Browsing Tag

championed

Jesse Jackson, civil rights icon who championed unity and common ground

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. Jackson, a long-time Chicago figure and an electrifying orator, disclosed in 2017 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s…