Meeks didn't run, but he isn't going away

Meeks didn't run, b
October 22, 2006

BY CAROL MARIN Sun-Times Columnist
State Sen. James Meeks said a blessing over my spinach omelet and his corned beef hash Thursday morning. We were at a corner table in the pancake house on Hyde Park Boulevard.
Meeks, dressed in a black collarless shirt and a black pin-striped suit, was wearing a gold chain with a small gold object suspended from it that looked familiar but oddly out of place.

What is that I asked?

"A mezuzah," he said.

This pastor of the Salem Baptist Church, an African-American Christian mega-church on Chicago's South Side, was wearing a Jewish symbol. A mezuzah, or mezuzsah, is that small container encasing a tiny parchment scroll that is often seen on the doorposts of Jewish homes. It is an affirmation of faith, a blessing.

Meeks bought it more than a decade ago while in West Jerusalem. He'd taken his choir to perform in Israel and one day went down to the big, teeming marketplace on Ben Yehouda Street. A shopkeeper implored him to buy the chain. The shopkeeper right next door insisted he buy a mezuzah pendant to put on the chain.

The two shopkeepers, Meeks learned, were brothers who hadn't spoken to each other in years even though they worked side by side.

Meeks said he began a negotiation, promising to buy the pendant from the one brother if he'd start talking to the other. It took a while but in the end, the warring brothers declared a truce and began to talk.

Two years later, Meeks said, he traveled back to the same market. The first shopkeeper, recognizing him, rushed out weeping and said that a year after their reconciliation, his brother had died. He told Meeks that if he hadn't forced them to talk to each other, he would not have been at his brother's side in the last year of his life.

It was an unexpected parable at what was supposed to be a breakfast to talk a little pre-election politics. But it speaks volumes about Meeks.

Had it not been for another Meeks' negotiation, right now he would be a third party candidate for governor.

Last spring he toyed with running as an independent against incumbent Democrat Rod Blagojevich and Republican challenger Judy Baar Topinka, although it was really Blagojevich whom he had in his sights.

Meeks is the lone independent in the state Senate, a freshman whose victory in 2002 crippled that dynamic, despotic Dolton political duo, the Shaw brothers, by knocking Bill out of his Senate seat and helping to defeat Bob at the Board of Review. Meeks' political juice comes from his association with the Jackson Machine, the other reverend and the congressman.

Had he decided to run, Meeks would have been able to siphon off a considerable block of the black vote that Blagojevich is counting on to win on Nov. 7.

Meeks swapped his threatened candidacy for assurances from Blagojevich that the governor would find more money and a more meaningful way to fund education in the embarrassing state of Illinois.

Now, with the election just a little over two weeks away, I asked the reverend if he had any regrets about not running.

He glanced down at his corned beef hash and said "at times." With good reason. There is another third party candidate in the race, the Green Party's Rich Whitney. And though no one expects him to win, there are some Downstate legislative districts, according to Joliet pollster Mike McKeon, that show Whitney tapping into voter disgust with both Blagojevich and Topinka, picking up low double-digit traction among the disaffected.

But Meeks, the spiritual leader of a 22,000-member congregation whose live Sunday broadcasts reach more than 700,000 viewers, will support the governor instead. It isn't that he's gotten a very good, or for that matter, long-term education commitment from Blagojevich. He hasn't. But this is a work in progress.

And while he could put two feuding brothers together in West Jerusalem, that's Little League compared with the World Series that is still required in Springfield to find a sustainable, sensible way to fund our schools.

Anybody who thinks Illinois' public school children don't live in a segregated land of economic educational disparity, has not been to North Lawndale and compared its classrooms with New Trier's.

Reverend Meeks is not going away. And another election is around the corner. And these days he's meeting often with Mayor Daley and House Speaker Mike Madigan and Senate President Emil Jones. He will keep pressing, pushing, and, yes, threatening that he knows more than one way to force people to talk to each other.

It's suggesting he might, someday, run for one of their jobs.