Bobby Rush - Early Life, Education, and Activism

Early Life, Education, and Activism

Rush was born in Albany, Georgia during a time of racial tension. Just eight months after his birth, a white mob lynched an African-American couple just north of his home, an event now known as the Moore’s Ford Bridge Case. He and his single mother moved to Chicago, Illinois. In 1963, after dropping out of high school, Rush joined the U.S. Army. While stationed in Chicago in 1966, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1968, he went AWOL from the Army and co-founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. He later received an honorable discharge from the Army.

Throughout the 1960s, Rush was involved in the civil-rights movement and worked in civil-disobedience campaigns in the Southern United States. After co-founding the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in 1968, he served as its "defense minister". His son, Huey Rush, was named after Panther leader Huey Newton. "We were reacting to police brutality, to the historical relationship between African-Americans and recalcitrant racist whites," Rush told People magazine. After witnessing fellow Black Panther Fred Hampton being killed in a police raid, Rush made statements saying "We needed to arm ourselves" and referring to the police as "pigs". Earlier that same year Rush stated the philosophy behind his membership in the Black Panthers saying, "Black people have been on the defensive for all these years. The trend now is not to wait to be attacked. We advocate offensive violence against the power structure." Despite the group's engagement in violence, Rush nonetheless worked on several non-violent projects that built support for the Black Panthers in African-American communities, such as coordinating a medical clinic which offered sickle-cell anemia testing on an unprecedented scale.

Rush's own apartment was raided in December 1969, where police discovered an unregistered pistol, rifle, shotgun, pistol ammunition, training manuals on explosives, booby traps, an assortment of communist literature, and a small amount of marijuana. Rush was imprisoned for six months in 1972 on a weapons charge, after carrying a pistol into a police station. In 1974 Rush left the Panthers, who were already in decline. "We started glorifying thuggery and drugs," he told People. Rush, a deeply religious born-again Christian, went on to say that "I don't repudiate any of my involvement in the Panther party—it was part of my maturing." He subsequently resumed his education in the early 1990s at the McCormick Seminary and received a master's degree in theology.

In 1973, Rush earned his Bachelor of Arts with honors in liberal arts from Roosevelt University, and went on to earn Master of Arts' in political science from University of Illinois at Chicago in 1974, and in theological studies from McCormick Theological Seminary in 1978.