Veteran United States civil rights campaigner Reverend Jesse Jackson has died at the age of 84, his family announced on Tuesday in Washington.
The outspoken Baptist minister, who rose from the segregated American South to become one of the most recognisable faces of the civil rights movement, passed away amid ongoing debates in the United States over race, history and social justice. His family described him as a servant leader who stood for the oppressed and the voiceless across the globe.
Jackson had been living with Parkinson’s disease since 2017, after first experiencing symptoms several years earlier.
Born on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson grew up during the Jim Crow era, when racist laws enforced racial segregation across the southern United States. Raised by his teenage mother and later adopted by his stepfather, he would go on to become a towering political and religious figure.
He studied at the University of Illinois on a football scholarship but later transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a historically Black institution, after complaining of racial discrimination. His activism began during his student days, including an arrest for attempting to enter a whites only public library in South Carolina.
Jackson attended Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968. Around that time, he became a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr., travelling with him and playing a key role in campaigns aimed at expanding economic opportunities for Black communities.
On April 4, 1968, when King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by James Earl Ray, Jackson was in the building. He later told reporters he had cradled the dying leader in his arms, a claim disputed by some of King’s associates.
After King’s death, Jackson split from Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader Ralph Abernathy and founded Operation PUSH in Chicago in the early 1970s. In 1984, he established the National Rainbow Coalition, broadening his platform to include women’s rights and gay rights. The two organisations merged in 1996. He stepped down as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 2023 after more than five decades at the helm.
Jackson twice sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. In 1984, he secured 3.3 million votes, about 18 percent of ballots cast in the primaries, finishing third behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart in the race to challenge incumbent Republican president Ronald Reagan. His campaign faltered after it emerged that he had used an offensive slur in reference to Jewish people and New York.
Four years later, he mounted a stronger bid, winning 11 state primaries and caucuses and capturing 6.8 million votes, or 29 percent of the total. He finished second to Michael Dukakis in the contest to face Republican candidate George H. W. Bush.
Addressing the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Jackson delivered one of his most memorable speeches, declaring, “America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth.”
“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. Don’t you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint,” he told delegates.
Jackson’s national profile extended beyond politics. In the 1990s, Democratic president Bill Clinton appointed him special envoy to Africa. He was involved in securing the release of detainees overseas, including U.S. naval aviator Robert Goodman Jr. from Syria in 1984, prisoners in Cuba, Americans held in Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait, and three U.S. airmen detained in Serbia in 1999. Reagan later thanked him at the White House for what he described as a mission of mercy.
Jackson also met Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during efforts to free captives. From 1992 to 2000, he hosted a weekly programme on CNN and pushed corporations to expand economic opportunities for Black Americans. In 2000, Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States.
His death comes at a time when President Donald Trump has overseen the removal of what he terms anti American ideology from public institutions, including changes to slavery exhibits and the restoration of Confederate statues. Civil rights advocates have voiced concern that such actions could reverse decades of social progress championed by leaders like Jackson.
Jackson is survived by his wife Jacqueline Brown, whom he married in 1962, and their five children. His son, Jesse Jackson Jr., served in the U.S. House of Representatives before resigning and serving prison time on a fraud conviction. Jackson also faced personal controversy in 1999 when it emerged he had fathered a daughter with a staff member at one of his organisations.
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