CHICAGO (AP).—The Reverend Jesse L. Jacksonprotected from reverendo Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate, who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the assassination of the revered leader, died yesterday at the age of 84.
As a young organizer in ChicagoJackson was summoned to meet King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, shortly before King was killed, and later publicly positioned himself as King’s successor.
Jackson headed all a life of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and disadvantaged on issues ranging from voting rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He achieved diplomatic victories with world leaders and, through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, channeled cries for black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society.
And when he declared: “I am someone,” in a poem that he often repeated, he sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I’m somebody; I may be young, but I’m somebody; I may be on welfare, but I’m somebody,” Jackson intoned.
It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s best-known civil rights activist since King.
“Our father was a servant leader — not only for our family, but for the oppressed, the voiceless and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family. His unwavering belief in justice, equality and love uplifted millions, and we ask that you honor his memory by continuing to fight for the values he lived by.”
A guiding voice
Despite profound health problems in his later years, including a rare brain condition that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued to protest racial injustice until the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared in the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a City Council meeting to show support for a resolution that rsupported a ceasefire in the Israeli occupation of Gaza.
“Even if we win,” he told protesters in Minneapolis before Derek Chauvin, the police officer whose knee suffocated George Floyd, was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They keep killing our people. Stop the violence (…). Keep hope alive.”
Jackson’s voice, imbued with the soulful cadences and powerful insistence of the black church, demanded attention. In his campaign and elsewhere, he used rhymes and slogans such as: “Hope, not drugs” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” to convey his messages.
Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told The Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the service of other leaders who came before him and lay a foundation for those to come. “Sometimes when you break down walls, you are marked by falling debris, but your mission is to open gaps so that others behind you can run through.”
In his final months, during which he received 24-hour care, he lost the ability to speak and communicated with family and visitors by holding their hands. “I am very excited to know that these speeches are now history,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October. His daughter, Santita, confirmed that Jackson died at home surrounded by his family.
From student to leader
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina.son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.
Jackson was the star quarterback of the football team in high school. Sterling High School en Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois. But after reportedly being told that blacks couldn’t play quarterback, he moved to North Carolina A&T en Greensborowhere he became the starting quarterback, was a valedictorian in sociology and economics and student president.
Arriving on that historically black campus in 1960, just months after students there started sit-ins at a whites-only restaurant, Jackson immersed himself in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.
By 1965, he joined the voting rights march that King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King sent him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, an effort by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to pressure businesses to hire black workers. Jackson called his time with King “four phenomenal years of work.”
Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson’s account of the assassination was that King died in his arms.
In 1971, Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation PUSH, originally called People United to Save Humanity.
Through lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their workforces.
Constant campaigning often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, in charge of raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress, Jonathan Luther Jackson, y Jesse L. Jackson Jr.who resigned in 2012 but is seeking re-election in the 2026 midterm elections.
Legacy and influence
Despite having stated that he would not run for president “because white people can’t appreciate me,” Jackson ran twice and He did better than any black politician before President Barack Obama, by winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988four years after his first failed attempt.
U.S. Rep. John Lewis said during a 1988 interview that Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that a minority person could walk through and become president.”
Jackson also promoted a cultural change, joining the call of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Naacp) and other leaders of the movement in the late 1980s to identify blacks in the United States as African Americans.
Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting with world leaders and achieving diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman in Syria in 1984, as well as the 1990 release of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
In 1999, he freed three American soldiers imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic during the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. “Citizens have the right to do something or do nothing,” Jackson said, before heading to Syria. “We choose to do something.”
In 2021, Jackson joined Ahmaud Arbery’s parents inside the courtroom in Georgia where three white men were convicted of killing the young black jogger.
In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke for the 2014 death of African-American teenager Laquan McDonald.
Suffering
Jackson, who stepped down as president of PUSH in July 2023, revealed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’sbut continued to make public appearances even when illness made it more difficult for listeners to understand him. Earlier this year, doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a hospital in November.
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