The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the fiery civil rights leader who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., founded the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and twice mounted historic bids for the Democratic presidential nomination, died Tuesday at 84.
“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 in a statement. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.” Public commemorations are expected to take place in Chicago, the city that became his political home.
Born Jesse Louis Burns on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, S.C., Jackson grew up under Jim Crow segregation. As a college student home for Christmas break in 1960, he was denied access to the town’s whites-only library. Months later, he joined seven other Black students in a sit-in that led to their arrest, an episode that helped set him on a path of lifelong activism.
After transferring to North Carolina A&T State University, Jackson became a student leader and organizer. In 1965, he answered King’s call to join the Selma voting rights campaign. He soon left graduate studies at Chicago Theological Seminary to work full-time with King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. By 1967, he was leading Operation Breadbasket, the SCLC’s economic initiative to leverage Black consumer power to secure jobs and contracts for Black communities.
Jackson was in Memphis in April 1968 when King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. King’s death marked a turning point. Within a few years, Jackson split from the SCLC and formed Operation PUSH — People United to Save Humanity, later merging it with the National Rainbow Coalition to create the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which became a major force in civil rights, economic justice, and voter mobilization.
Ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, Jackson moved steadily onto the national stage through the 1970s and 1980s. In Chicago, he organized voter registration drives that helped elect the city’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. That same year, he announced his first run for president.
His 1984 campaign reshaped Democratic politics. Jackson built what he called a “Rainbow Coalition” of Black voters, Latinos, working-class whites, farmers, and the poor. At the Democratic National Convention, he delivered a speech that became one of the most memorable in party history, calling on Democrats to unite around a moral mission to “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless” and choose “the human race over the nuclear race.”
Though he finished third behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, Jackson won millions of votes and registered more than a million new voters, demonstrating the political power of a newly mobilized Black electorate. His campaign was not without controversy, including criticism over remarks about New York’s Jewish community and his relationship with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, for which he later apologized.
In 1988, Jackson ran again, expanding his appeal and becoming the first African American to win major presidential primaries. He finished second to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Until Barack Obama’s 2008 election, Jackson was the most successful Black presidential candidate in U.S. history.
Beyond electoral politics, Jackson traveled the world as an unofficial diplomat. In the 1980s and 1990s, he negotiated the release of American hostages in Syria, Cuba, and Serbia, sometimes acting independently of the U.S. administrations but often welcomed afterward for his results. From 1992 to 2000, he hosted the CNN talk show Both Sides with Jesse Jackson, tackling political and social issues.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The following year, Jackson publicly acknowledged fathering a child outside his marriage, saying, “I fully accept responsibility, and I am truly sorry for my actions.” He also weathered political storms involving his son, former Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 and later pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds.
Jackson’s later years were marked by health challenges and continued activism. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017 and later with progressive supranuclear palsy, he nevertheless appeared at protests against police brutality, including after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. “Today, there’s a moral desert, top-down,” he said in 2020 in Kenosha, Wis., after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. “That kind of moral desert hurts all of America.”
In 2023, after more than five decades of leadership, Jackson stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH, citing age and health concerns. Even in retirement, he remained an outspoken advocate for voting rights, economic justice, and global human rights.
Chicago leaders and fellow civil rights advocates quickly framed Jackson’s exit from day-to-day leadership as the end of an era. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said Jackson is “an architect of the soul of Chicago… His faith, his perseverance, his love, and his relentless dedication to people inspire all of us to keep pushing for a better tomorrow”.
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who has long described Jackson as a mentor, called the moment “the resignation of Reverend Jesse Jackson is the pivoting of one of the most productive, prophetic, and dominant figures in the struggle for social justice in American history”.
Even as his health limited public appearances, Jackson remained engaged in political and moral debates. In May 2024, he wrote in The Chicago Maroon about the Gaza war, condemning the Oct. 7 attacks while calling Israel’s response against Palestinian civilians a “massacre”. He also expressed support for pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, comparing them to divestment campaigns targeting South Africa, which were proposed in the 1960s but gained major momentum in the mid-1980s.
Jackson is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and six children, including U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson.
For many, Jackson embodied the bridge between the civil rights movement and modern American politics, a preacher, protester and presidential candidate who insisted that the arc of history could bend toward justice if pushed hard enough.
RIP Reverend Jackson.
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