Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and twice ran for president, died Tuesday at age 84 after battling progressive supranuclear palsy. Jackson spent decades advocating for racial equity, economic justice and voting rights
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Jesse Louis Jackson was an American civil rights activist, politician, and ordained Baptist minister. A protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel during the civil rights movement, he became one of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From 1991 to 1997, he served as a shadow delegate and shadow senator for the District of Columbia. He was the father of U.S. representative Jonathan Jackson and former U.S. representative Jesse Jackson Jr.
,,Jesse Jackson, a key figure during the US civil rights movement of the 1960s, was known for being the first African American to make the jump from activism to major-party presidential politics.
A protege of Martin Luther King Jr, Jackson built a career around working to politically organise and improve the lives of African Americans, and became a national force during his two White House campaigns.
While other African Americans sought the US presidency, Jackson was the first to find significant success at the ballot box – which would pave the way for those who came after, including Barack Obama and Kamala Harris.
Over the course of his career, Jackson built a movement to bring America’s increasingly diverse population together, with a message that centred on poor and working-class Americans.
„No one else in the Democratic Party was talking about a multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said at an event in Chicago in August 2024 that celebrated Jackson. „This movement wasn’t just about bringing us together, but about bringing us together around a progressive agenda.”
A gifted orator, Jackson articulated the frustrations of those who felt like second-class citizens in the world’s most prosperous democracy. His speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention, which ended with the refrain „keep hope alive”, would be echoed decades later in the „hope and change” slogan of Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign.
After his historic run of presidential campaigns, Jackson went on to position himself as an elder statesman within the Democratic Party.
However, Jackson’s later years would be punctuated by scandal, including revelations of marital infidelity and financial impropriety involving his son and political heir, Jesse Jackson Jr, who served as a congressman from Illinois.
In 2017, the elder Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and largely withdrew from public life. That diagnosis was subsequently changed to one of progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative brain disease with similar symptoms.
Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns on 8 October 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina – the son of 16-year-old Helen Burns. Unmarried, she was expelled from her local Baptist church after she became pregnant – the result of an affair with a 33-year-old married neighbour, Noah Robinson.
When Jackson was two, his mother married Charles Jackson, who went on to adopt his new stepson. Jesse Jackson remained in touch with Robinson, and regarded both men as his fathers.
Charles Jackson was a religious man, and his son was brought up in the church – a traditional focus for black political resistance since the time of American slavery.
Growing up in South Carolina, Jackson, like all black Americans, was segregated from his white neighbours. He was forced to attend separate schools and allowed only in designated areas in public places, like buses or restaurants.
Martin Luther King’s protege
In high school, Jackson did well – being elected as class president and excelling in nearly every kind of team sport.
A football scholarship to the University of Illinois helped Jackson pursue his ambitions and escape his poor surroundings. But he soon transferred from the predominantly white institution to a historically black college in North Carolina.
He said he left Illinois because his white coaches wouldn’t let him play quarterback in American football, although that account is disputed. Records show the team already had a black quarterback and Jackson was on academic probation.
As a student in North Carolina A&T, Jackson gradually became involved with the civil rights movement. In 1960, he was arrested with seven other students after a silent demonstration in a whites-only public library, which led to the desegregation of the library.
Four years later, Jackson graduated and moved to Chicago, where he trained to become a religious leader and was noticed by King, the country’s most famous civil rights leader.
Jesse : the life and pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (Marshall Frady) -book.
https://archive.org/details/jesselifepilg00frad/mode/2up
Beyond the Boundaries: Reverend Jesse Jackson in International Affairs (Karin L. Stanford) -book.
https://archive.org/details/beyondboundaries0000stan
The Oratory of Jesse Jackson
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137509031_11
A Conversation with Jesse Jackson
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Conversation05.pdf?x97961
Sources:
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/jackson-jesse-louis
https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-rights-leader-the-rev-jesse-jackson-has-died-at-84-okwpv4/