Jesse Jackson dead at 84

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights icon, Baptist minister and two-time Democratic presidential candidate, died Tuesday at age 84.

The Jackson family confirmed his passing in a statement on Tuesday morning.

The civil rights leader spent decades in the public eye fighting to end racial and class divisions in America.

A protégé of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson fought on the front lines of the battle against Jim Crow segregation laws as a college student. He stood out for his rousing speeches, radical ideas and passion for racial equality. Jackson would become a key figure in the civil rights movement that pressed for broader economic opportunities for Black people through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, and more recently, his organization the Rainbow PUSH coalition. 

Jackson eventually transitioned into politics. In 1984 and 1988, he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, winning multiple primaries and surpassing expectations each time. He based his campaigns on expanded equality for various racial minority groups, the working class and women.

Later, Jackson served as U.S. special envoy to Africa in the 1990s. He also acted as “shadow senator” for Washington, D.C., a role in which he lobbied for the district’s statehood.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Jackson also negotiated the release of dozens of international hostages and prisoners, and became a vocal supporter of voting and LGBTQ rights. 

He was no stranger to controversy. During the 1984 presidential primary, he referred to Jews with the slur “Hymies” and called New York “Hymietown” in remarks he at first denied and later apologized for. “Saturday Night Live” lampooned the incident in a sketch featuring Eddie Murphy playing Jackson. And, in a testament to his stature in American political and popular culture, Jackson himself hosted “SNL” later that year.

In 2001, he admitted to having an extramarital affair that led to the birth of a daughter.

Jackson had been fighting Parkinson’s disease since November 2017. In August 2021, he and his wife were hospitalized with Covid-19 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He was discharged in September after receiving successful treatment for the virus and Parkinson’s disease. 

While Jackson had largely been off of the political and civil rights main stage in recent years, he had taken every opportunity to renew pushes for equality. 

“If we played the big game, and the rules are not fair, and goals not clear and public, we would protest, but in politics we seem to make it alright, it’s not alright,” said Jackson in a 2018 podcast appearance. “We want a system that’s fair, and fairly applied. Americans want and deserve an even playing field with equal protection under the law, equal access and fairness.”

”It is where I get the drive to think I could change the South through the civil rights movement and run for President,” Jackson told The New York Times in 1997. 

As a child, Jackson would know the harsh reality of the Jim Crow era, growing up at a time when racial segregation was in full force across the U.S. He attended all-Black public schools and was taught to sit at the back of buses and use “colored” restrooms and drinking fountains. 

After graduating from Greenville’s Sterling High School in 1959, Jackson spent a year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, or A&T, a historically Black school in Greensboro, North Carolina. 

It was during his time at A&T that he first became active in the civil rights movement. Jackson joined the local Congress of Racial Equality chapter in Greensboro and participated in local protests and sit-ins against segregated public facilities. 

“I came out of Greensboro,” Jackson told the Greensboro News & Record in 2015. “It was my launching pad. All that I subsequently became in the movement came out of the lessons I learned in Greensboro.”

After being barred from accessing books at the public library and placed in jail for trying to use the same library for class work, Jackson said he felt the “insult of segregation” and the “liberating power of going to jail for dignity,” according to the News & Record. 

While home from college, he became a part of the Greenville Eight, a group of Black students who in 1960 protested the South Carolina city’s segregated library system. Jackson and seven Black high school students refused to leave the whites-only Hughes Main Library and were arrested for “disorderly conduct.”

Following their staged sit-in, the library system of the city became racially integrated.

It marked the beginning of what would become a lifetime career of civil rights activism. 

After graduating from A&T in 1964, Jackson pursued divinity studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary and began to organize student support for Martin Luther King Jr. 

On March 7, 1965, a day that would become known as Bloody Sunday, Jackson watched on television as club-wielding Alabama state troopers fired tear gas and charged at hundreds of nonviolent demonstrators who had just crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The demonstrators were part of the historic marches from Selma to the Alabama capital of Montgomery to fight for Black civil and voting rights. 

A day after witnessing the violence on television, Jackson organized a caravan of seminary students to drive down to Alabama and join King in the Selma-to-Montgomery marches.

Jackson appeared at several commemorations of the marches, including an event hosted by former President Bill Clinton on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 2000.  

“The blood of Selma set all of us free,” Jackson said at the event, surrounded by several prominent civil rights leaders and then-President Clinton. “How can I forget that season? My first-born son Jesse Jr. was born when we were marching here, I almost named him Selma.” 

“In Selma, America was reborn, democracy redefined, human rights redefined. The fruits of Selma are bountiful. And so today, we say to all of America, America won. One flag, one nation,” Jackson said, drawing roaring applause. “Not the flag of sedition and slavery and segregation. But one America, one flag.”

Impressed by Jackson’s passion and organizational abilities during the marches, King gave him a staff position at the SCLC, the civil rights organization that King led until his death. Just three courses short of finishing his studies at the seminary, Jackson dropped out to pursue a full-time career in civil rights. Though he still became an ordained Baptist minister in 1968. 

In 1966, he was placed in charge of the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, an SCLC initiative that monitored white companies’ treatment of Black people and organized boycotts calling for fair hiring practices. 

While Jackson was seen by some in the SCLC as a “loose cannon” that worked too independently of others in the organization, his leadership was integral to the Chicago branch’s success. Under Jackson, the Operation Breadbasket branch won 2,000 new jobs worth $15 million a year in new income to the Black community. 

He was promoted to national director of Operation Breadbasket in 1968, the same year King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson was a floor below King when he was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, though he told reporters that the civil rights leader died in his arms, a claim that several King aides have disputed. 

“Every time I go back, it pulls a scab off and the wound is still raw. Every time, the trauma of the incident. His lying there. Blood everywhere. It hurts all the time,” Jackson said in a 2018 interview with CNN. 

Jackson was embroiled in controversy after the assassination, with other SCLC leaders accusing him of using the organization and King’s death for self-promotion. 

Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as chairman of the SCLC, told the New York Times in 1977, “I hope God has forgiven [Jackson.]”

In 1971, Jackson formally resigned from the SCLC and founded Operation PUSH, or People United to Serve Humanity — his own Chicago-based civil rights organization that aimed to improve the economic conditions of Black communities across the U.S. Twenty five years later, it would merge with the National Rainbow Coalition, Jackson’s other civil rights organization that sought equal rights for the working class, women and racial minority groups. 

Since its establishment, Jackson has served as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which aims to “protect, defend, and gain civil rights by leveling the economic and educational playing fields,” according to its website. 

″Why D.C. statehood? Why not mayor?″ Jackson asked at a gathering of Democratic women in July 1990, The Associated Press reported. ″Because my life commitment is to expand democracy. My quest is not employment. It’s empowerment.″

He would serve as a “shadow senator” until getting tapped by then-President Clinton to become the U.S. special envoy to Africa in 1997. 

“What joy, what privilege, what responsibility,” Jackson said at his swearing-in ceremony. “I called my mother; we prayed.”

“It is quite a journey from Haynie Street in Greenville, South Carolina. A happy home, but an environment of such low expectations, where our family was denied the right to vote, even though my father was an honorably discharged veteran of the army,” Jackson said. “From that to an assignment by the President and Secretary of State, to in some small measure, to help shape our foreign policy by building bridges between the U.S. and Africa.”

On several occasions, Jackson also worked independently to secure the release of prisoners held by anti-American regimes. 

He frustrated President Ronald Reagan’s administration by traveling to Syria in 1983 to fight for the release of a U.S. fighter pilot who had been held hostage by the Syrian government. That same year, he negotiated the release of 48 American and Cuban prisoners held hostage by the communist Cuban government. And in 1991, Jackson worked to free several hundred citizens hiding in Iraq and Kuwait before the Persian Gulf War. 

Jackson also advocated for the LGBTQ community when few prominent Democrats dared to do so, becoming the first speaker at a Democratic National Convention to mention gay and lesbian Americans.

He has been a long champion of voting rights as well. In August, he and others were arrested outside the U.S. Capitol during a demonstration calling for the end to the filibuster. 

“Black and Brown people are the base of the party. We’re not the bottom. We’re the foundation,” Jackson told the crowd, according to The Washington Post. “If we lose, they lose. If we lose, democracy loses. If we lose, Democrats lose. If we lose, the nation loses.”