The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a key figure in the U.S. civil-rights movement and the first African American to be a significant contender for the presidency, passed away on February 17. He was a key figure in the civil rights movement in the United States. “A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” he once said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can run through.” Mourners from various backgrounds acknowledged his impact on politics, corporate environments, and social activism.
The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who carried the torch of the civil-rights movement for decades after Dr. King’s assassination, died Feb. 17. He was 84.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa praised Jackson for his “towering contribution to the global anti-apartheid cause.”
“From Selma in the American South to Soweto in 1979, where he visited following the death of Steve Biko, Jesse Jackson defied the architects of apartheid and executors of brutality to declare that all people are equal and that justice would ultimately triumph over injustice,” Ramaphosa said in a statement.
At a memorial service in Chicago March 6, mourners ranging from former presidents to an NBA Hall of Famer to prominent pastors recounted stories of Jackson’s influence on politics, corporate boardrooms, and picket lines.
The public tribute – with appearances by Grammy-winning gospel singers and Jennifer Hudson – felt at times like a church service and others like a political rally. Many, from former President Bill Clinton to the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader and founder of the National Action Network, likened Jackson’s death to a call to action, from speaking out against justice to voting in the midterms.
Former President Barack Obama said Jackson’s presidential runs in the 1980s set the stage for other Black leaders, including his own successful 2009 presidency and reelection.
“The message he sent to a 22-year-old child of a single mother with a funny name, an outsider, was that maybe there wasn’t any place or any room where we didn’t belong,” Obama said to the boisterous crowd of thousands. “He paved the road for so many others to follow.”
The five-hour event drew a slew of elected U.S. leaders. Other notable attendees included actor and producer Tyler Perry, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, and political activist and theologian Cornel West. Detroit Pistons great and Chicago native Isiah Thomas also spoke.
The crowd gave an especially warm welcome to Obama, who launched his political career in Chicago, and credited Jackson with keeping him on his toes. He said he was grateful to Jackson for providing a “legacy of hope” in contrast with the current Republican leadership in Washington.
“We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope,” Obama said. “Each day we wake up to some new assault to our democratic institutions. Another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible.”
Clinton said Jackson made him a better president, while former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris talked about Jackson’s inspiring 1980s presidential runs and showed off campaign memorabilia she had kept from them. Former President Joe Biden also spoke during the service.
The event honoring the protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate followed memorial services that drew large crowds in Chicago and South Carolina, where Jackson was born. The March 6 celebration – at an influential Black church with a 10,000-seat arena – was the largest.
Attendees waited in long lines outside the church as television screens played excerpts of some of Jackson’s most famous speeches. Inside, vendors sold pins with his 1984 presidential slogan and hoodies with his “I Am Somebody” mantra.
‘I am somebody’
As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King shortly before the assassination in 1968, and he later positioned himself the one carrying on King’s legacy.
Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he 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 somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I am somebody; I may be young; but I am somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am 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.
Fellow civil-rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton said that Jackson “taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work,” adding that Jackson taught “trying is as important as triumph. That you do not wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it real.”
Despite profound health challenges in his final years including a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a City Council meeting there to show support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
Jackson’s voice, infused with the stirring cadences and powerful insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhyming and slogans such as: “Hope not dope” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” to deliver his messages.
Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside of the Black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek out the spotlight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson said in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to come.
“A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can run through.”
In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to speak, communicating with family and visitors by holding their hands and squeezing.
“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son Jesse Jackson Jr. said in October.
From athlete to activist
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of high-school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Burns later married Charles Henry Jackson, who adopted him.
Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois. But after he reportedly was told Black people couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honor student in sociology and economics, and student body president.
Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students there launched sit-ins at a whites-only lunch counter, Jackson immersed himself in the blossoming civil-rights movement.
In 1965, he joined the voting-rights march King led from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital. King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Opera-tion Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers.
Jackson called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”
Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil-rights leader was slain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson’s account of the assassination was that King had died in his arms.
With his flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with King’s blood for two days, including at a memorial service held by the Chicago City Council, where he said: “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King’s head.”
However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, questioned whether Jackson could have gotten King’s blood on his clothing. There are no images of Jackson in pictures taken shortly after the assassination.
In 1971, Jackson broke with SCLC to form Operation PUSH, originally named People United to Save Humanity. The organization based on Chicago’s South Side declared a sweeping mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of color nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their workforces.
The constant campaigns often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, the college sweetheart he married in 1963, taking the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 but is seeking re- election in the 2026 midterms.
The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned his Master of Divinity degree in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it means to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially.
Presidential campaigns helped ‘keep hope alive’
Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson ran twice for the Democratic nomination, in 1984 and 1988. In 1988, he did better than any Black politician had before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses.
He made divesting from South Africa a central part of his platform, lambasting then-President Ronald Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the apartheid regime.
His successes left supporters chanting another Jackson slogan, “Keep Hope Alive.”
“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he later reflected. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”
U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who had been a leader in the ’60s civil-rights movement, told C-SPAN in 1988 that Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that some minority person will be able to walk through and become president.”
Advocated ‘African American’
Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black people in the United States as African Americans.
“To be called African Americans has cultural integrity – it puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”
Jackson’s words sometimes got him in trouble.
In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter, calling New York City “Hymie-town,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to Black people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on during a break in a television taping.
Still, when Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet the victorious Obama that election night, he had tears streaming down his face.
“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or [slain civil-rights leader] Medgar Evers … could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he said years later. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
Anti-apartheid crusade
Jackson also crusaded to end apartheid in South Africa, telling a crowd in a Cape Town squatter settlement in 1979 that “segregation is wrong” and “this land is changing hands.” In 1985, he and African National Congress head Oliver Tambo led a massive march in London to demand that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher impose sanctions on the apartheid regime. In 1990, Jackson went to Cape Town to greet Nelson Mandela when he was released from prison, and he also attended Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. In 2013, however, he warned that the end of apartheid had not brought full equality to Black South Africans, calling on them to fight for economic justice.
He also had enough influence to score diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from captivity 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 won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.