Jesse Jackson obituary: charismatic civil rights leader who ran for president

On the night that Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, Jesse Jackson, who has died aged 84, was there among the vast crowds that gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park, tears streaming down his face, said The Times. Growing up in the segregated Deep South, Jackson “could never have dreamt that he would one day see a Black American winning the highest office in the land”. But he, as much as anyone else, “had blazed the trail for Obama’s victory”.

A civil rights leader in the 1960s, Jackson became the most influential African-American leader in the decades after Martin Luther King Jr’s death; he ran for president twice in the 1980s, and though unsuccessful on each occasion, he won millions of votes and went “further than anyone at that time believed a Black man could”. But “Jackson’s strengths were also his weaknesses. He was driven, ambitious, a powerful orator and brilliant at garnering publicity, but he was also impulsive, attention-grabbing and endlessly controversial.”

Struggle and self-belief

Jesse Louis Burns was born in the small town of Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941. Nothing about his life was simple, said The New York Times, starting with his upbringing. His mother, Helen, was a 16-year-old schoolgirl; his father, Noah, was a 33-year-old former boxer who lived next door, married to another woman, and was not involved in his upbringing. In 1943, his mother married another man, Charles Jackson, who only adopted Jesse 14 years later. Before that, Jesse was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Matilda, in a shack.

“Rejected by his father and not fully embraced by his stepfather, he was taunted by other children, all while learning the racial caste system of the segregated South”: years later, he recalled the two water fountains at the bakery, and the first time his mother led him to the back of the bus. But his grandmother, an illiterate domestic servant, encouraged his growing sense of self-belief.

Jackson stood out at school – “he could talk a hole through a billy goat”, remembered a friend – and excelled as an athlete. In 1959, he won a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, but was shocked to find that, as a Black student, he would not be able to play as a quarterback. While home from college, he joined a sit-in at Greenville’s segregated library and was arrested. He then transferred to the historically Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he was elected student body president. There he met Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, a fellow student, whom he married in 1962. The pair would go on to have five children.

In 1964, Jackson enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary but, horrified by the beatings of Black demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he left his studies to join the protesters (he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968). He met Martin Luther King Jr and, “transformed”, offered his services to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Jackson was appointed head of the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, which boycotted businesses that did not hire Black people. He made an impact; but his drive, ego and desire for self-promotion “led to clashes, even with Dr King”.

Household name

In April 1968, King was shot dead on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson claimed to have raced to King’s side, cradling his head as he died. He appeared on TV shows the next day wearing the same sweater – now stained with blood – he had worn the day before. “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr King’s head,” he declared. There had been a crucifixion, he said. “I was there. And I’ll be there for the resurrection.”

His claims were disputed by others present, said The Daily Telegraph: they “unanimously agreed” that Jackson had remained in the parking lot; he was accused of using King’s death for his own advancement. Whatever the truth, “the image of Jackson and his bloody shirt brought the horror of the assassination home to the American public” – and he became a “civil rights celebrity”. But he quarrelled with SCLC leaders and, in 1971, Jackson left to form his own group, People United to Save Humanity (Push).

Criss-crossing America, “speaking out against racism, militarism and class divisions”, Jackson became a household name, leading campaigns against truancy and drug use, and inspiring audiences with his slogan: “I am somebody.” In 1979, he travelled to South Africa to denounce apartheid, before visiting the Middle East, where he publicly embraced Yasser Arafat, calling for Palestinian emancipation.

In October 1983, he entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jackson was, in fact, the second Black American to do so – Shirley Chisholm had run in 1972. His platform was partly “classic left liberalism: taxing the rich, cutting defence and using the savings for social programmes”, said The Economist. But he also had a “glorious vision”, rendered in his rousing Southern Baptist oratory: he told the Democratic National Convention that he would champion “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised”. He came third in the primaries, having run into trouble when he reportedly called Jews “Hymies”, and New York “Hymietown”. Jackson ran again in 1988, emerging from the contest in second place, with seven million votes; Michael Dukakis, who won the nomination, overlooked him as a running mate.

“The rest of his life was spent trying, unsuccessfully, to find a role that would match the excitement of the civil rights years and the presidential runs,” said The Guardian. His international profile remained high; he flew to Baghdad ahead of the first Gulf War to negotiate the release of hundreds of Americans, and to Yugoslavia in 1999 to seek the release of three downed pilots. President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and made him his spiritual adviser during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Jackson was no stranger to scandal himself, admitting in 2001 to a four-year affair with a member of his staff, who had become pregnant in 1998. He did not leave his wife, but supported his daughter financially.

He supported Obama’s run for the presidency, but not uncritically: he accused him of talking down to African Americans. Obama was brilliant, he conceded, but “I would say he ran the last lap of a 60-year race”, Jackson remarked in 2010. On the night of Obama’s victory, he said, his tears had been for King, his mentor and father figure. In 2017, Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and later with progressive supranuclear palsy. He is survived by Jackie and their five children, Santita, Jesse Jr, Jonathan, Yusef and Jacqueline, and by his daughter, Ashley.