Civil rights icon Jesse Jackson dies at 84

CHICAGO - The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Baptist minister and two-time presidential candidate whose booming oratory and populist message propelled the civil rights movement in the decades after the assassination Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died Tuesday, his family said.

He was 84.

"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 said in a statement.

Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement that “our nation lost one of its greatest moral voices” and paid tribute to a man who “carried history in his footsteps and hope in his voice.”

"Reverend Jackson stood wherever dignity was under attack, from apartheid abroad to injustice at home. His voice echoed in boardrooms and in jail cells," Sharpton said.

A cause of death was not immediately given. Jackson's family said he died peacefully surrounded by his loved ones.

Reverend Jesse Jackson makes an appearance at a Democratic gathering at the Cheyenne Civic Center on April 20, 1989 in Cheyenne, Wyo.

He was admitted to a hospital in November and had been living for more than a decade with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), according to his Rainbow PUSH Coalition. PSP affects patients’ ability to walk and swallow and can lead to dangerous complications.

Jackson revealed he had Parkinson’s in 2017. He was treated as an outpatient at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago for at least two years before he shared the diagnosis with the public.