1. She had early skeptics in Chicago’s Black churches.
Not long after moving here from New Orleans in 1931, at age 20, Jackson started belting out solos with the Johnson Singers, a quintet based at Greater Salem Missionary Baptist Church, then located in Armour Square. Although she wowed many folks, Chicago’s more conservative Black ministers denounced her blues-tinged Southern sound. And some found her “physical style irreverent, even lewd,” write Timothy B. Tyson and Mary D. Williams in Mahalia Jackson, Moving On Up a Little Higher. Jackson insisted that the intensity was firmly rooted in her faith: “I want my hands … my feet … my whole body to say all that is in me.”
2. She often lent her booming contralto to political campaigns.
Even before she became a recording star, she was in high demand at local rallies for politicians like William L. Dawson, a Black alderman who was elected to Congress in 1942, and at precinct captain meetings. “I sang for I don’t know how many of those different meetings a night — and, baby, all those politicians would go crazy!” she once declared.
3. Ed Sullivan put her on TV.
Jackson made her national television debut in 1952 on Toast of the Town, the original name of Sullivan’s long-running variety show that would later feature Elvis and the Beatles. According to Tyson and Williams, Jackson became “the Black performer most frequently appearing on American television in the 1950s.” They quote Motown singer Smokey Robinson on the effect of that exposure: “Mahalia crossed all barriers, and just as many white people had Mahalia Jackson in their homes listening to her as Black people.”
4. She spurred on one of the greatest speeches of all time.
As Martin Luther King Jr. began improvising the climax of his address in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, Jackson, who had heard a version a few weeks earlier, called out, “Tell ’em about the dream!” The book describes the subsequent moments: “Standing just a few feet in front of the podium, she entered into a kind of duet with King, urging him on, echoing him, praising him.”
5. She formed an unlikely friendship with Richard J. Daley.
The mayor saw her as an asset to attract Black votes for his Democratic machine. So as Jackson got involved in the civil rights movement, Daley, who was no proponent, gave her free access to civic venues like Soldier Field and McCormick Place to hold rallies. And in 1956, when Jackson faced a hostile reception after moving into Chatham, which was mostly white at the time, Daley provided security. “Someone shot through one of my windows,” she recalled. “Mayor Daley put a guard outside my house for a full year.” The book suggests Jackson was naive in her belief that the mayor could be persuaded to make meaningful changes in the city’s racial divide. But his affinity for her was real. When Jackson died in 1972, at 60, Daley opened McCormick’s 5,000-seat Arie Crown Theater for her funeral.