Rev. Jesse Jackson, a Civil Rights Icon, Dies at 84

In 1962, he married Jacqueline Brown, with whom he had five children. In 2001, he acknowledged a sixth child, born to a staffer at his Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 1999.

Jackson felt called to activism in 1960, when, home from college, he joined seven others in a sit-in protest at a whites-only public library in Greenville. He was arrested and jailed, but two months later the library was integrated. In 1963, he participated in major sit-in protests in Greensboro. His actions caught the attention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and King, whom he first met in an airport.

“It was just a thrill to see him,” Jackson said in a May 2017 interview. “He saw me — he called my name, Jesse. It flipped me off.”

In 1965, he marched with King in Selma, Alabama. The following year, King tapped him to run the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, a nationwide organization dedicated to improving the economic conditions of poor Blacks. Jackson took over as national director in 1967.

Jackson, left, was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.

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When King was shot to death on the balcony of a Memphis, Tennessee, motel in April 1968, Jackson was standing just a few feet away. Soon after, he called Coretta Scott King to convey the awful news. “We would not,” he said later, “let one bullet kill a movement.”

In the years that followed, Jackson assumed the mantle of Black America’s top civil rights leader, according to George E. Curry, former editor in chief of Emerge magazine and the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service.

The Rev. Al Sharpton went even further. “In many ways, I would say that the economic fights … he started in the ’70s, to the political empowerment that resulted in the first Black attorney general and the first Black president, to the whole concept of coalition building, he has defined the last part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century.”

And as Sharpton told AARP, “So as long as we are doing the work, his legacy is not limited to one organization or one person. His legacy is that he has planted the seeds that have now grown.”

But Jackson also worked to lift up the Black community from within, especially to steer young men away from the violence many of their idols were perpetuating.

“When you watch many of our young rich rappers who are killing each other now,” he told PBS, referring to the slain rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., “who were their role models? Scarface Nelson, Al Capone or Godfather.”

He urged impressionable Black children to spend less time emulating idols from the media and music and, instead, to believe “I am somebody.”

It was a mantra he taught himself. Jackson was born out of wedlock, which made him the subject of childhood taunts that motivated him to make something of himself.

Jackson rose to higher prominence when he broke from the SCLC to form Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). He served as its executive director from 1971 to 1986. It was during this time that he made his first bid for the presidency and helped secure the release of American prisoners in Cuba and Syria, something he would do for future administrations. From 1992 to 2000, he hosted Both Sides With Jesse Jackson on CNN.

Jackson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. Citing his work with King, President Bill Clinton spoke of “instilling hope and inspiring millions.”

In 1985, Jackson joined many prominent civil rights leaders to re-enact the historic march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. Here, they cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where in March 1965 the marchers were beaten by police in what came to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

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Jackson had largely been out of the national spotlight in the years since his illness. He underwent gall bladder surgery in 2021 and was hospitalized later that year for both COVID and the aftereffects of a fall.

In 2023, he stepped down as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a social justice group that merged PUSH with the Rainbow Coalition, the organization he began in 1986.

He remained active in the movement as long as his health allowed. As AARP reported in August 2023, he joined striking workers at Chicago’s Loretto Hospital in their final push to settle a contract negotiation. And in 2020 he stood with the family of Jacob Blake at a Wisconsin rally for the Black Lives Matter movement. (Blake had been shot and severely wounded by police in August of that year.)

“I have the ability and the will to fight,” he said at the Loretto Hospital protest.

That might as well serve as his epitaph.