Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader and US presidential hopeful, dies at 84

WASHINGTON – US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, an eloquent Baptist minister raised in the segregated South who became one of the country’s most influential black figures, has died at age 84.

His family confirmed the death in a statement, saying Mr Jackson “died peacefully”.

Mr Jackson was hospitalised in November for treatment of a rare and severe neurodegenerative condition, progressive supranuclear palsy, according to the advocacy organisation he founded, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. 

In 2017, he announced he had Parkinson’s disease, which in its early stages can produce similar effects on movement and speech.

Long a central figure in US activism and politics, Mr Jackson devoted his life to advancing civil rights for disenfranchised people in his country and abroad. His family said his “unwavering commitment to justice, equality and human rights helped shape a global movement for freedom and dignity”.

He was “a tireless change agent” who elevated marginalised voices and left “an indelible mark on history”, his family added.

As a young man, he joined the inner circle of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and was in Memphis in 1968 at the time of Dr King’s assassination.

Mr Jackson took up the mantle of Dr King and ran for president twice, decades before Mr Barack Obama’s 2008 election. But he never matched Dr King’s commanding moral stature or achieved the ultimate political success realised by Mr Obama.

Instead, through the force of his rhetoric and his tireless energy and ambition, Mr Jackson became a moral and political presence in a transitional era, when Jim Crow was still a living memory and black political power remained more aspiration than reality.

Mesmerising oratory

Mr Jackson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, attracting black voters and many white liberals in mounting unexpectedly strong campaigns, but fell short of becoming the first black major-party White House nominee.

In 1984, he won 3.3 million votes in Democratic nominating contests, about 18 per cent of those cast, and finished third behind the eventual nominee, Mr Walter Mondale, in the race for the right to face Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan.

His candidacy lost momentum after it became public that Mr Jackson privately called Jewish people “Hymies” and New York “Hymietown”.

In 1988, Mr Jackson was a more polished and mainstream candidate, coming in a close second in the Democratic race to face Republican George H.W. Bush.

He gave eventual Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis a run for his money, winning 11 state primaries and caucuses, including several in the South, and amassing 6.8 million votes in nominating contests, or 29 per cent.

Mr Jackson cast himself as a barrier-breaker for people of colour, the impoverished and the powerless. He electrified the 1988 Democratic convention with a speech telling his life story and calling on Americans to find common ground.

“America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one colour, one cloth,” he told the delegates in Atlanta.

“Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint,” he said

Southern roots

Born on Oct 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, his mother was a 16-year-old high school student and his father was a 33-year-old married man who lived next door. His mother later married another man who adopted Mr Jackson.

He grew up amid the Jim Crow era in the US, the often brutally enforced web of racist laws and practices born in the South to subjugate black Americans.

Mr Jackson earned a football scholarship at the University of Illinois but transferred to a historically black college because he said he experienced discrimination.

He began his civil rights activism while a student at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College and was arrested when he sought to enter a “whites-only” public library in South Carolina.

He attended Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968 despite failing to graduate.

Mr Jackson became a lieutenant to Dr King and sometimes travelled with him.

On the day Dr King was assassinated by a white man named James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Mr Jackson was just a floor below.

Mr Jackson infuriated some of Dr King’s other associates when he told reporters he cradled the dying Dr King in his arms and was the last person to whom Dr King spoke, an account they disputed.

Dr King, who headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), installed the energetic Mr Jackson in a leadership role to help create economic opportunities in black communities.

Mr Jackson later broke with Dr King’s successor at the SCLC, Mr Ralph Abernathy, and set up his own civil rights organisation in Chicago – Operation PUSH – in the early 1970s.

In 1984, Mr Jackson founded the National Rainbow Coalition, whose broader civil rights mission also included women’s rights and gay rights, and the two organisations merged in 1996. He stepped down as the president of Rainbow-PUSH Coalition in 2023 after more than five decades of leadership and activism.

He met his wife, Ms Jacqueline Brown, during college. They married in 1962 and had five children.

His son, Mr Jesse Jackson Jr, was elected to the US House of Representatives but resigned and served prison time on a fraud conviction.

Mr Jackson also had a daughter out of wedlock in 1999 with a woman who worked at his civil rights groups, which became a scandal.

Mr Jackson was known for personal diplomacy. After he secured the 1984 release by Syria of US naval aviator Robert Goodman Jr, President Reagan invited Mr Jackson to the White House and expressed gratitude for the “mission of mercy”.

In 1990, Mr Jackson met Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to gain the release of hundreds of Americans and others after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He won the 1984 release of dozens of Cuban and American prisoners from Cuban jails and the release of three American airmen held in Serbia in 1999.

He hosted a weekly show on CNN from 1992 to 2000, pressed corporations for black economic empowerment and received the highest US civilian honour – the Presidential Medal of Freedom – from former president Bill Clinton in 2000.

Mr Jackson continued his activism later in life, condemning the police killing of Mr George Floyd and other black Americans in 2020 amid the global racial justice movement. REUTERS