Sam Ackerman Believed in Justice and Never Stopped Working For It -- Making Him This Week's BuzzFlash Wings Of Justice Honoree

WINGS OF JUSTICE

Sam Ackerman

Regrettably, this accolade must serve also as a eulogy, because this week's BuzzFlash Wings of Justice award goes to social justice, civil rights, and progressive political activist Sam Ackerman of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. As mourners noted, even in death Sam maintained his activism, departing this earth only after President Obama's first 100 days had been served, and on a day of worker solidarity, May 1, 2009.

The Chicago Tribune described Sam as "a long-time political fixture in Hyde Park whose activism stretched from the civil rights era to Barack Obama's presidential election." In fact, it started earlier and ended later. Sam's activism began when he was a student in New York State in the Fifties, including his defense of Pete Seeger's right to sing at Cornell University.

After moving to Illinois in the Sixties, Sam helped organize Chicagoans to join Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington, and he served on a medical team for the violence-plagued 1968 Democratic Convention. He became a critic of Mayor Richard J. Daley and helped elect Harold Washington as Chicago's first Black mayor in 1983. Recently, he took pride in having hosted the first "coffee" for Barack Obama's first successful political campaign, for Illinois state senator. Just prior to his death, he was sharing his organizing expertise with progressives working to elect a new mayor in Albany, New York.

Sam was a grass-roots activist who gave much to his own community, but his vision was broad enough to embrace world peace and social justice and a nuclear arms-free world as well. Sam marched in the streets, campaigned (helping on at least 63 elections), collected food-pantry donations, chaired arts committees, and made buttons -- lots of buttons. Those who knew and worked with him will remember the glint of gleeful trouble-making in his eyes, and his undying belief in the brotherhood of all humanity.

Those who gathered to remember him Sunday at his temple, directly across the street from Barack and Michelle Obama's Hyde Park home, called Sam a great friend, a true optimist, a humanitarian, a legend, and an inspiration. His family asked that, to continue his legacy, donations to progressive groups and causes be made in Sam's name.

Sam Ackerman made justice his lifelong work. He relished diversity, and lived it. He believed in change, and created it. For that, Sam Ackerman is this week's honored recipient of the BuzzFlash Wings of Justice Award.

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Nominated by Christine Bowman, a family member and friend. To see a full list of past Wings of Justice honorees, click here.

WINGS OF JUSTICE

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