The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a towering civil rights icon who battled alongside Martin Luther King Jr., negotiated global hostage releases, and shamed corporations for their lack of corporate diversity and failure to support voting rights, has died.
Jackson was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, a Democratic presidential candidate and one of the world’s best-known Black activists.
He was 84 and had suffered from progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare disease that causes a decline similar to Parkinson’s disease but accelerated.
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Despite the illness that softened his voice and weakened his steps, Jackson had continued to advocate for civil rights and was arrested twice in 2021 over his objection to the Senate filibuster rule. {snip}
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Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson’s rise to prominence began after he and seven other men were arrested in 1960 ‒ he was 18 at the time ‒ for protesting segregation at their town’s public library. He then joined King’s burgeoning civil rights fight and was just feet away when King was assassinated in 1968.
Jackson founded what would ultimately become the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and ran for president as a Democrat in 1984 and 1988, energizing and registering millions of Black voters.
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Born in the fall of 1941 to a teenage mother and her married neighbor, Jackson was adopted by the man his mother married, and he considered both to be his fathers. He attended a segregated high school and played football in college, dropping out a few credits short of his master’s degree in divinity in 1966 to join the Civil Rights Movement full time.
By 1965, he’d marched with King and others from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to push for Black voting rights, and by 1967 was running operations for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Chicago, the city that would become his home.
Under Jackson, the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket used boycotts and public attention to pressure companies to hire more Black workers. Jackson ultimately earned his divinity degree after being ordained a minister in 1968.
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His successes bolstered his presidential campaign, although he lost the 1984 Democratic primary to Walter Mondale, who went on to lose to Ronald Reagan. Jackson ran again for president in 1988, putting on a strong showing but ultimately falling to Mike Dukakis, who lost to Republican George H.W. Bush.
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In 2000, Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing his decades of work to make the world a better place.
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Jackson’s family includes his wife of 63 years, Jacqueline “Jackie” Jackson, and six children: Santita, Jesse Jr., Jonathan, Yusef, Jacqueline and Ashley. In 1999, he fathered a child with Karin Stanford, the director of the Washington bureau of his organization, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He first publicly acknowledged his daughter, Ashley, in 2001 and apologized for his affair.
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The post Jesse Jackson, Towering Icon of Civil Rights, Dies Following Lengthy Illness appeared first on American Renaissance.
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