US civil rights leader Rev Jesse Jackson, a Baptist minister raised in the segregated South who became a close associate of Martin Luther King jnr and twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, has died at age 84, his family said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said.
Jackson, an inspirational orator and long-time Chicagoan, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017 at age 76.
The media-savvy Jackson advocated for the rights of Black Americans and other marginalised communities dating back to the turbulent civil rights movement of the 1960s spearheaded by his mentor King.
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Jackson weathered a spate of controversies but remained America’s pre-eminent civil rights figure for decades.
His death comes at a time when the administration of Donald Trump has targeted US institutions, from museums to monuments to national parks, to remove what the president calls “anti-American” ideology, leading to the dismantling of slavery exhibits, the restoration of Confederate statues and other moves that civil rights advocates say could reverse decades of social progress.
He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, attracting Black voters and many white liberals in mounting unexpectedly strong campaigns but fell short of becoming the first Black major party White House nominee. Ultimately, he never held elective office.
Jackson founded the Chicago-based civil rights groups Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition and served as Democratic president Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Africa in the 1990s.
Jackson pursued his political ambitions in the 1980s, relying on his mesmerising oratory. It was not until fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008 that a Black candidate came as close to securing a major party presidential nomination as Jackson.
Jackson cast himself as a barrier-breaker for people of colour, the impoverished and the powerless. He electrified the 1988 Democratic convention with a speech telling his life story and calling on Americans to find common ground.
“America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one colour, one cloth,” Jackson told the delegates in Atlanta.
“Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes,” Jackson said.
He hosted a weekly show on CNN from 1992 to 2000, pressed corporations for Black economic empowerment, and received the highest US civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Clinton in 2000.
Jackson continued his activism later in life, condemning the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans in 2020 amid the global racial justice movement.
Born on October 8th, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, he grew up amid the Jim Crow era in the United States, the often brutally enforced web of racist laws and practices born in the South to subjugate Black Americans.
He began his civil rights activism while a student at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, and was arrested when he sought to enter a “whites-only” public library in South Carolina.
He attended Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968 despite failing to graduate.
On the day King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968, Jackson was just a floor below. Jackson infuriated some of King’s other associates when he told reporters he had cradled the dying King in his arms and was the last person to whom King spoke, an account they disputed.
Jackson stepped down as the president of Rainbow-PUSH Coalition in 2023 after more than five decades of leadership and activism.
He met his wife, Jacqueline Brown, during college. They married in 1962 and had five children. His son Jesse Jackson jnr was elected to the US House of Representatives but resigned and served prison time on a fraud conviction. Jackson also had a daughter out of wedlock in 1999 with a woman who worked at his civil rights groups, which became a scandal.
In a social media post reacting to Jackson’s death, President Trump wrote, “He was a good man, with lots of personality, grit and ‘street smarts.’ He was very gregarious — someone who truly loved people!”
Rev Al Sharpton, the US civil rights and social justice activist, said: “The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson was not simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself. He carried history in his footsteps and hope in his voice. One of the greatest honours of my life was learning at his side.
“He reminded me that faith without action is just noise. He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work.” – Reuters
