The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after King, has died at 84

CHICAGO (AP) – Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protégé of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the assassination of the respected leader, died Tuesday. He was 84.

His daughter, Santita Jackson, confirmed that her father died at home, surrounded by family.

As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before King was assassinated and he subsequently publicly positioned himself as King’s successor.

Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and jobs to education and health care. He won diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH coalition channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pushing executives to make America a more open and just society.

And when he declared, “I am Somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he was trying to reach people of all colors. “I might be poor, but I’m Somebody; I might be young; but I’m Somebody; I might be on welfare, but I’m Somebody,” Jackson said.

It was a message he took literally and personally, after rising from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s most famous civil rights activist since King.

“Our father was a servant leader — not just for our family, but for the oppressed, the voiceless and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return the world became part of our extended family.”

Fellow civil rights leader, Rev. Al Sharpton, called his mentor “a consequential and transformative leader who changed this nation and the world.”

“He kept the dream alive and taught young kids from broken homes, like me, that we don’t have broken spirits,” Sharpton wrote on Facebook. “A giant has gone home.”

Despite profound health challenges in his final years, including a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued to protest racial injustice well into the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a city council meeting to show support for a resolution supporting a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”

Calls to action, delivered in an unforgettable voice

Jackson’s voice, filled with the stirring cadences and powerful insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhymes and slogans such as, “Hope not dope” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” to deliver his messages.

Jackson had his share of critics, both inside and outside the Black community. Some saw him as a bigot, too eager to seek the limelight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told The Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to continue the service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to come.

“Part of our life’s work has been tearing down walls and building bridges, and in half a century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes when you break down walls, you get scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open holes for others to run through behind you.”

In his final months, when he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to speak, communicating with family and visitors by holding and squeezing their hands.

“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches now belong to the ages,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.

A student athlete drawn to the Civil Rights Movement

Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.

Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois. But after reportedly being told that blacks couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honors student in sociology and economics, and student body president.

Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students there staged sit-ins at a white diner, Jackson immersed himself in the booming Civil Rights movement.

By 1965, he had joined the suffrage march that King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King sent him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire black workers.

Jackson calls his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”

Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson’s version of the assassination was that King died in his arms.

With his flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with King’s blood for two days, including at a King memorial service held by the Chicago City Council, where he said, “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the bloodstain of Dr. King’s head.”

However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, questioned whether Jackson could have gotten King’s blood on his clothes. There are no images of Jackson in photographs taken shortly after the assassination.

In 1971, Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation PUSH, originally called People United to Save Humanity. The based on Chicago’s South Side has declared a comprehensive mission, from workforce diversification to voter registration in communities of color nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their workforces.

The constant campaigns often let his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, the college sweetheart he married in 1963, take the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr. mid term

The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned his Master of Divinity in 2000, also admitted to fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it meant to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially.

Presidential aspirations fall short, but help ‘keep hope alive’

Despite once telling a black audience that he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson ran twice and did better than any black politician before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.

His successes led supporters to chant another Jackson slogan, “Keep Hope Alive.”

“I was able to run for president twice and redefine what’s possible; it lifted the lid on women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”

US Rep. John Lewis said in a 1988 C-SPAN interview that Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors through which some minority person will be able to walk through and become president.”

Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s for Black people in the United States to identify as African Americans.

“Being called African-American has cultural integrity — it puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some basis, some historical cultural basis. African Americans have reached that level of cultural maturity.”

Jackson’s words sometimes got him into trouble.

In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter, calling New York City “Hymietown”, a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to black people” in remarks caught by a microphone he didn’t know he was on during a break in a television taping.

Still, when Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama that election night, tears streamed down his face.

“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (slain civil rights leader) Medgar Evers… could have been there for just 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I got overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”

To influence events at home and abroad

Jackson also wielded influence abroad, meeting with world leaders and achieving diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the release in 1990 of more than 700 foreign women and children detained in Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion. In 1999, he won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

“Citizens have the right to do something or do nothing,” Jackson said before leaving for Syria. “We choose to do something.”

In 2021, Jackson joined the parents of Ahmaud Arbery in the Georgia courtroom where three white men were found guilty of murdering the young Black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago asking for federal charges against former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014 killing of black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, revealed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s, but he continued to make public appearances even as the disease made it harder for listeners to understand him. Earlier this year, doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a hospital in November.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived hospitalization with COVID-19. Jackson was early vaccinated and especially encouraged black people to be protected, given their greater risks for bad outcomes.

“This is America’s unfinished business — we are free but not equal,” Jackson told the AP. “There is a reality check brought on by the coronavirus that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.”

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Former Associated Press writer Karen Hawkins, who left The Associated Press in 2012, contributed to this report. Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in Minneapolis and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed.

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