CHICAGO — The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a two-time presidential candidate, and a central figure in the Civil Rights Movement for decades following King’s assassination, died Tuesday at the age of 84. Jackson, a young organizer in Chicago, was summoned to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, in the days before King’s murder, and subsequently positioned himself publicly as King’s successor.
Santita Jackson confirmed her father’s death, stating he passed away at his Chicago home surrounded by family. He had been living with a rare neurological disorder.
Throughout his life, Jackson spearheaded numerous crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and disenfranchised on issues ranging from voting rights and job opportunities to education, and healthcare. He achieved diplomatic breakthroughs with world leaders and, through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, channeled demands for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressing executives to create a more open and equitable American society.
Jackson often invoked the refrain, “I am somebody,” a poem he frequently recited, aiming to reach people of all backgrounds. “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,” he would proclaim. It was a message he embodied, rising from obscurity in the segregated South to become the most prominent civil rights activist in the United States since King.
“Our father was a servant leader—not just to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement released online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, another prominent civil rights activist, described Jackson as more than a civil rights leader. “He was a movement in himself,” Sharpton said. “He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it’s a daily job,” Sharpton wrote in a statement, adding that Jackson taught that “trying is as significant as succeeding. That you don’t wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it come true.”
Despite serious health challenges in recent years, including a condition that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued to protest racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a City Council meeting to voice his support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“Even if we win,” he told protesters in Minneapolis before the officer who restrained George Floyd was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They keep killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
Jackson’s voice, imbued with the stirring cadences and forceful insistence of the Black church, commanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he employed rhymes and slogans like “Hope, not dope” and “If I can believe it, and my heart can conceive it, I can achieve it” to deliver his messages.
Jackson faced criticism from some, both within and outside the Black community, with some viewing him as self-promoting and overly eager for the spotlight. Reflecting on his life and legacy in 2011, Jackson told the Associated Press he felt blessed to continue the work of leaders who came before him and lay a foundation for those who would follow. “Part of our life’s work has been tearing down walls and building bridges, and in a half-century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes, when you tear down walls, you get marked by the falling debris, but your mission is to open gaps for others who come behind you to run through.”
In his final months, receiving around-the-clock care, Jackson communicated with family and visitors by squeezing their hands. “I am so thrilled to grasp that these speeches now belong to history,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to Helen Burns, a high school student, and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. He was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother. Jackson was a star quarterback for Sterling High School in Greenville and accepted a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. After reportedly being told that Black players could not play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became a starting player, a distinguished student in sociology and economics, and student body president.
Arriving on that historically Black campus in 1960, shortly after students began protesting at a whites-only restaurant, Jackson immersed himself in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. By 1965, he joined the voting rights march led by King from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King then sent him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, an effort by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to pressure businesses to hire Black workers.
Jackson described his time with King as “four phenomenal years of work.” He was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was assassinated. Jackson recounted that King died in his arms. Sharpton said he always wondered about the trauma that must have been for Jackson to witness King’s death. “He never talked about it much, but it drove him,” Sharpton said Tuesday. “He said, ‘We have to keep Dr. King’s legacy alive.’”
Known for his dramatic flair, Jackson carried a sweater he said was stained with King’s blood for two days, even displaying it at a Chicago City Council tribute to King, stating, “I come here with a heavy heart because in my chest is the bloodstain of Dr. King’s head.” Still, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, questioned whether King’s blood actually stained Jackson’s clothing. Photographs taken after the assassination do not show Jackson with the sweater.
In 1971, Jackson broke away from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation PUSH, originally called People United to Save Humanity. The organization, based on Chicago’s South Side, declared a broad mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of color across the country. Through lawsuits and boycott threats, Jackson pressured major corporations to spend millions of dollars and publicly commit to diversifying their payrolls.
Jackson’s constant campaigning often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, his college sweetheart whom he married in 1963, to shoulder the responsibility of 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 a seat in the 2026 midterm elections.
The elder Jackson, ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earning his Master of Divinity degree in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a daughter, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it meant to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially.
Harold Hall joined others Tuesday in expressing condolences at the Jackson family home. Hall, who once lived in the same Chicago neighborhood as Jackson, left a bouquet of flowers and recalled Jackson’s efforts to help local street organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jackson “would go out and play basketball and attempt to change the mindset of a lot of our young people,” encouraging them to stay out of trouble, Hall said. “And in many cases, it worked.”
Despite once telling a Black audience that he would not run for president “because whites are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson launched two presidential bids, achieving more success than any Black politician before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first unsuccessful attempt. His successes prompted his supporters to chant another of his slogans: “Keep hope alive.”
“I was able to run for president two times and redefine what was possible; he raised the ceiling for women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to plant seeds of possibility.”
Obama acknowledged Jackson’s efforts, saying he was at the forefront of some of the most significant movements in history. Michelle Obama wrote on X that she had her first glimpse of political organizing at the Jackson’s kitchen table as a teenager. “And in his two historic runs for president, he paved the way for my own campaign for the highest office in the land.” Jackson “was tireless in his belief that we are all God’s children and deserve dignity and respect,” the post read.
Jackson also spurred a cultural shift, joining calls from NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black Americans as African Americans. “Calling ourselves African Americans has cultural integrity: it places us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time.
Jackson’s words drew controversy. In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private remarks to a reporter in which he referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines complaining that Obama was “talking down to Black people” in comments caught by a hot microphone during a television taping break.
Yet, Jackson wept as he joined the ecstatic crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama on election night. “I wish for a moment that Dr. King or [slain civil rights leader] Medgar Evers… could have been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I was overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
Jackson also wielded influence abroad, meeting with world leaders and achieving diplomatic victories, including securing the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman in Syria in 1984, as well as the release in 1990 of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1999, he secured the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2021, Jackson stood with the parents of Ahmaud Arbery inside a Georgia courtroom as three white men were convicted of murdering the young Black man. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the Chicago federal prosecutor demanding federal charges against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke for the 2014 shooting death of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, revealed in 2017 that he had been treated for Parkinson’s disease, but continued to make public appearances even as the illness made it harder for listeners to understand him. Doctors confirmed last year a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a potentially fatal neurological disorder. He spent nearly two weeks hospitalized last November.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived after being hospitalized with COVID-19. Jackson was vaccinated early, urging Black people in particular to protect themselves, due to increased vulnerability. “It’s America’s unfinished business: we are free, but not equal,” Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that the coronavirus has brought, exposing weakness and opportunity.”
