Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and presidential candidate, dies at 84

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist known for his rousing oratory who became the first African American candidate to have a plausible path to winning the presidency, has died. He was 84.

Because of declining health, Jackson stepped down as the leader of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in July 2023. In the summer of 2024, as Democrats gathered to back Kamala Harris' candidacy, Jackson received a standing ovation when he was wheeled on stage at the party's convention in Chicago.

"Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson's family said in a statement Tuesday morning.

The Baptist minister pulled in 3.3 million votes in the 1984 Democratic primaries and 6.9 million in the 1988 contests, drawing far more votes than any Black candidate had at that point in U.S. history and making his Rainbow Coalition a legitimate force in the Democratic Party. He also carved a transformative grassroots path through the primaries that would be emulated in various forms by other candidates in Democratic primaries over the years, including Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, who would go on to realize Jackson's ambition of becoming the first Black president.

“People forget about this,” Sanders, the Vermont senator, said in 2015 before the Iowa caucuses, “but Barack Obama would not be president today if Jesse Jackson didn’t come to Iowa. That was a guerrilla-type campaign that clearly didn’t have resources but had incredible energy.”

Jackson particularly appealed to minority voters who had long been underrepresented or totally ignored. “When I look out at this convention,” he told the 1988 Democratic National Convention, “I see the face of America, red, yellow, brown, black and white. We are all precious in God’s sight — the real rainbow coalition.”

Jackson's positions occasionally put him at odds with longtime Democratic voters, but his campaigns galvanized some people who detested mainstream politics.

"Even though he did not win the Democratic Party presidential nomination," Marxist activist Angela Davis wrote in an introduction to her autobiography, "Jesse Jackson conducted a truly triumphant campaign, one that confirmed and further nurtured progressive thought patterns among the people of our country."

Before his presidential bids, Jackson was a civil rights activist and organizer who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and founded Operation PUSH, an organization designed to improve economic opportunities for Black people and other minorities.

In later years, Jackson was an all-purpose activist, jumping from crisis to crisis with seemingly boundless energy. He‘d be enthusiastically welcomed in impoverished neighborhoods that terrified others, in difficult situations that no other politician wanted any part of. His impact was also felt internationally, particularly as a supporter of Nelson Mandela and those who worked to topple apartheid in South Africa.

“Jackson had come to see himself as America’s racial traffic cop and ambassador. All racial cases seemed to flow eventually to Jesse Jackson — as he preferred. If they didn’t, he often flowed to them,” wrote Mike Kelly in “Color Lines: The Troubled Dreams of Racial Harmony in an American Town,” his 1995 book.

Activism was his life's blood. “Gandhi had to act. Mandela had to act. Dr. King had to march,” Jackson said in a Chicago speech in 2002. “Dr. King suffered and sacrificed. We must honor that tradition. We must use the pitter-patter of our marching feet and go forward.”

Aiming to inspire, Jackson frequently recited variations of a poem called “I am — Somebody!” written in the 1950s by the Rev. William Holmes Borders Sr.

On “Sesame Street“ in 1972, Jackson began: “I am. Somebody! I am. Somebody! I may be poor. But I am. Somebody. I may be young, But I am. Somebody.“ The children on the PBS show shouted the words back at him. They were neither the first nor the last to do so.

Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to Helen Burns, a high school student. "Born in a three-room house, bathroom in the backyard, slop jar by the bed, no hot and cold running water," he told the 1988 Democratic National Convention.

“Jesse Jackson is my third name. I'm adopted,” he said in that speech. “When I had no name, my grandmother gave me her name. My name was Jesse Burns until I was 12. So I wouldn't have a blank space, she gave me a name to hold me over. I understand when nobody knows your name. I understand when you have no name.“

At Greenville’s segregated Sterling High School, he was the class president; in 1960, he took part in a sit-in at the public library. Jackson went to the University of Illinois to play football but transferred to North Carolina A&T, a historically Black college where he played quarterback and was elected class president.

After graduating with a degree in sociology, he became an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and attended the Chicago Theological Seminary. He was ordained as a minister in 1968.

Deeply segregated Chicago was a tough nut to crack, as it was in the grip of an entrenched Democratic Party machine led by Mayor Richard J. Daley. When Jackson arrived, he showed up at the mayor‘s office with a letter of introduction but left empty-handed.

According to “Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago" by Chicago journalist Mike Royko: “Daley told him to see his ward committeeman, and if he did some precinct work, rang doorbells, hustled up some votes, there might be a government job for him. Maybe something like taking coins at a tollway booth.”

That was clearly not what Jackson had in mind. Instead, Jackson became the leader of SCLC’s newly created Operation Breadbasket, which pushed businesses located in Black communities to employ Black people and invest in the community. He was also a highly visible presence in King's Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966.

SCLC veteran Andrew Young later wrote in his autobiography “An Easy Burden": “Jesse’s model for leadership was the traditional Baptist preacher. He was eager for the leadership mantle. We didn’t know exactly what was driving Jesse, but Martin appreciated Jesse’s desire to lead and encouraged it.“

While critical of Jackson’s ambition and ego, Young wrote that Operation Breadbasket “achieved excellent results by bringing economic strength to the black ghetto over a period of several years.”

As a Christian activist in the civil rights movement, Jackson said of King: "He was the pilot of the plane, but we were the ground crew."

On April 4, 1968, Jackson witnessed King’s assassination in Memphis.

King was shot to death as he stood on the balcony of Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. At that moment, King was talking to Jackson and Memphis musician Ben Branch, who were waiting in the parking lot to join King and others for dinner at the home of the Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles.

Jackson claimed to have cradled King in his arms before he died, an assertion at odds with eyewitness accounts. (It was Marrell McCollough who grabbed a towel off a cleaning cart to try to stanch King's bleeding; the Rev. Ralph Abernathy then took over at King's side.)

Five days later, Jackson walked with other movement leaders next to the mule-drawn farm wagon that carried King's casket through the streets of Atlanta to Morehouse College. Abernathy succeeded King atop the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In 2018, Jackson said King's assassination still haunted him whenever he returned to Memphis.

"Every time I go back, it pulls a scab off and the wound is still raw," Jackson told CNN. "Every time, the trauma of the incident. His lying there. Blood everywhere. It hurts all the time."

Along with Abernathy and the widow Coretta Scott King, Jackson carried on with King's planned Poor People's Campaign for economic justice in Washington in the spring of 1968. But the movement became increasingly fragmented.

At odds with Abernathy, Jackson left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1971. "Without King's powers of mediation and persuasion, rifts had deepened between the two men who inherited the largest pieces of King's mantle," Time magazine wrote of them in January 1972.

Jackson then launched a variation of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago called Operation PUSH, which stood for People United to Save (later Serve) Humanity.

“Despite precarious finances,“ James Ralph wrote in "The Encyclopedia of Chicago," “Operation PUSH was active.”

Ralph added: “It held rousing weekly meetings at its Hyde Park headquarters to energize its supporters, which included both black and white Chicagoans. It pressured major companies to hire more African Americans and to extend business ties with the black community. And in 1976, it launched PUSH-Excel, a program designed to inspire inner-city teenagers across the country to work hard and to stay out of trouble.”

Operation PUSH utilized strategic boycotts, including one of Anheuser-Busch in 1983, designed to increase minority hiring. These boycotts elevated Jackson’s national profile.

Jackson's organization also spotlighted high-achieving African Americans as role models.

In 1973, for instance, Operation PUSH hosted Hank Aaron as a speaker as the baseball superstar chased the sport's all-time record for home runs set by Babe Ruth. Aaron biographer Howard Bryant described the scene in "The Last Hero."

"When we look at Hank," Jackson said, "there's something on the outside in his presence that tells us that we can achieve, and because he's just like us, there's something on the inside that tells us we deserve to achieve, and if he can, any man can."

In November 1983, Jackson declared his candidacy for president, becoming the second African American after New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm in 1972 to mount a potentially viable major-party bid.

It was only months after Chicago had unexpectedly elected Harold Washington to be the city's first Black mayor. That election was as mean and ugly as elections get, but Washington's supporters mounted a vigorous grassroots campaign that overcame systemic racism to win with 51.7 percent of the vote. It became a template for Jackson's efforts.

Almost immediately, though, Jackson ignited a firestorm when he referred to Jewish people as “Hymie” and New York City as “Hymietown“ in an interview with a Washington Post reporter. Jackson already had critics within the Jewish community, having embraced Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1979 and called Zionism “a poisonous weed," but his “Hymietown” remarks threatened to derail his fledgling candidacy.

“He was no longer an indication of Black-Jewish problems; he was the problem,” wrote J.J. Goldberg in “Jewish Power.” In February, Jackson apologized at a New Hampshire synagogue, saying: “However innocent and unintended, it was wrong."

The 1984 Democratic presidential race seemed like it might end quickly, but frontrunner Walter Mondale stumbled in New Hampshire, losing to Colorado Sen. Gary Hart. As the race heated up, Jackson became a factor.

"It means a victory for the boats stuck at the bottom," he said in May after winning Louisiana.

Jackson ended up with more than 3 million votes and 465 delegates, both well short of Hart and eventual nominee Mondale, but enough to make him a force to be reckoned with. In July, Mondale ruled out picking Jackson as his running mate, citing deep philosophical differences on some issues. (Mondale picked New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro instead.)

The National Rainbow Coalition grew out of the 1984 campaign. Jackson had used the phrase “Rainbow Coalition” for years — Black Panther leader Fred Hampton had launched a group by that name in 1969, months before he was shot to death by Chicago police. Jackson adopted the phrase as part of an effort to broaden his appeal for his next presidential bid. The group would later morph into the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

It soon became clear Jackson would be a much more formidable candidate in 1988.

“Jesse Jackson is a serious candidate for the presidency,” The Nation wrote in April 1988. “He was always serious; it was just the political scientists and the other politicians who belittled his campaign, trivialized his efforts, and disdained his prospects. Despite the contempt and condescension of the media — or perhaps because of it — Jackson went to the most remote and isolated grass roots in the American social landscape to find the strength for a campaign that has already begun to transform politics."

Among those endorsing him was Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, who helped Jackson win the state's caucuses.

After early front-runner Hart quickly fell by the wayside because of scandal, five Democrats won primaries in 1988, including Jackson and Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, who took five Southern states each on Super Tuesday in March. But both took a back seat to Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who dominated in other regions of the country.

Jackson accumulated 1,219 delegates, second only to Dukakis. He angled unsuccessfully for the vice-presidential slot, but Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen got the nod instead.

“Never surrender, move forward,” Jackson told the Democratic National Convention in support of Dukakis that July in Atlanta. Jackson finished his speech with a repeated exhortation: “Keep hope alive!”

He did not run again in 1992, but ended up playing an important role in the race inadvertently and perhaps unhappily. At a Rainbow Coalition gathering, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton criticized racial remarks made by hip-hop artist Sister Souljah, another featured speaker.

“This planned political stunt,” argued Ibram X. Kendi in his book “Stamped From The Beginning,” showed Clinton was not captive to Jackson’s wing of the party, something that Kendi said “thrilled racist voters.”

Unlike Mondale in 1984 and Dukakis in 1988, Clinton won the general election.

Jackson’s electoral success gave him a platform from which to launch reform efforts around the country and jump into crisis situations wherever and whenever he saw fit. One such case came in Teaneck, New Jersey, in April 1990, when Phillip Pannell, a Black teenager, was shot to death by a white police officer under questionable circumstances. Protests and unrest followed.

Arriving on the scene soon thereafter, Jackson pushed for justice but also tried to dial down tensions.

“When the lights go out, don’t turn on each other,” Jackson urged students at Teaneck High School, according to Kelly’s "Color Lines" book. “In the dark, turn to each other and not on each other, and then wait until morning comes.“

He added: “What is the challenge of your age? Learning to live together.”

Children in need remained a focus of his. “We must invest in the formative years of these children,” Jackson said in 2013. “So we need more than a conversation. We need transportation and education and trade skill training. And that will cost. It will cost more to not do it.”

He did not limit his activism to the United States, at times venturing into hostile lands, meeting with dictators such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to seek the release of prisoners. Perhaps no other American secured the release of so many people trapped in places they didn't wish to be.

Jackson vigorously opposed apartheid in South Africa, noting the parallels between the American civil rights movement and the efforts to upend the existing order in South Africa.

''Whatever you do to protest this evil system does not go without notice to those it is being done to," South African Bishop Desmond Tutu told Jackson about his activism in December 1984.

Jackson, in his own community, remained a symbol of what was possible. In Derrick Bell’s 1992 book “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” one of the characters likened the inspirational impact of Jackson in the African American community to that of a Chicago basketball superstar.

“With Jackson still active,” Bell’s character says, “we can expect some more Michael Jordan-type moves, political slam dunks in which he does the impossible and looks good while doing it.”

In December 1995, his son Jesse Jr. was elected to fill a vacancy in Congress from Chicago’s South Side; he resigned in 2012, but sibling Jonathan was elected to a Chicago seat in 2022. For his part, Jesse Jackson never held a government post more significant than his stint as the District of Columbia’s “shadow senator” from 1991 to 1997.

During the 2008 campaign, Jesse Jackson said some unflattering things about Obama, a fellow Chicagoan whom he accused of "talking down to black people." But on election night, Jackson was seen crying with joy in Chicago’s Grant Park after Obama was elected.

He saw progress but, as always, pushed for more.

"Africans are free but not equal, Americans are free but not equal," Jackson wrote in 2013 at the time of Mandela's death.

"Ending apartheid and ending slavery was a big deal, Mandela becoming president of South Africa, [Barack] Obama becoming the first African American president was a big deal, but we have to go deeper. We were enslaved longer than we have been free and we have a long way to go."

Jackson in 2017 announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's, though his son, Yusef Jackson, later said it was actually a related condition called progressive supranuclear palsy. Seven years later, the ailing Jackson was clearly moved by the response when he was wheeled on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago by Yusef and Jonathan Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

"The thunderous applause went on for several minutes," wrote David Maraniss in the Washington Post. "Cameras panned to members of the audience in tears. Jackson’s face lit up, his eyes sparkling, his puffed cheeks rising from a broad smile. He lifted his hands and gave a thumbs-up sign."

Shia Kapos contributed to this report.