The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a leading figure in the civil rights movement who ran twice as the Democratic candidate for president, has died at the age of 84. The news was confirmed in a statement from his family, who noted that Jackson “died peacefully.”
“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 wrote. “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.”
While the family did not specify a cause of death, the news came after Jackson’s hospitalization in November last year for progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare neurodegenerative condition. He was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017, and hospitalized twice with COVID in recent years.
Born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson showed an interest in politics from an early age. He excelled at school, becoming class president and earning a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, though he later transferred to North Carolina A&T, an HBCU where he first became involved with the civil rights movement. (In 1960, he was arrested along with seven other students for a silent demonstration in a library reserved for white students, eventually leading to its desegregation.)
After moving to Chicago and being ordained as a minister, he caught the attention of Martin Luther King Jr., later participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches and being elected by King as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket, dedicated to providing economic opportunities and jobs for Black communities, partly through the use of strategic boycotts.
In 1968, Jackson was with King when he was assassinated in Memphis, controversially appearing on television the following day wearing clothes still stained with King’s blood. In the wake of King’s death, Jackson unofficially assumed the role of the leader of the civil rights movement, becoming a highly influential political figure through Operation PUSH, which he established in the early 1970s after a schism within Operation Breadbasket.
In the 1980s, he achieved further notability for his two campaigns as the Democratic nominee for president, running on a platform he dubbed the “rainbow coalition,” uniting disenfranchised and marginalized voters across a variety of backgrounds, and rebuking the negative impact of President Reagan’s policies on both Black and low-income voters.
While his 1984 run was unsuccessful, it boosted his national profile significantly, and when he ran again, in 1988, on a platform of increased public spending and universal healthcare, he took an early lead, eventually earning nearly 7 million votes, though he’d lose to Michael Dukakis.
While Jackson was not the first Black candidate to run as the Democratic nominee for president, many figures—including President Obama himself—have noted his importance in paving the way for Black political leaders on the national stage over the following decades.
Jackson also faced several controversies throughout his career. His use of a pejorative term for Jewish people in the 1980s led to a strained relationship with Jewish leaders and accusations of antisemitism. In his early career, Jackson was also criticized for his anti-abortion views and opposition to same-sex marriage, though he later changed his position on both issues. The revelation of an extramarital affair in 2001 also drew criticism, as did a series of scandals involving Jackson’s son Jesse Jackson Jr. in the early 2010s, with Jackson Jr. being convicted and sentenced to prison for misuse of campaign funds while running as the U.S. representative for Illinois’s 2nd congressional district.
More than anything, however, Jackson will be remembered for his powerful oratory, his influential approach to building coalitions across racial and economic divides, and the precedent he set for later Black leaders. Those who have shared tributes to Jackson already include civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton, who honored Jackson as his “mentor”; Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice; and the recently elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“He marched, he ran, he organized, and he preached justice without apology,” Mamdani wrote. “May we honor him not just in words, but in struggle.”
