Veteran American civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of the country’s most prominent black figures, died peacefully on Tuesday at the age of 84, AFP reported.
A Baptist minister, Jackson had been active in the civil rights movement since the 1960s, marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and helped raise funds to support the fight for equality.
“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the deaf and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson’s family said in a statement.
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“His unwavering belief in justice, equality and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing to fight for the values he lived by.”
Cause of death
The family did not release the cause of death. However, in 2017, Jackson announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder, AFP reported.
Who Was Jesse Jackson?
In November, he was hospitalized for observation due to another neurodegenerative condition, media reports said. The longtime Baptist minister, a powerful speaker and skilled mediator in international disputes, has expanded opportunities for African-Americans on the national stage for more than six decades, AFP reported.
He was the most prominent black candidate to run for the US presidency – making two unsuccessful bids for the Democratic Party nomination in the 1980s – until Barack Obama’s election to the White House in 2009.
“We stood on his shoulders,” Obama wrote on X, saying Jackson laid the groundwork for his own historic victory decades later, praising Jackson as “a true giant.”
Trump says he ‘was a good man’
U.S. President Donald Trump has praised Jackson as an engaging, gregarious and streetwise man, and has taken credit for helping him both before and after he became president as Jackson fought for the empowerment of black Americans.
“Jesse was a force of nature like few before him,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Trump has a checkered record on race relations. He told The New York Times last month that because of civil rights-era protections, “white people have been treated very badly.”
Trump insists that whites in South Africa are victims of genocide, and his administration regularly highlights its focus on people with white European roots. Last week, Trump refused to apologize for a video posted on his social media account that depicted the Obamas as monkeys.
A long battle
Kamala Harris, the first black vice president and the Democratic nominee whom Trump defeated in the 2024 election, praised Jackson as “one of America’s greatest patriots.” Her former boss, ex-President Joe Biden, said in a statement that Jackson “believed in his bones” that all people are created equal and should be treated accordingly.
Biden remembered Jackson as “determined and tenacious. Not afraid to work to redeem the soul of our nation.”
Jackson’s moments in the long struggle for racial justice
Jackson was present at many key moments in the long struggle for racial justice in the United States, including standing alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968, when the civil rights icon was assassinated.
He was seen openly weeping in the crowd when Barack Obama celebrated his presidential victory in 2008, and in 2021 he stood with the family of George Floyd after a court convicted a police officer of murdering an unarmed black man during an arrest.
Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina to a single teenage mother and former professional boxer.
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He later adopted his stepfather’s surname, Charles Jackson.
“I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed into my hand,” he once said.
He excelled at his segregated high school and won a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, but later transferred to a predominantly black agricultural and technical college in North Carolina, where he earned a degree in sociology.
He participated in his first sit-in in Greenville in 1960 and later joined the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965, where he caught the attention of Martin Luther King Jr.
Jackson went on to serve as a mediator and envoy in several major international endeavors. He became a leading voice against apartheid in South Africa and in the 1990s was appointed by Bill Clinton as the president’s special envoy for Africa. His missions to secure the release of American prisoners took him to Syria, Iraq and Serbia.
In 1996, he founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to social justice and political activism.
He is survived by his wife and six children.