Jesse Jackson, the U.S. civil rights leader, Baptist minister and two-time Democratic presidential candidate who rose from the segregated South to become a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., has died at 84, his family said in a statement.
“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.
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Jackson, a long-time Chicago figure and an electrifying orator, disclosed in 2017 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Across six decades of activism, he championed the rights of Black Americans and other marginalized groups, helping translate the moral force of the 1960s civil rights movement into sustained political and economic campaigns.
He founded Operation PUSH in Chicago in the early 1970s and later the National Rainbow Coalition, organizations that pressed for racial justice, voting rights and corporate accountability. The groups merged in 1996 as the Rainbow PUSH Coalition; Jackson stepped down as president in 2023 after more than five decades of leadership.
Jackson twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination, mounting breakthrough national campaigns that energized Black voters and attracted many white liberals. In 1984, he won 3.3 million votes — about 18% — and finished third to Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. His candidacy was marred when it became public that he had referred privately to Jewish people as “Hymies” and New York as “Hymietown.”
Four years later, Jackson returned as a more polished, mainstream contender and finished a strong second, winning 11 states and 6.8 million votes (29%) as he challenged eventual nominee Michael Dukakis. He cast himself as a coalition-builder for the poor and the powerless, and his 1988 Democratic National Convention address — a life-story testimony that urged Americans to seek common ground — remains one of the party’s defining speeches.
Between campaigns and after, Jackson practiced personal diplomacy on the world stage. He helped secure the 1984 release of U.S. naval aviator Robert Goodman Jr. from Syria — earning a White House invitation from President Ronald Reagan for what Reagan called a “mission of mercy.” He later met with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to help free hundreds of people, won the 1984 release of dozens of Cuban and American prisoners from Cuban jails, and led the effort that freed three U.S. airmen held in Serbia in 1999.
President Bill Clinton named him special envoy to Africa in the 1990s, and in 2000 awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Jackson also hosted a weekly show on CNN from 1992 to 2000 and pressed corporate America for Black economic empowerment.
Born Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to a teenage mother, Jackson grew up under Jim Crow laws and often spoke of the humiliations and violence of segregation. He earned a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, transferred to North Carolina A&T, and began civil rights activism that included an arrest for trying to enter a whites-only public library. Ordained in 1968 after study at Chicago Theological Seminary, he had already become a close aide to King.
Jackson was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis the day King was assassinated in 1968. He later emerged as a national movement leader in his own right, channeling pulpit cadence and street-level organizing into a durable political presence — even as he never held elective office.
His public life also included personal controversy. He and his wife, Jacqueline Brown, whom he met in college and married in 1962, had five children. Their son, former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., resigned from Congress and served prison time on a fraud conviction. Jackson also fathered a daughter in 1999 with an employee of his civil rights organization.
In later years, he remained visible at protests and commemorations, condemning the police killing of George Floyd and joining marches that bridged generations of activists. He is survived by his wife and six children.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
