The Rev Jesse Jackson, the civil rights campaigner who was prominent for more than 50 years and who ran strongly for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, has died. He was 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. His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”
No cause of death was given.
Jackson had had progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) for more than a decade. He was originally diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He was also twice hospitalised with Covid in recent years.
A fixture in the civil rights movement and Democratic politics since the 1960s, Jackson was once close to Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
In an interview with the Guardian in May 2020, Jackson said: “I was a trailblazer, I was a pathfinder. I had to deal with doubt and cynicism and fears about a Black person running. There were Black scholars writing papers about why I was wasting my time. Even Blacks said a Black couldn’t win.”
“It was a big moment in history,” Jackson told the Guardian, 12 years later.
Twenty years later, the first Black president, Barack Obama, saluted Jackson for making his victory possible. Obama celebrated in Chicago, also home to Jackson.
During the Covid pandemic, he campaigned against disparities in care and outcomes, asking: “After 400 years of slavery, segregation and discrimination, why would anybody be shocked that African Americans are dying disproportionately from the coronavirus?”
He also said all past presidents had failed to “end the virus of white superiority and fix the multifaceted issues confronting African Americans”.
Born on 8 October 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson became involved in politics at an early age as he navigated the segregated south. He was elected class president at the all-Black Sterling high school, where he also excelled in athletics. In 1959, he received a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. The Chicago White Sox offered the young Jackson a spot on their baseball team, but he decided to focus on his education instead.
During winter break his freshman year of college, Jackson returned home to Greenville and tried to obtain a book needed for his studies from the white-only Greenville public library, but he was turned away. The experience stayed with him. A few months later on 16 July 1960, Jackson and seven Black high school students entered the Greenville library for a peaceful protest. After browsing the library and reading books, the group later known as the Greenville Eight, were quickly arrested for disorderly conduct and later released on a $30 bond. Following a federal lawsuit the students’ filed, a judge ruled that they had the right to use the publicly-funded institution, and the Greenville library system became integrated in September 1960.
Jackson did not return to the University of Illinois after his first year, and instead transferred to the historically Black college the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro. At North Carolina A&T, he continued to play football as a quarterback, was the national officer for the Black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, and was elected the student body president. While earning a sociology degree, he also continued his activism by participating in sit-ins at restaurants in Greensboro.
“My leadership skills came from the athletic arena,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 1984. “In many ways, they were developed from playing quarterback. Assessing defenses; motivating your own team. When the game starts, you use what you’ve got – and don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strength. You also practice to win.”
During college, Jackson met his future wife Jacqueline, whom he married in 1962 and later had five children with – Santita, Jesse Jr., Jonathan Luther, Yusef DuBois, and Jacqueline Jr. He would later go on to have a sixth child, Ashley, during an extramarital affair with Karin Stanford in the early 2000s.
Jackson first met King, who would become his mentor, at an airport in Atlanta in the early 1960s. King had followed Jackson’s student activism from afar for several years.
In 1964, Jackson enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary, as he continued to be involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Jackson travelled with his classmates to Selma, Alabama to join the movement after he watched news footage of “Bloody Sunday, where King led nonviolent civil rights marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, who were then beaten by law enforcement. Impressed by Jackson’s leadership at Selma, King offered him a position with the civil rights group that he co-founded, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
After a couple of years, Jackson put his seminary studies on hold to focus on SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, an economic justice program that harnessed the power of Black churches by calling on ministers to put pressure companies to employ more Black people through negotiations and boycotts. In 1967, Jackson became Operation Breadbasket’s national director, and was ordained as a minister a year later.
“We knew he was going to do a good job,” King said at an Operation Breadbasket meeting in 1968, “but he’s done better than a good job”.
Tragedy struck soon after Jackson gained a leadership position at SCLC. On 4 April, 1968, Jackson witnessed King’s assassination from below the balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The experience stayed with Jackson for the rest of his life. “Every time I think about it, it’s like pulling a scab off a sore,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “It’s a hurtful, painful thought: that a man of love is killed by hate; that a man of peace should be killed by violence; a man who cared is killed by the careless.”
Following King’s death, Jackson continued to work for SCLC until 1971, when he created his own organization to improve Black people’s economic conditions, People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). The organization hosted reading programs for Black youth and helped them find jobs, and also encouraged corporations to hire more Black managers and executives.
In 1984, Jackson ran as a Democratic candidate for president, becoming the second Black person to launch a nationwide campaign following Shirley Crisholm more than a decade earlier.
“Tonight we come together bound by our faith in a mighty God, with genuine respect and love for our country, and inheriting the legacy of a great party, the Democratic Party, which is the best hope for redirecting our nation on a more humane, just, and peaceful course,” Jackson told an audience at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, California. “This is not a perfect party. We’re not a perfect people. Yet, we are called to a perfect mission. Our mission to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to teach the illiterate, to provide jobs for the jobless, and to choose the human race over the nuclear race.” He lost the Democratic nomination to former vice president Walter Mondale, with the incumbent Republican president Ronald Reagan ultimately winning the election.
After his first presidential run, Jackson created the National Rainbow Coalition to push for voting rights and social programs. In the mid-1990s, Jackson merged his two organizations together to form the multiracial group Rainbow Push Coalition, which focuses on educational and economic equality. Throughout the years, the coalition has paid more than $6m in college scholarships, and gave financial assistance to more than 4,000 families facing foreclosures so that they could save their homes, according to their website.
Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president a second time in 1988, performing strongly but losing out to Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor who was beaten heavily in the general election by George HW Bush.
“I cried because I thought about those who made it possible who were not there … People who paid a real price: Ralph Abernathy, Dr King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, those who fought like hell [at the Democratic National Convention] in Atlantic City in ’64, those in the movement in the south.”
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his decades of work focused on increasing opportunities for people of color.
Jackson took King’s work forward, staying to the fore in the worldwide civil rights movement through a tumultuous half-century of American history, through to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of Black Lives Matter.
“Dr King believed in multiracial, multicultural coalitions of conscience, not ethnic nationalism,” Jackson said in 2018. “He felt nationalism – whether Black, white or brown – was narrowly conceived, given our global challenges. So having a multiracial setting said much about his vision of America and the world, what America should stand for as well as the world.
“The moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice, but you have to pull it to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr King used to remind us that every time the movement has a tailwind and goes forward, there are headwinds.
“Those who oppose change in some sense were re-energised by the Trump demagoguery. Dr King would have been disappointed by his victory but he would have been prepared for it psychologically. He would have said: ‘We must not surrender our spirits. We must use this not to surrender but fortify our faith and fight back.’”
