement of three black CHA board members with three whites. This protest turned out to be the first step in the successful campaign to elect Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, eight months later.

October 1985. A boycott of WBBM-Ch. 2 following the demotion of African-American anchor Harry Porterfield.

November 1996. A boycott of Texaco because of its discriminatory practices. The protest continued even after the oil company agreed to pay $176.1 million to its black employees to settle a lawsuit.

August 2001. A threatened boycott of Toyota Motor Sales USA because of a lack of diversity among its employees. When the carmaker agreed to spend nearly $8 billion over the next decade to increase minority participation in the company, it was criticized by some business leaders for caving in to what they called a shakedown.

September 2002. A threatened boycott of the movie “Barbershop,” which made fun of civil rights leaders Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackson himself.

January 2005. A boycott of businesses in Columbus, Ga., because of the shooting death a year earlier of an African-American insurance analyst by a deputy sheriff.

June 2006. A boycott against oil giant BP PLC, one of the sponsors of the annual Rainbow PUSH Coalition conference, because few of its executives and franchisees are minorities.