The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights icon who marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and became the most successful Black presidential candidate in American history until Barack Obama, 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.”
Jackson’s activism started early. During his freshman year at the University of Illinois, he was arrested for participating in a sit-in at a whites-only library in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. He was one of the “Greenville Eight.”
By 1965, he’d joined King’s march in Selma, Alabama, eventually leaving graduate school to work full-time for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was with King in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was assassinated.
Jackson’s two presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 transformed Democratic politics. His 1984 run registered more than a million new voters and won 3.5 million votes. His “Rainbow Coalition” speech at that year’s Democratic convention became iconic: “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.”
His campaigns weren’t without controversy. Jackson drew criticism for a disparaging remark about New York’s Jewish community and his relationship with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. He apologized but couldn’t clinch the nomination either time.
Still, until Obama’s 2008 victory, Jackson remained the most successful Black presidential candidate in U.S. history. He was at Obama’s victory party in Grant Park, weeping.
“I knew that people in the villages of Kenya and Haiti, and mansions and palaces in Europe and China, were all watching this young African-American male assume the leadership to take our nation out of a pit to a higher place,” Jackson told NPR that night.
Throughout his life, Jackson negotiated the release of American hostages from Syria, Cuba, and Serbia. President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000.
Jackson announced in 2017 that he had Parkinson’s disease. Last November, his organization revealed he’d been diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological condition. Despite his illness, he continued showing up at protests against police brutality, including in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after police shot Jacob Blake in 2020.
“Today, there’s a moral desert, top-down,” Jackson said at the time. “The acid rain is coming, top-down. That kind of moral desert hurts all of America.”
He stepped down as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 2023. Jackson is survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and six children. Public commemorations will take place in Chicago.