Jesse Jackson, the Baptist minister and civil rights leader who mounted two groundbreaking but unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination, has died aged 84.
Jackson’s death was announced in a statement from his family.
“His unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and human rights helped shape a global movement for freedom and dignity,” it said. “He elevated the voices of the voiceless — from his presidential campaigns in the 1980s to mobilising millions to register to vote — leaving an indelible mark on history.”
Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1941, in the segregated South, and went on to graduate from North Carolina A&T State University, a historically Black university, in 1964.
He quickly became active in the civil rights movement, including participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama, and emerged as one of several disciples of Martin Luther King Jr, its totemic leader.
It was King who tapped Jackson for a role in his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organisation that spearheaded non-violent protests against segregation. King also chose Jackson to lead Operation Breadbasket — an effort to pressure companies, including through boycotts, to hire more Black workers in Chicago, Jackson’s adoptive home town.
But it was Jackson’s proximity to King at the time of his assassination in 1968 that raised his profile significantly within the civil rights movement. Jackson was with King on his fateful trip to speak to sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, before he was gunned down at the Lorraine Motel.
“Every time you take the scab off, the wound is still raw,” Jackson told Scripps News in 2018, recalling the assassination.
By 1971, Jackson had launched Push — originally known as People United to Save Humanity — as a mission to improve economic opportunities for Black communities, even as the broader civil rights movement struggled to regain its footing after King’s murder, with Richard Nixon in the White House.
In 1984, as his influence grew, Jackson separately created the National Rainbow Coalition to champion voting rights and social justice for a broader swath of progressive groups and minorities.
Jackson was a fierce critic of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, judging that his combination of tax cuts and deregulation were exacerbating US inequality. The two organisations would merge in 1996 to establish the Rainbow-Push coalition, which was led by Jackson until his death.
As Jackson’s activism expanded, so did his political ambitions. In 1983, he launched a nationwide campaign for the US presidency, becoming the first Black man to be a top contender for a major party nomination, and just the second African-American after Shirley Chisholm’s candidacy in 1972.
In the 1984 contest, Jackson was up against Walter Mondale, the former vice-president from Minnesota, and Gary Hart, a senator from Colorado. Jackson did not come close to winning the nomination — which went to Mondale — but he did win more than 3mn votes in the primary process, nearly 20 per cent of ballots cast.
“America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same colour, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colours, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread,” Jackson told the 1984 Democratic convention. “Even in our fractured state, all of us count and fit somewhere.”
Four years later, in 1988, Jackson came even closer to the White House. He won more than 29 per cent of the primary vote, and almost 7mn supporters, before being edged out by Michael Dukakis for the Democratic nomination.
Jackson did not run for the presidency again. But he continued to be one of the most powerful voices within the Democratic Party for years, throughout the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies.
His relationship with Clinton got off to a tense start, when during the 1992 campaign, the future Democratic president used a speech at the National Rainbow Coalition to criticise Sister Souljah, the rapper, for fuelling anti-white sentiment and racial divisions in America.
Jackson bristled, responding that Souljah “represents the feelings and hopes of a whole generation of people”.
But Jackson would eventually patch things up with Clinton. He was appointed to be a special envoy for democracy in Africa and was involved in some delicate missions such as securing the release of US prisoners of war from Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia.
During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Jackson offered spiritual advice to the first family. “You need faith when storms come suddenly, so I really talked to Hillary and Chelsea about matters of faith and unconditional love,” he said at the time.
In August 2000, a few months before leaving office, Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the presidential medal of freedom, with a warm embrace at the White House.
“It’s hard to imagine how we could have come as far as we have without the creative power, the keen intellect, the loving heart and the relentless passion of Jesse Louis Jackson,” Clinton said that day. “And God isn’t done with him yet.”
The 2008 campaign would propel Obama to become America’s first Black president, where Jackson had fallen short. “We are a better America today,” Jackson told CBS the morning after he grew visibly emotional watching Obama’s victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park.
But during the presidential race, Jackson had not always been so generous towards Obama. In July of that year he was caught on an open microphone complaining that Obama was “talking down to Black people” and he wanted to “cut his nuts out”.
Jackson apologised for the crude and disparaging comments. Jackson had worked with US President Donald Trump in the 1990s on urban development programmes, but his entry into the political arena filled him with worry, dread and recalled some its darkest chapters in history.
“The idea of making America great again reopens the wounds in America’s immoral foundation, born in sin, and shaped in equity,” he told an audience at the University of Michigan in November 2016, shortly after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to win his first White House term.
“We need not for a moment underestimate the damage done to our country . . . in the last few days,” he said. “What are we confronted with? There is a tug of war for the soul of America.”
Jackson is survived by his wife Jacqueline, six children and several grandchildren.
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