The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the longtime civil rights activist, Baptist minister and two-time presidential candidate, died Tuesday, his family said.
He was 84.
“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family. His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”
A cause of death was not immediately given. His family said he died peacefully surrounded by his loved ones.
He was admitted to a hospital in November and had been living for more than a decade with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), according to his Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which affects patients’ ability to walk and swallow and can lead to dangerous complications.
Jackson revealed he had Parkinson’s in 2017. He was treated as an outpatient at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago for at least two years before he shared the diagnosis with the public.
At the time, the Rev. Al Sharpton reflected on Jackson’s impact on American politics and the Civil Rights Movement.
“As I watched him, I thought about the greatness of this man,” Sharpton said then. “How he continued Martin Luther King’s movement for justice, how he cemented it in the North and made the King movement truly national. … He changed the nation. He served in ways he never got credit. No one in our lifetime served longer and stronger. We pray for him, because he’s given his life for us.”
Public observances will be held in Chicago and future plans for celebration of life events will be announced by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Jackson family said in its statement Tuesday.
Jackson was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and rose to prominence in the civil rights era, participating in demonstrations alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His activism spanned decades, including two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1984 and 1988.
In the first race, he won more than 18% of the primary vote and a handful of primaries and caucuses.
“Merely by being black and forcing other candidates to consider his very real potential to garner black votes, which they need, Jackson has had an impact,” read a 1984 New York Times profile.
Four years later, he built on that success by winning 11 primaries and caucuses.
Jackson began his work as an organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, participating in marches and sit-ins. He attended North Carolina A&T State University and graduated with a degree in sociology. He began rallying student support for King during his divinity studies at Chicago Theological Seminary and participated in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama.
Shortly afterward, Jackson joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, to work alongside King full time. He drew praise from King as a young man running the SCLC’s economic development and empowerment program, Operation Breadbasket — “we knew he was going to do a good job, but he’s done better than a good job,” King said
